YA New York

I’m pleased to present an interview with Robin Wasserman, whose new book Skinned is getting rave reviews from pretty much everyone. You may recognize her name, considering this is her eleventh book (and she’s only thirty!); Robin is the author of the Seven Deadly Sins series and a bunch of other good stuff.

Question One

Me: How did you come with the idea for Skinned?
Robin: In grad school I did a lot of work on automata, which are mechanical replicas of life, and so I’ve been thinking about those issues for a really long time and so it was exciting to get them into a teen novel exploring life and death and all of those issues.

Question Two

Robin: What is the most interesting thing you’re going to do be doing this weekend?
Me: I will be meeting with my landlady to talk about the lovely furry creatures that inhabit my home, and to talk about whether we will be renewing the lease. Wish me luck!

Question Three

Me: You wrote on your webpage that when you grew up you wanted three things: to live in New York, to eat a lot of pasta, and to have a dog. Why don’t you have a dog?
Robin: It turns out having a dog is as much work as my parents always said it was.

Question Four

Robin:Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Me: I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and I suppose the only person who looks quite right is Keiko Ageina, from the Gilmore Girls, although she is much cuter than I am, which is not to say I’m not cute, but that’s she’s totally adorable.

Question Five

Me: Not to spoil anything, but the book ends in a way that suggests it could be a standalone, or there could be more to come.
Robin: Oh, yeah, this is the first in a trilogy.

Question Six:

Robin:What’s your favorite book?
Me: You know, people have asked me that before and the answer always changes, so today I’d say Dark Dude by Oscar Hijuelos, which is this book I just read about growing up Cuban in New York.

Question Seven:

Me: When can we expect book two?
Robin: September 2009, assuming I can finish it.

Question Eight

Robin: What’s your middle name?
Me: Kim, which is my mother’s maiden name.

Question Nine

Me:Okay, to get a little bit silly, I’m going to throw one of your questions back at you. Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Robin: You’d think I would have thought about that … See, it’s tough with the curly hair, they don’t have too much of that in Hollywood. I have to ignore appearance and go with Cynthia Nixon in her Sex and the City mode.

Question Ten

Robin: What were you likely doing ten years ago today?
Me: I was a sophomore in college, so I was probably drinking a lot of coffee and I know for a fact that I was trying really, really hard to get a date with a guy who turned out to be gay.

Question Eleven

Me: Do you remember what you were doing ten years ago?
Robin: September 1998? Let’s see … I was a junior in college, and probably around today I would have been moving into my dorm, so I would have been fighting with my roomate over who was going to get the real bedroom and who was going to to get the fake bedroom with a Chinese screen as a wall.

Question Twelve

Robin: What class, if you could go back to college, what class do you most wish you could take that you didn’t take before?
Me: In my former life as a reporter, I always said I would have loved to take statistics or economics, but now I think I’d have taken some sort of literature class that focused on stuff I never got to read, like Milton.

Question Thirteen

Me: Back to the Skinned trilogy, can you tell us anything about what we can expect of book two?
Robin: I don’t want to give too much away. I guess you could say that in some sense book one is about an extraordinary girl facing a normal situation, and book two is about a normal girl facing an extraordinary situation, except I would like to please clarify that normal situation in this case is still very exciting.

Question Fourteen

Robin: What are you looking at right now?
Me: Well, my computer screen for one. But, on my left there is a set of Hello Kitty twist-up crayons and a big old glass of iced coffee; in front of me is the mess that my desk has become, and on my right is the phone.

Question Fifteen

Me: Right back at you, what are you looking at?
Robin: I’m looking out the window at a tree in which several bizzarely bright orange feathered birds are flitting around and wondering if they’re something exotic or just sickly pigeons. (They’re sort of spotted.)

Question Sixteen

Robin: What is the oldest possession that you have that you still use?
Me: I have a copy of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass that I’ve had since I was in fourth grade, and I still read it once a year, seriously, once a year.

Question Seventeen

Me: What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
Robin: That would be working in the basement of a tax preparer’s office, stapling W-2 forms together.

Question Eighteen

Robin: What’s your dream job?
Me: I suppose it’s what I’m doing right now, which is blogging and working on a book, but … my dream part of it would be to get paid for it, which I hope will happen sooner or later, although I should clarify that I don’t want to get paid for blogging, but for writing books.

Question Nineteen

Me: Just for readers who haven’t yet picked up a copy of Skinned, what would your one-sentence summary be?
Robin: Oh, man I’m bad at that. I guess I would say it’s about a girl who finds herself in a body that can never die, who has to figure out whether she’s really alive.

Question Twenty

Robin: If there were to be a television show about your life, what would it be called?
Me: I’ve always been really bad at naming things, but … you know, I can’t even figure out whether it would be a half-hour comedy or a one-hour dramedy. So as for a name, I’m stumped.

Question Twenty-One

Me: What have you been reading lately?
Robin: I’m in the middle of Under the Banner of Heaven, which is about fundamentalist Mormonism and in the young adult arena the last couple things I’ve read that I’ve really loved are Skin Hunger by Kathleen Duey and The Disreputable of Frankie-Landau Banks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.