Matthue has also written several other novels, a memoir, poetry and music, much of which is about his Jewish heritage and religion. Which means we had a ton to talk about. Without further ado …

Question One

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about Losers, the book, not the people?

Matthue: Basically, my first book, Nevermind the Goldbergs, was my kind of idealized fantasy of the person that I’d like to be, if the person I’d like to be was a seventeen-year-old girl. … Jupiter is everything that I was at seventeen, although more so: He’s totally socially awkward, has relationships that exist entirely in his head, and he lives in a factory.

Question Two

Matthue: What did your bedroom look like growing up?

Me: I moved a lot, so I had a lot of different bedrooms, but one thing stayed the same throughout, which is that I plastered my walls with photographs of my friends; since I only had two or three friends at a time, the same people would often appear in the pictures.

Question Three

Me: You didn’t live in a factory growing up, but you did live in Philadelphia. What was your childhood like?

Matthue: I always wanted to live in a factory. I actually really wanted to move into the basement, which was a big area that had a few couches and a lot of pillows and some seventies furniture that no one had used for years. I thought the wall would be filled with books and the floors would be filled with gigantic Lego sculptures. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid.

Question Four

Matthue: Of those two or three different friends that you’d always have, what friendship do you miss the most?

Me: My best friend when I lived in Germany, on an army base outside Stuttgart, was a girl named Keisha. Unfortunately, her last name was Smith, so I’ve never had any luck tracking her down. She taught me how to roller skate, she got me in trouble for “Doin’ the Butt” at her birthday party, and the two of us spent hours trying to boil eggs over steaming manhole covers. So … readers … if you know a thirty-year-old woman named Keisha, point her here to this blog.

Question Five

Me: According to your website, you were raised a Conservative Jew, but then became Orthodox later in life. What is religion about for you?

Matthue: I was raised in the Conservative movement, whatever that means. It always felt like anthropology in action. It’s like you’re taught about everything but you don’t actually do any of it. … I got very involved in the punk rock third wave feminist DIY scene where what you believed and what you did had to match up. … For awhile I hated saying I was Orthodox. I said I was just hard-core Jew or something. … I think that the essence of being religious is just being aware of everything around you. Maybe that could be the essence of being an atheist or not being religious, too, but for me being religious is about remembering that there are things in the world greater than you are and that you’re just this single measly pixel in the middle of all of it … and how insane and amazing it is.

Question Six

Matthue: What do you think of God?

Me: I was raised in a very conservative, hellfire and brimstone, John Calvin/Jonathan Edwards kind of household. Oh, and my father was a minister. I saw a lot of things that people clung to, word for word, that didn’t match up with my sense of justice, which actually led me down a path toward conversion to Judaism. But I never finished my conversion because I still had too many questions, and cannot at any point accept the concept of “I am right and everyone else is wrong.” So … me and God? I guess I’m kind of like Margaret from that Judy Blume novel right about now.

Question Seven

Me: How does your religious perspective affect your writing?

Matthue: Writing is that [aforementioned] humility to an extreme. On one hand you’re taking this blank sheet of paper and filling it all and making a world out of it, and on the other you’re realizing that the story is meant for people that are not you … people don’t want to know about your waking up and brushing your teeth in the morning. They want to read about passion and adventures and take all the boring stuff away. So it really is about taking your life and stripping it down and only leaving what matters on the page.

Question Eight

Matthue: If you were writing Losers or if you were jumping into the Losers universe, who would you be?

Me: I wish I could say I’d be that cool girl in the music store, or one of the cool girls at the cafe, but when I was in high school, I would probably have been more comparable to Reese Witherspoon in Election than to any character in your book. Which is to say, I would have been an intolerable know-it-all extracurricular geek.

Question Nine

Me: You are only thirty years old, and you have four books under your belt already, plus you’ve had stories and poetry published in collections, so you’re clearly pretty prolific. HOW? How did you do it? How have you published so many books already???

Matthue: It’s less how and … I don’t even know. I mean, I’ve been writing forever. I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen and it was 210 pages. Writing for me is one of these things that I can’t contain. Now that I have a baby and I have a job because I have a baby, the only time I have free is on the subway, and I write for two hours standing up on the subway every day. I think I just need to do it, and the publishing stuff is just I’ve been really really lucky and really really fortunate.

Question Ten

Matthue: Where do you read?

Me: I read in bed, in the bathtub, at the table, walking down the street, while cooking, while brushing my teeth, in a special little chair by the window overlooking my back yard, and — though not very often — sometimes I’ve been known to sneak a peek at a book while behind the wheel of a car. But only at red lights. And only peeks. Really.

Question Eleven

Me: You just mentioned that you have a new baby and a new job. Can you tell us a little bit about both?

Matthue: My baby is amazing and her name’s Yalta and she’s named after this famous woman in the Talmud that nobody’s ever heard of, who’s really fiery and gave a lot of wisdom that people don’t necessarily realize comes from her. Yalta, my daughter, generally eats a lot of toys and listens to They Might Be Giants and Prince, so basically the same thing.

My new job is being the associate and blogger at MyJewishLearning.com. It’s really cool. Today I just interviewed Francesca Lia Block, who is one of my favorite writers ever. Day jobs suck, but as they go, this is a good one to have.

Question Twelve

Matthue: What’s your favorite food to cook?

Me: I make the single most awesome kosher lasagna in the world, and I am only saying that because it’s true. Back when I was a kosher vegetarian, I spent a lot of time looking for the right sauces and cheeses and other ingredients that would pass the strictest of tests. And it’s my favorite food to eat, too.

Question Thirteen

Me: Why is your name spelled M-A-T-T-H-U-E?

Matthue: It started as a joke. I signed my name that way in an e-mail to a friend, then I kept writing it that way, and I got the website matthue.com because I’m a huge dork, and I kept spelling it that way and then my first book came out and I saw my name spelled that way and I was like, “I guess there’s no turning back.”

Question Fourteen

Matthue: What was the first band that rocked your world?

Me: I fell in love when I was fourteen. I fell madly, passionately, obsessively, insanely in love with (…dramatic pause…) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I am not as insane or obsessive as I once was, but to this day he remains my favorite musician of all time.

Question Fifteen

Me: Right back at you: what was the first band that rocked YOUR world?

Matthue: They’re in the book. The Dead Milkmen. They’re a punk rock band from Philly. When I was seven years old I listened to this totally kid-friendly radio show where they just happened to play “Punk Rock Girl” in regular rotation, and it was a Dead Milkmen song, and they were the first band I loved. (I should say the Cure because all of the chapter titles from Losers are mostly based on Cure songs.)

Question Sixteen

Matthue: What’s your book like?

Me: It is made of awesome. It is the single most important piece of literature ever written. It is unfinished. It is un-agented. It is a memoir about my own childhood, or adolescence, and it’s about being crazy, and it’s about being driven crazy. Also, I probably lied when I said it was the single most important piece of literature ever written.

Question Seventeen

Me: What are you working on now?

Matthue: I can’t get Jupiter out of my head, and even more the other characters [in Losers]. In one way Jupiter is about growing up with my best friend who just died, and then I wrote/am still writing this book about his death which is kind of about me and Anne Frank hanging out. … I don’t know if anyone will like it but me, but it’s my heart. I just took my heart out and stuck a bunch of knives in it and this is what I got.

Question Eighteen

Matthue: What’s the difference for you, writing a memoir and writing fiction?

Me: Well, fiction for me is kind of the way I see things, or the way I would like to see things, or the worst case scenario … it gives you a million opportunities to change directions. A memoir is in certain aspects already written for you. You can’t change history, but you can change the way you present it. So it’s actually a form that offers more structure, I think.

Question Nineteen

Me: What’s the best book you’ve read in the last twelve months?

Matthue: Lydia Millet’s book Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. It’s about a librarian who witnesses a shooting and then Robert Oppenheimer and a bunch of the scientists who invented the atomic bomb are instantly transported into the present day and she has to take care of them. It’s supremely geeky, but Lydia Millet writes with pure emotion about the atomic bomb and its creation and the way people reacted to it.

Question Twenty

Matthue: Have you ever read the Sandman by Neil Gaiman?

Me: No.

Matthue: Inside the world where everybody dreams there’s a library, and it’s a library of all the books that have never been written. What book would you have that you have not written in your dream library?

Me: It is a very, very good thing that this book will never be written, but here’s the idea: I was interested in villains and their relationships with their fathers, and I was thinking about how Voldemort had a bad relationship with his father and how a lot of historical villains had bad relationships with their fathers … and basically the whole thing led me to the idea of a villain whose aim was to become the father of every boy on earth. So, anyway, that book will never be written. Unless you’re an agent and you want me to write it.

Question Twenty-One

Me: What is your favorite thing about Losers?

Matthue: You know that moment where you’re writing a story and you lose control of it? Where you’re writing a story or a poem and then you’re like, “I know how this should be,” and then you don’t know how it should be but it’s already taking form and you’re just letting it float through you? I felt that about Losers, but not just about the story, about the people. Like there are all these people in the book that are jostling with each other and fighting with each other and struggling to get out. It’s this whole world that kind of reminds me of my life and my high school but is so much more real and there’s so much more going on and it’s so much more dangerous than my life ever is or was. I still look at it and it surprises me, and that’s my favorite thing about Losers.

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.

Question One

Me: What gave you the idea for Gone?
Michael: I was working on an adult science fiction concept called Guns and Dragons, and that idea mutated and became something completely different.

Question Two

Michael: What do you like to drink?
Me: I am addicted to coffee and Coke (-a-Cola), and I’m embarrassed to admit that I drink about a half gallon of Poland Springs spring water every day. (Note: Michael says water is a good thing, even bottled water, and Coke is bad, of the cola variety or not.)

Question Three

Me: What was the original idea for Guns and Dragons?
Michael: That is going to probably have to remain a trade secret because I may still sell the concept, but I’ve always been fascinated by the concept that the laws of the universe are ultimately just like software, that they can be hacked, re-written, altered.

Question Four

Michael: How’d you end up in New York?
Me: I was an army brat, and then after my dad retired, he went to seminary and became a minister, and the church that hired him when he finished seminary was in Westchester County, right outside of New York City.

Question Five

Me: There’s a hint of religious metaphor in Gone, an idea of a last reckoning with God, and in my original review, I compared the events to the evangelical Christian idea of the Rapture. What are your own religious ideas?
Michael: I am non-believer with a background in both Judaism and Christianity; I’m an atheist but not in any way hostile to religion, and I frequently incorporate religious characters and religious themes and wherever possible I’ll steal from the Bible or from Shakespeare or from re-runs of Star Trek.

Question Six

Michael: What do you do in New York? What do you do for a living, because God knows blogging doesn’t pay.
Me: I am a true starving artist, finishing up — or maybe I should just say working on — my own book, and maintaining this blog.

Question Seven

Me: Why do you write under a pseudonym?
Michael: Because I have also written for and about politics at different times in my life and in fact for awhile produced political ads for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, and I realized that the two worlds are somewhat incompatible in that I don’t ever want to be preaching an agenda for readers of my fiction.

Question Eight

Michael: Tell me about your background in politics.
Me: I was very, very conservative when I was younger, and I became very, very liberal when I hit college, and from the time I was thirteen I was working on political campaigns, but I gave it all up when I was about eighteen because in all those years I had only ever met one politician who genuinely meant everything he said.

Question Nine

Me: What’s up with the family move to Tuscany?
Michael: My wife and I have both moved a lot in our lives — I was an army brat, she was a corporate IBM kid — when you move around a lot you learn to embrace it, so we embraced it and we were bored with every other option we came up with, and our kids were brats and we didn’t think that the French would put up with them. (Michael elaborated, saying the French really don’t put up with the brattiness of American kids. Hmm.)

Question Ten

Michael: What are you writing, and tell me about it?
Me: My current book is called The Worms in My Brain, and it is a memoir about surviving abuse, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety; although the topics are really heavy, I’m trying to approach it all with a sense of humor, which I think is vital to survival.

Question Eleven

Me: What can you tell us about Gone 2?
Michael: Right now it’s titled Sacrifice; it started out being titled Hunger — it’s very dark and very long, and I just about fifteen minutes ago heard from my editor that the second draft is great and I still need to rewrite parts of the end, which hopefully I can turn around quickly because everybody is very impatient with me right now.

Question Twelve

Michael: When you think about succeeding as a writer, which is the moment that you daydream about?
Me: It’s really weird, but I daydream a lot about my acknowledgments page, where I think of all the people I’d want to thank and maybe a couple of people I’d like to insult.

Question Thirteen

Me: What are your all-time, desert island, top five favorite books?
Michael: They wouldn’t necessarily be my favorite books, but the books I’d take with me on a desert island, first of all Lord of the Rings, and I know that’s a cliche answer, but Lord of the Rings is the reason I’m a writer, and then everything by Patrick O’Brien, who wrote seafaring novels — they say he’s the Jane Austen for guys — and I love Brill Bryson, who’s a travel writer, because he makes me laugh enough to spit up beer, and of course my personal God in the writing business is Stephen King because he’s faster and more prolific than I am, and I write fast.

Question Fourteen

Michael: Do you lie awake nights imagining the moment when you get the call from the editor that says, “You’re in”?
Me: Not really, because … a lot mumbling under my breath … I’m more concerned at this point about technicalities of things like representation, or lawyers, or paperwork, and also about actually finishing my book.

Question Fifteen

Me: What’s next on your plate?
Michael: I’ve got to write Gone 3, and it’s six book contract. I need to be writing it, like, tomorrow. I’ve got roughly about 2500 pages left to write of Gone, assuming we go through all six books.

Question Sixteen

Michael: When you talk to writers, when you interview writers, do you have the general impression that they are being forthright with you, or are they shady?
Me: You know, out of all the sorts of people I’ve interviewed — from politicians to religious leaders to museum executives to teachers — I’ve found that writers, especially young adult writers, are the most forthcoming and the most palatable.

Question Seventeen

Me: How many books do you think you’ve written, total, under all your pseudonyms?
Michael: The number we usually cite is about 150 books, and this is my wife and I writing together most of them until recently, and we don’t write together now because we retired for awhile, and we realized when we don’t write together we hit each other much less frequently with frying pans.

Question Eighteen

Michael: Here’s a softball for you: How’s the website going?
Me: It’s turned into a lot more work than I originally thought it would be, which means any at all, but I’m enjoying it and getting some good responses, although I would love for more readers to flock over and stay and discuss, and right now my biggest problem is that I don’t know exactly how to lure people in — I think it’s going to have to involve free stuff.

Question Nineteen

Me: What would you like to say to our readers?
Michael: To anybody to buys a YA book: Every YA author appreciates all of you more than you can imagine, and it’s not just about getting paid; it’s about the fact that the writing is an extremely solitary occupation which creates a lot of insecurity in a writer, and as you’re typing away on your book, you’re not quite sure it’s ever going to mean anything, and you’re typing into the void, and then you get a reader, and everything makes sense, and you’re not just some fool who was daydreaming, you’re a writer, because somebody out there was a reader.

Question Twenty

Michael: What do you think of Harry Potter?
Me: Ohhhhhh. I adored Harry Potter. I worshipped Harry Potter. I thought about book seven constantly from the day book six came out until the very sad day that book seven was released, and then I realized that JK Rowling had not written the book I’d come to expect. I was so sad. The epilogue is what really killed me, and I’d like to go into bookstores and tear that last section out of every copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Though I’ll hold off a bit for a full review, I do want to rave about this novel a bit. It’s not your usual vampire book. Instead, it’s a really humorous story about a teen (almost) vampire who has to attend vamp classes in the evenings, classes that are something like driver’s ed.

On to the twenty questions!

Question One

Me: Tell us about your upcoming release, Sucks to Be Me.
Kimberly: My husband calls it “a vampire bat mitzvah story.”

Question Two

Kimberly: How do you like New York?
Me: I’ve lived here since I was thirteen, and I cannot imagine ever permanently settling down anywhere else.

Question Three

Me: In addition to being an author, you’re also the founder of YA Books Central. How did you decide to start the site?

Kimberly: I was doing book reviews for what was about.com, and they decided to get rid of all of their teen sites, and I had all this great stuff and I didn’t want to just get rid of it, so I started my own site at that point, and my goal has always been to encourage reading and to support literacy and give away a lot of books every year. (My postage bill is humongous.)

Question Four

Kimberly: Well, how did you get into starting YA New York?
Me: I was discussing with some of my friends how I couldn’t afford all the books I was reading, and I used to be a book reviewer for newspapers, so one night after Maureen Johnson’s book release party for Suite Scarlett, I came home and told my boyfriend, “I promised a bunch of authors that I’d have a book review site up by tomorrow,” and that night we stayed up late and designed the whole thing, and here it is. So part of it was selfish, I have to admit.

Question Five

Me: What do you think of all the YA Ghetto stuff that’s been floating around lately?
Kimberly: I think it’s a bunch of rot. I think a lot of the best writing out there today is YA. A lot of adult writers, who write for the adult market, are now writing for the young adult market, and there’s some just stellar writing out there.

Question Six

Kimberly: So how is your first book coming along?
Me: It’s funny because things are moving really, really quickly, much faster than I expected them to, and right now I’m sort of in seventh heaven, although I’m sure that once I reach the editing stage, I’ll be in the seventh circle of hell. I should clarify that by the editing stage, I mean self-editing stage.

Question Seven

Me: What inspired you to move from reviewing YA fiction to writing it?
Kimberly: I’ve actually always wanted to be a writer. I majored in English and I specialized in children’s lit. I started doing book reviewing partly as an outlet — I was working in the corporate world, which is really soul-draining. With my husband’s support I was able to decide to try and write full-time, and I did. I’ve always written, I’ve had some short stories published, and I’ve written for magazines and newspapers, but I’ve never taken it seriously until I quit work.

Question Eight

Kimberly: What is your second favorite movie?
Me: My second favorite movie is probably Almost Famous, but if I may say so, I think it’s probably tied with Lost in Translation and with His Girl Friday.

Question Nine

Me: What was it like sitting down and writing a full-length novel, and going through the whole process?
Kimberly With Sucks to Be Me, it was the first time I’d ever made myself an outline and followed it, which worked really well. I have a number of other in-progress books, and I’ve found that if I don’t have any kind of outline I just end up dabbling and doing a scene here and a scene there.

Question Ten

Kimberly: If you could write a book with anyone else, a little joint book, who would you want to write with, live or dead?
Me: There are a lot of living writers I’d like to work with, so instead of singling one of them out, I’ll just say that I would love to write a book with Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Question Eleven

Me: How about you?
Kimberly: P.L Travers. I love the originally Mary Poppins books, and while I like the Disney movie, it’s very very different. Every time I read those books, they’re smart, they’re intelligent, they’re a little bit subversive. … She always comes to mind as someone who nobody ever reads the original any more, they always have this whole Disney-fied version in their heads.

Question Twelve

Kimberly: What are your favorite restaurants in New York? [Kimberly explained that she and her husband are foodies and always on the lookout for great restaurants, thus the question.]
Me: I’m one of those people who always orders the same thing, and goes back to the same places over and over again, but I’ll say that I love Kang Suh, which is a Korean restaurant, and I love ACME, which is a Cajun-ish place, and those are probably the places I go most.

Question Thirteen

Me: Where did you grow up?
Kimberly: I was born in California in San Mateo, and my parents were not hippie freaks, but they decided to drop out and sell everything they owned and they moved us to Arkansas and started a rabbit farm. And then they decided that rabbits were nasty little creatures. They started doing arts and crafts shows — my mom painted, and my dad did woodwork. We ended up moving to Florida because Arkansas was too cold.

Question Fourteen

Kimberly: You’re having a dinner party with your favorite foods and you get to invite four famous people, and they can be alive or dead. Who would they be?
Me: I’ve always had a hard time answering these sorts of questions, but I would definitely want Dorothy Parker as a dinner guest, and Gloria Steinem, and obviously Lucy Maud Montgomery, and then just to mix things up a bit, I’d also invite Aaron Burr, because I’d love to see those lovely ladies team up on him and tear him to shreds, which I have no doubt they would do.

Question Fifteen

Me: What’s your next book?
Kimberly I’m working on a sequel right now called It Still Sucks to Be Me. Of course, it’s going to depend on how well the first book does, so we’ll see. [Editor's Note: I have faith that Kimberly's first will do very well. How could it not? It's awesome.]

Question Sixteen

Kimberly: If you could live anywhere, where would you live?
Me: I would live in my very own beautifully rehabbed brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, near the water, which is the thing I miss most since having moved to the middle of the middle of the middle of Brooklyn, because I spent my teen years and my early twenties living within a block of the Long Island Sound.

Question Seventeen

Me: If you could live anywhere, where would you live?
Kimberly: Italy. We spent three weeks there and we went all over the northern half and just loved all of it, so it’d be really hard to pick a spot, but oh … maybe outside Florence.

Question Eighteen

Kimberly: What did you want to be when you were ten?
Me: When I was ten … when I was ten, I wanted to be a writer, but I was dissuaded by the character Connie on Just the Ten of Us, because she said that writers were always poor and never happy and so she was destined to be one, and I thought, “I really don’t want to be poor.”

Question Nineteen

Me: What are your plans for keeping up the website now that you yourself are an about-to-be published YA author?
Kimberly: Luckily I have a number of volunteer reviewers for the site. I don’t want to review books for Mirrorstone [Kimberly's publisher] because I don’t want to have any kind of conflict of interest there. If you look, I haven’t posted a review since my baby was born. I’ve barely read since my baby was born, but that’s getting better. I do plan to keep it up, and I’m going to rely heavily on my reviewers and I might even add some more in there as well. I haven’t reviewed a vampire book in ages, I haven’t read a vampire book in ages because I don’t want to mess up the vision in my head with somebody else’s vision.

Question Twenty

Kimberly: You probably write on a computer, as most of us do today, but if all the computers in the world died and you had to go back to using paper and pen, what kind of paper and pen would you use?
Me: Well, first of all, I’d be pretty screwed, because my penmanship is terrible and because I can type about half as fast as I think, while I can write longhand about a tenth as fast as I think. But, I only use purple pens, so I would probably use a purple Le Pen, and because my penmanship is so terrible, I would go with loose-leaf, college-ruled, plain paper so I could stick it in a binder.

… Question Twenty-One!
Me: I can’t let you off the hook just yet, because I need to know what you would do in the same circumstances.
Kimberly: It would definitely have to be college-ruled paper because I can’t stand wide-ruled paper, and if I just have blank paper my writing goes all slanty, and it would have be a fine-point pen, like a really bold one, but there’s actually some new kind of Sharpie that’s not supposed to bleed through paper and I have to check that out.

And you, my friends, have got to check out Kimberly’s upcoming release. I’ll be back with more on the book on the 26th, but for now, you can find out more about Sucks to Be Me (or pre-order it!) on Amazon.com.

Before I post part two of my interview with Lauren, though, I have to tell you all about her wonderful book.

Our heroine, Claire Voyante (Get it? Claire? Voyante?), has been having weird visions for a good long time. But just after she turns fifteen, her fabulous grandmother gives her a cameo necklace that changes everything. She starts to have strange dreams in black and white, and she’s not quite sure what to do with them. Meanwhile, she’s started attending a dreary but renowned NYC public school, and she’s having trouble making friends until she meets heiress Becca Shuttleworth and gets embroiled in the Shuttleworth family secrets.

Dream Girl is like Nancy Drew — with which I was obsessed for a good three years, until I turned ten and was told by my school librarian that Nancy Drew was not good reading for a girl my age (!?!) — but better. Lauren, who co-wrote The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber and two other Social Climber books, really shows her chops here. She’s witty, sarcastic in a good way, and her teen heroine couldn’t be more lovable. Besides which, YA has for some reason been suffering from a dearth of mystery books lately, so it’s great that Lauren has come along to fill that void.

Lauren expressed some concerns in part one of our interview about whether readers would be turned off by the lack of “sexytime antics.” Au contraire! There may not be any actual full-frontal, rated R, S-E-X, but there is plenty of sexual tension. And I for one am very, very psyched to see what happens in Claire’s love life in future books.

I’m a hundred percent serious when I say I’ve been waiting for months to review this book and give it all the gold stars I have. (Twenty-seven, to be precise.) Dream Girl is not to be missed. I read the book again for the third time last night, and it’s every bit as good as I remembered it.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled interview.

Question Eleven

Me: You’ve probably noticed that journalists are dropping like flies, and that even before the great journalism deluge, those of us who called ourselves reporters and editors were, you know, starving. From what I’ve learned over the last few months, it turns out most authors are also starving. So … what in the world possessed you to be a writer?
Lauren: Hmm . . . good, tough question. I don’t really have a eureka moment story — it’s not like I wanted to be a rare dog breeder and then one day I read The Fountainhead and knew my true calling. It’s more like I’ve always been writing in some form or other and I never discovered I was good enough at anything else to abandon the one thing I love. Writing is tough, true, and it’s not a path that leads to piles of Christian Louboutin shoes, but I never tire of it.

Question Twelve

Lauren: Do you REALLY read a whole book every day? I once heard you say something along those lines.
Me: Yes, usually. Sometimes, when I’m super-busy or really sick, I only read about five books a week. But seven is my norm. Yes, it’s freaky. But just think of all the moments you could be reading: In the bath, while brushing your teeth, while eating, on the subway, etc. As a side effect, I hardly ever watch television any more (though when 30 Rock starts back up, I’ll definitely be doing my best to keep up with that). Oh. And some books, the really really long ones, might take me two days.

Question Thirteen

Me: Who are some of your current favorite teen writers? Got any recommendations for us?
Lauren: Do I ever. I think the Kiki Strike books [by Kirsten Miller] are tremendous. I am obsessed with the Susan Juby oeuvre (her upcoming detective book Getting the Girl is soooo good) and I am also coming down from a Norma Klein kick. Norma Klein, whose books are out of print, was this YA writer who chronicled the lives of kids of mostly divorced, culturally enlightened, sexually liberated parents living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I love her world — I picture everyone wearing those horrible brown and orange tones that were popular in the late 70s and fooling around in a dark corner of the Museum of Natural History. Her fictional world is the kind of place I imagine Anastasia Krupnik and Harriet the Spy and Sport went when they turned into teenagers.

Question Fourteen

Lauren: Here’s a dinner party game I’m hopeless at: Can you come up with your six word bio?
Me: I have a feeling I’d be hopeless at this dinner party game, too. Let’s see. “I’m a starving but hopeful writer.” How does that work?

Question Fifteen

Me: What’s next for you, novel-wise? Will we get more Claire Voyante after Dream Girl, and is there a plan yet for how many books long the series will be?
Lauren: Dear starving but hopeful, I like the answer you came up with. May you be stuffed-to-the-gills and jaded when we next play Twenty Questions!

As for your question, there’s another Claire Voyante book in the pipeline. It’s called Dream Life and it’s to do with a fabulous secret society (objects in mirror are less socialite-y than they appear), a not-so-fabulous secret society (where they have a fake library with painted-on books), an unwanted houseguest, and a cute boy who’s better connected than Ivanka Trump. I’m working on revisions as we e-speak.

Question Sixteen

Lauren: What’s the embarrassing thing you regularly eat by your lonesome? It has to be something that no sane human would ever serve in a restaurant.
Me: Oh my God. You’re really trying to torture me, aren’t you, asking questions like these? Okay, here’s the thing I eat when I’m sick: Peanut butter rice soup. Basically, you take leftover rice (the kind used in making sushi, which is short-grained and what Koreans eat on a daily basis) and you cover it with water and let it boil. Add two tablespoons of peanut butter, and simmer until you get a weird brown porridge. It’s like chicken soup for the crazy half-Korean girl.

Question Seventeen

Me: Fine, Ms. Lauren. What embarrassing food do YOU eat on your lonesome?
Lauren: Oh, I was hoping you’d ask! I like instant couscous, boiling hot water, worsterschire sauce, a pat of butter, and a sprinkle of salt.

Question Eighteen

Lauren: Who designed the skyline on YA New York? My mom thinks it’s very elegant and I totally agree.
Me: First of all, that’s totally gross. But only because I think couscous is gross, which is mostly because I grew up on weird foods of the 1950s, transplanted to the 1980s. But to answer your question, the illustration was done by my boyfriend, Adam Parrish, who is a media artist. (For hire!) But it was based on a photograph taken by someone called AngMoKio, posted to Wikimedia Commons. You can find all this info on my about page.

Question Nineteen

Me: What’s your favorite part of writing novels for teens?
Lauren: I’m tempted to say something all cozy and heartwarming, about how being a teen is tough business and I’m prepared to so anything I can to help make the ride less bumpy. But that wouldn’t be the entire truth, and besides we are now 5,000 words into this interview, meaning the only person reading this is my aforementioned mother (hi, mom!). The selfish reason I like writing for teenagers is similar to why my friend K likes to hang out on nudist beaches in remote parts of Mexico: because anything goes, nobody’s really judging you, and it’s a whole lot more fun than trying not to offend anyone in the so-called Real World.

Oh, now I’m sad that I’ve answered my last question. This saying goodbye stuff is never much fun. Okay, my final inquiry for you is:

Question Twenty

Lauren: I know you’ve written teen fiction. Have you ever been to a nudist beach and if so, what was more liberating?
Me: Alas. I’ve never been to a nudist beach, and I don’t think I’d find it liberating if I did go. More like terrifying. I dunno, I’ve never been one to let it all hang loose, at least not so far as flesh is concerned. But I do find writing for teens to be very liberating.

On that note, my friends, that wraps up our two-day, two-part Lauren Mechling extravaganza. But hopefully it won’t be too long before we hear more from the fabulous Ms. Lauren.

Now, get your butts out to your local bookstore and buy yourself a copy of Dream Girl!

Or, buy Dream Girl from Amazon.com.

Let me just tell you that I’ve been having little weird Freudian time-switcharoos about this book. First I thought it was coming out on June 22, but the publicist let me know that it was July 22. Repeatedly. THEN I thought it was coming out July 11, for some bizarre reason. It was only after a lot of head-poking that I forced myself to remember Dream Girl’s real publication date. Which is tomorrow!

In honor of this great event, I’ll be doing a two-part Twenty Questions with Lauren, rules suspended, and a review tomorrow on the release date. The twenty questions, they start now.

Question One

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about your new novel, Dream Girl?
Lauren: Dream Girl is a 704-page-long meditation on suffering and regret. Kidding! It’s a magical mystery featuring Claire Voyante, the most lovable half-French girl detective out there.

Question Two

Lauren: If you could abolish any single thing from the world, what would it be?
Me: Oh boy. I’m tempted to get all serious here, and say I’d like to abolish unkindness or abuse or prejudice or something. But there are too many evils out there to choose just one, you know? Also, it’s too much pressure to decide on the world’s greatest evil, and you know, sometimes bad stuff causes good stuff, which is a whole philosophical discussion I won’t attempt to get into now. So instead, I would abolish leggings. Women should wear pants, and they must learn this. Leggings were left back in the eighties for a reason. Why are folks like Lindsay Lohan coming back now and trying to haunt me with terrible memories of my tween years?

Question Three

Me: You wrote your first three novels [the Social Climber series] along with Laura Moser. What was it like to go solo for this one?
Lauren: To be honest, it was scarier. Laura has a first-rate mind and a wicked sense of humor, and a lot of better stuff in the Social Climber books are her doing. I missed having somebody to delete/write over my bad jokes, somebody to exchange e-mail high-fives with. It was a little shaky at first — and I spent many a night staring at the ceiling listening to bad podcasts. That said, it was well worth it. I learned so much about writing and (cymbal crash please) I have slayed the crushing fear of going it alone!

Question Four

Lauren: Do you believe Men are from Mars and women are from Venus?
Me: No, I believe men are from Nick Hornby novels and women are from Helen Fielding novels, only maybe a little less neurotic. The YA version of this might be something like … guys are from Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini, and girls are from … I don’t know … maybe one of the early Princess Diaries books. But really, I do believe Nick and Helen pretty much nailed it, so to mature-ish readers out there who are searching for understanding on how love and romance really work: read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby and Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding.

Question Five

Me: Umm. Why did you just ask me that thing, about women being from Venus and men being from Mars?
Lauren: Because my friend’s parents have a copy [of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus] at their country house, and I spent a few rainy hours over July 4th weekend reading it. Maybe I’m just not cut out for self-help, but I found it so bleak! As far as I could tell, the whole premise belongs to the “grin and bear it” school. One shuldn’t look to their partner for good conversation or, heaven forfend, affection. “Venutians” are advised to sit pretty while their “Martians” spend days holed up in their “caves,” and Martians are told that “Venentians” need a steady diet of gestures of affirmation — to the automaton tune of one phone call and four hugs a day. I almost expected him to suggest the proper amount of fishfood to keep us from making too much of a fuss.

Question Six

Lauren: What’s the last thing to happen that made you smile?
Me: Your answer to that last question. What the [expletive] is a “Venentian”? And what does “forfend” mean? The Boyfriend, who is sitting reading this over my shoulder, claims that it’s a Simpsons reference, and that it’s good that you watch said show. Anyway, self-help books are generally more harmful than helpful, in my personal opinion.

Question Seven

Me: If you had to choose between having no cheeks and having a hairy tongue — for life — which would you pick, and why? [Note: If you, Lauren, or you, dear readers, can guess where this question was originally posted, I'll send you some freebies.]
Lauren: I’m going to resist the urge to run a Google search and answer blindly. No cheeks, hands down. Having a dearth of cheeks has never been my problem, so I’d happily take a walk on the cheek-less side.

Question Eight

Lauren: Can I ask now? What on earth was that cheek vs. tongue thing all about?
Me: I was racking my brain, trying to think of something wacky to ask you, and that particular question jumped into my fever-stricken head. [Note: I had a terrible ear infection while we were doing this interview, which meant we did it via e-mail instead of in person or on the phone, because I actually couldn't hear much at all.] Anyway, the offer for freebies still stands: Anyone who does not live with me and has not known me for more than five years qualifies.

Question Nine

Me: You have, like, a day job, yeah (and from what I hear, a pretty cool one, too)? How do you manage this job thing, plus the writing novels thing, plus the having a life thing?
Lauren: You hear right. For the past couple of months I’ve been working at the Wall Street Journal, where my job is to bring in Hot Stuff writers to contribute essays to the Weekend section. It’s been very cool — how many people come to work to find e-mails from the likes of Billy Collins and Zoe Heller in their in boxes? In fact, Zoe signed her last e-mail to me “Love, Zoe”!!! And once I’ve “landed” the talent, I get to work with them on refining their essays. My autobiography can fit into the Dream Girl series: Dream Job.

As for the “how does she do it?” question, I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ve been carving out little packets of time in the early morning hours, but given the amount of progress I’ve made, I think I’m soon going have to do the Martha Stewart thing — stop sleeping and lose all my friends.

Question Ten

Lauren: Here’s something I’ve been fretting about lately: Do you think kids will like Dream Girl or will the lack of sexytime antics put them off?
Me: Newsflash: Not all novels include sexytime. Some of the best books I’ve ever read are much more lacking in that department than yours. I love Dream Girl, and I dare anyone, teen or adult, to be put off by the supposed “lack of sexytime antics.” Indeed, I dare anyone, teen or adult, to be put off by anything at all in your novel. If they do, I’ll come after them with the virtual flame torch Beth Bernobich offered me earlier today, when I was complaining about the ongoing construction in my home and the ear infection that is currently making my life more nightmarish than dreamlike.

♥

All right, kids. That’s all for today. But stay tuned, because I’m posting the next ten questions tomorrow, along with a full report on Lauren’s spectacular new book. In fact, I’m going to go re-read it right now, so I can give you a really detailed and brilliant review.

PS. That picture of Lauren is from the Brooklyn Tee Party we both attended in May. And the ring on her finger has a cameo, which is an important talisman in Lauren’s book. More on that tomorrow, though!

In case you don’t know the rules, Twenty Questions works like this: I ask one question, the author asks the next. We try to keep our answers one sentence long, but sometimes that rule doesn’t work. Okay, here goes:

Question One

Me: How did you get the idea for Artichoke’s Heart?
Suzanne: Several years ago I was sitting in a salon chair in front of a mirror and I thought, what would it be like work in a place with mirrors everywhere if you didn’t like the way you looked?

Question Two

Suzanne: How did you get the idea for your website?
Me: I was a book reviewer for several years and now that I’m working on my own book and not really earning any income, I can’t afford to buy all the novels that I read every week, so I needed free books.

Question Three

Me: Have you ever struggled with your weight?
Suzanne: In the sense that Rosemary struggles, no, but in the sense that nearly every female struggles, yes.

Question Four

Suzanne: Where did you grow up?
Me: I was an army brat, so I was born in Korea, then moved to Maryland, then moved to Oklahoma, then moved to Mississippi, then finally ended up in New York.

Question Five

Me: How did you learn about Rosemary’s struggle, or invent it, or explore it?
Suzanne: I have to say first that I grew up around people who struggled with weight, so I was witness to those struggles, and I knew them up close and personal and in an intimate way, but also I think we all have our points of insecurity and weakness and sadness, and so I wrote from those places in myself as well.

Question Six

Suzanne: What’s the title of your novel, and how’s your novel coming along?
Me: Actually, I’m currently working on a non-fiction YA book called The Worms in My Brain, which is a new project for me, and it’s going much faster and better than I could possibly have anticipated.

Question Seven

Me: You say on your website that you wrote for years and kept getting rejection slips; how did it feel to finally hit The One?
Suzanne: Every time I think about it I get a little choked up. It’s an incredible feeling, and it doesn’t solve all your problems and it doesn’t bring you millions of dollars and instant fame, but it’s just a beautiful thing to think that something you’ve worked really hard on and pursued most of your adult life has come to fruition.

Question Eight

Suzanne: What’s your own personal habit for your writing life, not including your website?
Me: I’m really really bad at the whole “discipline thing” because I get distracted by e-mail, the internet, RSS feeds, contractors trying to destroy my home, but when I need to get serious, I put my headphones on and I listen to music that is work-conducive, and I just write until I can’t do it any more, which can vary from an hour to several hours.

Question Nine

Me: Let me ask you the same question back.
Suzanne: I write every day, Monday through Friday, and if need be, I will get up at some hideously early hour and write, but mostly I’m finished with my writing work around three in the afternoon. [Editor's note: Suzanne admitted she sometimes rises as early as 4:45 a.m. to write!]

Question Ten

Suzanne: What is your all-time favorite book?
Me: I’m going to have to say Anne of Green Gables, because not only do I understand what it’s like to be lonely and overly imaginative, but also because I grew up with the exact same strict religion L.M. Montgomery writes about, which was a kind of puritanical Presbyterianism.

Question Eleven

Me: What is your all-time favorite book and why?
Suzanne: Flannery O’Connor, the Complete Stories — The first time I read one of her short stories I realized that all the stories I had swirling around in my own head were worth writing down because they were so similar to the observations she made in her Southern upbringing.

Question Twelve

Suzanne: How long have you been in New York?
Me: My family moved to New York state when I was thirteen, and when my father died when I was sixteen I refused to move and told my mom I wanted to finish high school in one place, so here I stay.

Question Thirteen

Me: You said you teach. What do you teach, and where, and to whom, and for how long have you been doing it?
Suzanne: I have taught off and on since 1993, and most recently I was at a magnet high school in Baltimore County, and I taught English and in their literary arts department.

Question Fourteen

Suzanne: What is your ultimate goal for your website?
Me: I’d really like to have a consistent audience of people who are passionate about books and have lively discussions about the books they’ve read on the site, and I also want to keep bringing the best new teen fiction to people’s attention.

Question Fifteen

Me: You are a teacher, a writer, and on top of all that, a wife and a mother of three. How do you do it?
Suzanne: I just take it day by day, and I address needs as they arise, and when I’m writing I try to enjoy writing, and when I’m teaching I try to enjoy teaching and when I’m mothering I enjoy mothering.

Question Sixteen

Suzanne: Have you interviewed anybody, not just on your website, because I know you were a journalist, but have you ever interviewed anyone who made you feel a little star-struck, and if so, who?
Me: You know, I don’t really get star-struck because from a young age I’ve been exposed to people who are famous in some way or another, but the closest I’ve ever come was definitely when I interviewed Meg Cabot, because she is, as I think I’ve said quite often, the High Priestess of YA.

Question Seventeen

Me: Can you tell our readers a little bit about your current project?
Suzanne: I am working on a book, tentatively titled Somebody Everbody Listens To, and it’s the story of Retta Jones, and she lives in a tiny little town on the Tennessee River, but her big dream is going to Nashville to become a country music singer.

Question Eighteen

Suzanne: What can writers do to help you support your website?
Me: Well, they could give me money, which they won’t do, but truckloads of cash are welcome anyway; realistically, they can link to me from their blogs and do interviews with me like you’re doing, and just generally tell their fans that I’m out here.

Question Nineteen

Me: There are so many more questions I want to ask you, but for the last one, I’ll just ask this: What makes you tick?
Suzanne: There are three things that make me tick: It goes without saying that my family is the most important thing, but reading, writing and exercise are the things that make me tick, and if I’ve done these things in a day’s time, I feel like it’s a day well-spent. [She runs, uses an elliptical machine, and sometimes jumps on the giant trampoline in her backyard.]

Question Twenty

Suzanne: What’s your worst hair salon story?
Me: When I was eight years old, I really, really, really wanted a perm because my mom got them all the time, so one day I convinced her and her faux-stylist friend to give me a perm, but they ONLY permed my bangs, and I looked like a poodle until my dad could get me to a real salon to get the mess fixed.

Ahem. Presenting … Ms. Melissa Walker in Twenty Questions:

Question one:

Sabrina: What made you decide to write the Violet books?
Melissa: I spent twenty-four hours in a male model apartment and I decided that I had to set a book in that world.

Question two:

Melissa: Why sparkling water?
Sabrina: I have had three cups of coffee today, and if I have any more I will go insane.

Question three:

Sabrina: Under what circumstances did you spend twenty-four hours in a MALE model apartment?
Melissa: I was writing a story for Elle Girl, which I pitched myself.

Question four:

Melissa: What is the last thing that you wrote?
Sabrina: That would be a chapter from my (hopefully) upcoming book, Letters to Bert.

Question five:

Sabrina: Why would you pitch a story that required you to spend twenty-four hours with male models?
Melissa: I felt it was important for teen girls to know that really hot guys can be really boring.

Question six:

Melissa: Who is Bert?
Sabrina: Bert is a fictional rock star.

Question seven:

Sabrina: What was it actually like to spend twenty-four hours with male models?
Melissa: They spent three hours at the gym, ate their dinner on bread plates for portion control, and watched a lot of MTV reality shows.

Question eight:

Melissa: What is your favorite of the Hershey’s miniature candy bars, or are you a fan at all?
Sabrina: Mr. Goodbar is probably the only one I can stand.

Question nine:

Sabrina: Where did you get those awesome orange shoes?
Melissa: I got them from LaRedoute.com, which is like the French H&M.

Question ten:

Melissa: What books did you buy today?
Sabrina: I bought Zombie Blondes by Brian James and Artichoke’s Heart by Suzanne Supplee, both of which I plan to review.

Question eleven:

Sabrina: What books did you buy today?
Melissa: I bought When It Happens [by Susane Colasanti] and How to Be Bad [by E. Lockhart, Lauren Myracle and Sarah Mlynowski], both of which I plan to give away on my blog after I read them.

Question twelve:

Melissa: Is the red that you’re wearing right now your go-to pedicure color?
Sabrina: Yes, I always wear red nail polish on my feet, specifically Essie’s A-List.

Question thirteen:

Sabrina: Who are your all-time, top five celebrity crushes?
Melissa: Kirk Cameron before he got all Christian-crazy, Sean Astin in Goonies, before he became a hobbit, Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites before he either married or left Uma, Winona Ryder for being the smart brunette that every guy had a crush on, and Johnny Depp forever and always.

Question fourteen:

Melissa: Do you have a good story about summer love?
Sabrina: I once went to crazy Christian sleep-away camp, where I had a torrid romance with a boy named Felder.

Question fifteen:
Sabrina: Since you asked me … well, why did you ask me that question?
Melissa: I am currently writing a teen romance called Lovestruck Summer that will come out in 2009.

Question sixteen:

Melissa: Where did you get your bag, which looks like fireworks to me, which is awesome?
Sabrina: I got it at a random shop on Smith Street in Cobble Hill [Brooklyn] for $22 because I needed a really big bag that wasn’t hideous.

Question seventeen:

Sabrina: What do you think of book trailers [about which I have a post planned; watch out for it once the electricians stop plaguing me]?
Melissa: I like them if they’re done well, and my favorites are usually the more DIY, less produced ones.

Question eighteen:

Melissa: What is your must-read blog?
Sabrina: I am ashamed to admit that I am insanely addicted to Go Fug Yourself.

Question nineteen:

Sabrina: Since this is my last question for you, I’m going to go all free-form and ask you what you’d like to say to the readers?
Melissa: I’ll use this opportunity to communicate my “No Rules for Summer” policy: Paint your nails any color you want, read books that call to you, listen to music that inspires you, cut your hair the way you’ve been afraid to cut it, but one piece of clothing that you’re not sure you can pull off, and ignore other people’s rules.
Sabrina: That is an awful lot of rules for a “No Rules” policy.

Question Twenty:

Melissa: Are these bright pink walls making you as cheerful as they’re making me?
Sabrina: Actually, they make me think of Barbies, and that is a totally neutral not-good/not-bad thing.

Melissa and I chatted for awhile, and she told me she grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (which is the town her protagonist Violet lives in). She turned thirty-one June 4, and is engaged to be married — yay!

But then we decided we hadn’t had enough fun with questions, and so we each asked the other one question that we should have asked earlier, but forgot to.

Question Twenty-One:

Sabrina: What is your favorite YA novel?
Melissa: I read a book a few years ago called Stone Garden [by Molly Moynahan], and it so aptly captured adolescent grief that I was mesmerized, and I can’t forget it.

Question twenty-two:

Melissa: Let me ask you the same question.
Sabrina: … [very long pause] … The Chosen by Chaim Potok because it was the first novel with a male protagonist that I ever really loved.

And that, my dear friends, is all I have to offer you now. Oh. Except for this:

Into the Wild, Sarah’s first book, was a hilarious and thrilling romp involving fairy tale characters who had escaped their endlessly repeating stories to live in the real world. Our heroine, Julie, is actually the daughter of Rapunzel and her prince, and the granddaughter of a reformed wicked witch. She’s also the adoptive sister of Puss in Boots. If that doesn’t reflect a nice sense of whimsy, I don’t know what does.

Sarah’s first novel explores what happens when “The Wild,” the magical forest that contains fairy tale characters, tries to take them back. Her second picks up where the first left off: with the ultimate cross-country road trip, taken by Julie and her princely father. It’s a fantastic read, and I heartily encourage you all to rush out and gobble it down. Preferably in a tub full of rose-scented bubble bath.

Now that explanations and exhortations are out of the way, we move onward, my friends, to the interview:


• On the topic of Sarah’s favorite fairy tale:

“Beauty and the Beast. It’s the only one that’s really about true love. All the other ones, they do this love at first sight thing. Cinderella, she goes on one date, Sleeping Beauty, she’s in a coma. The only thing I don’t like about [Beauty and the Beast] is that he turns human at the end.”

Sarah, like me, believes in real love. You know, the kind of love that is blind to unsightly beasts. The kind that grows over time. We’re thinking Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, rather than Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. And really, if Billy Crystal ever turned into Tom Hanks, we’d all be kind of freaked out, wouldn’t we?

• About the Disney movie adaptations of classic fairy tales:

“I adore Disney, which really surprises people that know the original tales. I think without Disney that the fairy tales, a lot of them would have disappeared. … I think the thing about fairy tales it that they’re designed the to be reinvented, intended to be retold.”

• On the setting, which is Sarah’s own hometown of Northborough, Massachusetts:

“It was completely wish fulfillment to set it in my hometown. I always wanted magic in my town, and this was a way to do that. Every place in the books, with the exception of the Wishing Well Motel itself, has a real life equivalent.”

• In which we reveal that Sarah, who is now in her early thirties, had the original idea for Into the Wild when she was still in high school:

“Yeah. My school did these little musical plays and I decided I wanted to write one and I had the idea that I wanted to do fairy tale characters in the real world.”

The play, Sarah said, was entitled “Rapunzel’s Hair Salon, and she never showed it to anyone because it was ‘terrible’ and, Sarah claims, because she’s actually tone deaf.

• Another whimsical idea that contributed to Sarah’s idea for the first book:

“What if there was a girl who had a monster under her bed, and her mom knew about it?”

Umm. I’d say that would be pretty bad parenting in most situations. You know. Move the monster out to the garage or something. But who am I to criticize? Sarah’s the one who wrote the awesome book, and Rapunzel does make a pretty decent mom, even if there is a monster under Julie’s bed. (Oh, by the way. There’s a monster under Julie’s bed.)

• In which Sarah talks about writing the sequel, which was an overnight process compared to her first labor of love, which she’d carried with her throughout the years:

“It was actually so much fun to write. It was like hanging out with old friends. … And it was easier because I knew the world, I knew the characters.”

Finally, Sarah’s book recommendations for our readers: City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare, and also “the latest re-telling of Rumpelstiltskin,” which she later clarified was A Curse Dark As Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce.

Sarah will be back in NYC next Wednesday, June 25, at 6 p.m., when she’ll be reading at the New York Public Library’s Jefferson Market Branch. 425 Sixth Ave. at 10th St.

Buy Out of the Wild from Amazon.com now. Behind the times? No worries: just grab a copy of Into the Wild while you’re at it.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of interviewing Cheryl Diamond, the gorgeous and very nice author of Model, a Memoir. We chatted for a very long time, and so this vlog entry will actually be in two parts. Because I still have to edit the other half of our interview so it is not seventeen hours long. Sorry for all the crazy cuts — I’m still learning!

PS. You’ll be able to hear this thing much better if you wear headphones. Or, like turn the sound on your computer allllll the way up. If you want to buy me an external microphone, I won’t stop you.

Cheryl Diamond with YA New York, Part I from Sabrina Banes on Vimeo.