New YA Novel Deals with Child Abuse and Mental Illness

Interview with young adult author Judy Gregerson:

When did you start writing?

I first tried my hand at writing when I was in about the seventh grade, but I didn’t fully understand what made a story work. It frustrated me no end, so I gave it up. I started writing again when I was in my mid-twenties. I had an idea for a memoir that I thought was very compelling, so I began making tapes of the story and eventually typing them all out on an old Selectric typewriter. After a few months of that, I had an outline and a first draft.

How, why and when did decide you wanted to be a published writer? How did you go about it? What did you do to achieve this end?

I decided when I was eight that I wanted to be a published writer. It came as my third grade teacher was reading Charlotte’s Web to the class. I thought that there could be no finer profession than writing and decided I’d do the same. A few years later, I met a married couple who were writers and I was just mesmerized by them. They seemed so important and so special. It only strengthened my determination to be a writer. But at the time, it seemed like a pipe dream, something that a kid wishes for but doesn’t know if it will ever happen. I had no encouragement at home, everyone just smiled at me and patted me on the head and because they didn’t take it seriously, I didn’t either. But after college, I lived in NYC. I was working in advertising and had become a copywriter, which I really enjoyed. That was when I discovered that I had that spark and I also learned that writing was a lot of fun! I was around writers and theater people and I had a very good friend who was very encouraging to me about writing. And it struck me that if I didn’t start, I’d never get a book published, so I took the leap and started writing. Up to this point, I had read no books on writing. I just jumped in and started, going on pure instinct. And back then, there was no internet, no computers, and no writing community to turn to for help. It was just me and the white blank piece of paper.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

I call it coming of age literary fiction. But literary fiction seems to have a bad name these days, so I’ll call it mainstream fiction. I call my writing literary because I use a lot of symbolism and images in my writing and I use setting as a character. I also like to write “deep” which seems to be associated with literary fiction. I write about characters who have suffered some kind of loss and who are struggling to understand who they are and where they’re going. My characters are usually fairly wounded and they make a lot of big mistakes. They all have deep longing for something and they usually satisfy that longing, but not in the way they expected.

Who is your target audience? What motivated you to start writing for this audience?

My audience is mixed. I have many adult reader fans who have emailed or called me to talk about my book. But my book is marketed as young adult, so I also have teen readers.

My target audience, as I see them, are people who have suffered loss in a very deep way (to them at least, even if it doesn’t look huge to anyone else) and they’re people who feel very deeply. They’re also thinkers and they’re people who care about other people. I write for this audience because they’re like me!

How have your personal experiences influenced the direction of your writing?

My books are all based on things that I’ve experienced in life, so I’d have to say that they have really directed my writing. In fact, I tend to write about the same themes, over and over, in new and different ways.

How many books have you written so far?

I’ve had two published. The first was put out by Doubleday, 1980, SAVE ME! A Young Woman’s Journey Through Schizophrenia to Health, which is self-explanatory. And BAD GIRLS CLUB was my next, published by Blooming Tree Press, July 2007, a small indy press in Austin, Texas. This is the story of a girl who has taken on the role of the parent in her house and who cares for her sister, her mother, and her father, while her mother spirals into madness and her father refuses to do anything about it.

I have about 5 or 6 other unpublished novels. I’m trying to find an agent now for CRACKING NORMAL, a coming of age (YA) story about a girl whose family moves into a trailer park and the problems that creates in her life.

The rest are unmentionable.

What is your latest book about? How long did it take you to write it? Where and when was it published? How did you chose a publisher for the book? Why this publisher? What advantages and/or disadvantages has this presented? How are you dealing with these?

My latest book, BAD GIRLS CLUB, is about a girl who cares for her mentally ill mother, her abused little sister, and her ineffective father during a summer of hell when her mother slips fully into madness. It took me about 7 years to write and finish and went through about 21 revisions. Blooming Tree Press published it this last summer. I didn’t choose them, they chose me. I sent the book in, expecting a rejection, and was shocked when they wanted to buy it. BTP is a small press, so there have been challenges in promotion and marketing, but I decided to take a year off to market the book which has helped tremendously and B&N and Borders have both just picked up the book. The nice thing is that my book is the lead title for this publisher, so it’s gotten a lot of attention, but it still requires (as do all publishing houses) that I get out there, make myself known, and sell books.

Which aspects of the work that you put into the book did you find most difficult? Why do you think this was so? How did you deal with these difficulties?

The most difficult part of the work was finding the voice. This story is about a dark subject, so I had to ride just on the border of madness to write it. That was a real dance sometimes. If you go too far, you lose the reader, so how do you stay just this side of the fence and make a book readable for a wide audience?This troubled me the most while writing. If it was too dark, I felt it wouldn’t capture its audience. It took all of those seven years to get that right.

Which aspects of the work did you enjoy most? Why is this?

I really enjoyed getting into the head of my character and becoming her as I wrote. I enjoyed my conversations with her and the things she told me about herself, especially as she revealed who she was and how she felt. Transferring that into words on paper was a lot of fun and I discovered that getting into the soul of a character is the best part of writing for me.

What sets the book apart from the other things you've written? In what way is it similar?

Bad Girls Club has a certain sadness to it and a longing that pulls the reader along and none of my other books have that. I think that narrative drive is important but I discovered in this book a way to really take the reader into the character’s head and ride along with her as the story developed. I’m not sure I could do it again, but it was very important to this character that the reader fully understand everything she thought.

What will your next book be about?

My next book is about a girl whose mother drops her off at the grocery store when she’s ten and never returns for her. She’s left with her very eccentric extended family and struggles with why her mother left, why she hasn’t come back and how she can go on without her.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

I think my most significant achievement as a writer has been receiving emails from people who read BAD GIRLS CLUB and told me that they so fully experienced the main character’s life that they felt they were a part of her family. I’ve also had people tell me that although they’ve never been abused, they felt so familiar in the territory of my story that they couldn’t put the book down. One reader even took it in the bathtub with her because she didn’t want to leave the character alone. I’ve received phone calls from crying women, thanking me for writing the book. All I wanted to do with this book was touch people. I believe I’ve done that.

How did you get there?

You tell the truth. You tell it as fully and completely as you can and you tell it in a way that people will say, “I’ve been there! I know how that feels.” Maybe a part of it is finding the universal human emotions that speak to anyone when they read your book. When I started this book, it was my belief that everyone has suffered some kind of loss and it didn’t matter what kind they’d suffered, because we recognize ourselves in the emotions of other people and their experience. I wanted my book to have a “universal” appeal and it seemed the only way to do that was to capture the human experience and make it available for all to feel in my story. I think I did that. At least my readers tell me I did.

Judy's bio: Judy grew up on the North Fork of Long Island. She attended college in Upstate New York and after college worked as a copy editor at a newspaper, in the marketing department of a publisher, as an account executive at an advertising agency, and then in various positions in promotion and marketing.

She now lives in the Pacific Northwest and works as a freelance book editor and a marketing consultant while she finishes her degree in Human Development.

Visit Judy on the web at www.judygregerson.com