Ellen Hagan is the author, with her husband, David Flores, of the new young adult novel Tell Me Every Lie. Her other books include Reckless, Glorious, Girl. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and she lives in New York City.
Q: What inspired you to write Tell Me Every Lie, and how did you create your characters JP and Mia?
A: It has been such a supreme joy to work together! David and I have known each other since we were 17 years old. We both attended the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts (GSA), a free, audition-based summer intensive offered to students in the state of Kentucky. I studied creative writing and David studied theatre.
We met again nearly a decade later when I was creating solo shows and performing in New York City and David was making a short film commission by GSA about artists responding to the events of September 11, 2001. David interviewed me in Gratz Park, Lexington, Kentucky, and soon after we began dating. We have been married since 2006 and will soon celebrate our 19th anniversary.
We have a shared sense of home, both being born and raised in Kentucky, and have found kinship in our backgrounds and identities. David is Filipino American, and I am of mixed raced ancestry: Assyrian, Irish and Italian.
Our conversations around race, traditions, and where we come from inform so much of our artistic work and we are constantly talking and sharing stories with each other, so when we were on a work trip at a resort in upstate New York, we started to think about how those stories could be interwoven and the idea came to us one night during dinner.
We kept thinking about class and identity and what it would be like for someone who was working at the resort to fall for someone who was there for vacation. The dare happened a bit later, but the roots of our book started that evening.
The characters emerged shortly after as we built a synopsis, pitch, and wrote the first several chapters to share with our agent and editor. Mia and JP morphed into themselves the more we wrote.
While they are not based on us, we wanted them to share some of our identity traits and infused some of our conversations as well. We have a long-standing partnership and are so thrilled to be telling stories together and celebrating what it means to discover and love yourself while also finding love with someone else.
Q: How did you collaborate on the book? What was your writing process like?
A: We worked in the same room together the entire time! We have a home in Louisville, Kentucky, that sits right next to David’s parents and his childhood home and it feels like an artist retreat when we are there.
We sat in the dining room together surrounded by chart paper where we crafted the timeline of the entire week that Mia and JP are getting to know one another.
David is a filmmaker and photographer, so his sense of plot is excellent. I learned so much by watching the way his mind works and so we wrote that first draft in the summer of 2023 and then navigated several rounds of edits in the summer of 2024. It was hard work, but so good to be in it together.
I am especially thankful to snacks, coffee, and the sweet neighborhood we live in which provided space for endless walks, and for our children, who gave us hours of quiet, and to both of our families who helped us to figure out the time it took to write a book together.
I would always tell David that the last person I wrote a book with was Renée Watson for Watch Us Rise and she set the bar VERY high! We worked diligently to match that level, and I am thankful for our partnership and our collaboration.
I look forward to writing more books with both David and Renée, as it feels like such a beautiful collective experience. Art making should feel like community building and when I am writing with a partner or friend, it truly does.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Mia and JP?
A: They have so many preconceived ideas about each other and are trying to hide parts of themselves along the way and so it takes a beat for them to really reveal who they are.
They are pretending for a stretch of time, but eventually they start to share small parts of their true selves and that unraveling feels so exciting to me.
I think David and I both remember being teenagers and trying to prove something as opposed to just being who you are, and so Mia and JP are grappling with those feelings and that anxiety to show who you really are.
At the core of their relationship, we see excitement and celebration too. They love to dance, sing karaoke, roller skate, swim, fly kites, and just have an awesome time being teenagers. That’s what we hope all readers find in this book. We hope they see Mia and JP exploring who they are by being playful, silly, and joyful!
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Our original title was Love at Lake Majestic, which we loved as a working title, but it felt like it didn’t reveal enough. As we worked with our amazing editor, Sarah Shumway Liu, we started to comb through the book and think of a title that would connect back to the dare and what JP and Mia are trying to hide.
Tell Me Every Lie feels like there is truth around every corner of the book and that by finally telling the truth both Mia and JP will love who they really are and in turns figure out how to love each other.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: We are very excited to be working on a new project together that we dreamed up last year. This is in very early stages, but since David and I talk all the time, we have formed some exciting ideas and visions for this book. We can’t wait to see where the story takes us!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: We would love to share some resources with young writers and librarians if anyone is interested in learning more about our work or the spaces that we work with!
Scholastic Art & Writing Awards
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Ellen Hagan.
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