Jennifer Mason-Black is the author of the new young adult novel Sometimes the Girl. She also has written the YA novel Devil and the Bluebird. She lives in Massachusetts.
Q: What inspired you to write Sometimes the Girl, and how did you create your character Holiday?
A: Let me preface this by saying I’ve never read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, so what follows has nothing to do with its literary merits. What interested me about its publication was the reader response.
The connection so many people have to To Kill a Mockingbird is deeply personal. To be confronted with an apparent earlier draft in which beloved Atticus Finch is openly racist felt to many like a betrayal.
Very quickly, the majority narrative became that publication of Go Set a Watchman was purely an exploitation of Harper Lee, now in her late 80s and likely misled into signing the contract. Surely she would never have chosen to let the world see her early work, surely To Kill a Mockingbird was the book she’d meant to write and deserved be her sole legacy.
For me, that presented several questions.
First, what role does ageism plays in such a situation? Second, what occurs in the space between an earlier work, like Go Set a Watchman, and a published version rebuilt from the ground up? Third, in a situation in which a writer subjugates their creativity to their editor’s desire, how might that affect their future art? And fourth, who should determine an artist’s legacy?
Of course, that’s not the origin of Holiday and her part of the story. Some of Holi is autobiographical. For example, the town she grew up in—Amherst—is my hometown, and the love she feels for it is my own, though less complicated. I also was a young writer who quit writing due to a mentor’s opinions, in my case for a very long time.
But Holi is her own person. I wish I could say that there’s a method to how I develop characters. The reality is that I stumble across a piece of life—a hat left behind, an awkward interaction, a passing cloud—that provides me entry into who they are. Then I just write and write until they come clear to me.
This time I had a head start because Sometimes the Girl is actually connected with two other books of mine, one published, one not. I already had a description of her and a sense of mystery. These made it easier to begin.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Holi and your character Elsie, an older writer?
A: I think Elsie is very conflicted about how to relate to this young woman writer, clearly wounded in some way, that shows up on her doorstep.
Elsie’s bitterness about writing is so deep that it cannot help but drive her to discourage Holi from following the same path. At the same time, Holi’s presence resuscitates some of Elsie’s feelings about writing—that passionate space in which nothing else matters—and what she’d lost.
The truth, though, is that most of the time they are communicating on different levels. Elsie’s need for privacy comes from her fame, but also from the suffering through which that fame came to be.
When she tells Holi that writing is no job for a woman, it originates from a place of history and experience and loss. When Holi hears it, she understands it as the words of an old woman who parrots outdated beliefs about women’s work being less than men’s.
In the end, what Holi longs to hear is that she is a writer, that she should continue to write. What Elsie wants, I think, is to covertly communicate her own pain and save Holi the same, while also to believe the world has changed enough that Holi might succeed with her writer’s heart intact.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Excellent, an easy question! Sometimes the Girl comes from a conversation I wrote very early on.
In it, Blue Riley, the singer/songwriter protagonist from my first book, Devil and the Bluebird, says that in books sometimes the girl gets the boy and sometimes she gets the girl, but sometimes the girl gets herself, and that’s what she—Blue—wants in a story.
There are so many great books that center romance, but Holi’s story isn’t meant to be one of them. She’s been so tied up in the lives and needs of the people she loves and her own fears about the future; the central question here isn’t whether she gets the girl but whether she gets herself. Whether she finds her own compass, whether she reclaims herself as an artist.
I agree with Blue: sometimes these stories are exactly the ones we need.
Q: The writer Mary McCoy said of the book, “Mason-Black never shies away from the hard questions and harder answers in this devastating, engrossing puzzle of a story.” What do you think of that description?
A: Something I knew from the beginning of my drafting process was that I had to face a question that I, as author, didn’t want to answer.
There were plenty of other questions along the way: how to allow close relationships to evolve, is it possible to move honestly into the future without healing the past, how do we trust ourselves in a world where so many benefit from our self-doubt.
We all grapple with those at some point, and the answers we find, as obvious as they can seem from the outside, are often hard won.
But this one question…I agonized over it as much as the characters involved did. Finally, though, I remembered that Holi’s grandfather is right: the hard thing isn’t knowing the answer, it’s following through on it. I knew the solution, both within the context of the story and in my own personal beliefs. I was just afraid to commit to it.
So, I think Mary McCoy gives a fairly accurate description. Life is full of hard questions and answers—without them we would experience static existences, exiting the world more or less the same as we entered it—and I wanted the book to be full of life.
And on a personal level, I also confronted a hard question, and it did force me to grow, and for that I am thankful.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: In life, sending my youngest child off to college!
In writing, I’m returning to where I began, working on an adult novel with some magic, some apocalypse, and a bit more reality than I’d like.
It revolves around a magical healer, who grows from a child surviving by bartering her talent, to a teen living a pampered existence built on her complicity in the violent theft of magic from children, to a woman on a quest to return what she stole while being hunted by a private army intent on seeing she doesn’t succeed.
It contains environmental collapse and sailboats crossing drought-stricken plains and a dog named Jack and a circus and the power of community.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: This is a dangerously broad question. A few years ago, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. I wrote lots of Caring Bridge updates, which were read mostly by colleagues of his that I’d never met.
One of them responded to every post. I was exhausted and terrified, and the kids and I felt adrift and alone, and he replied each time with encouragement. Not false cheer—support arising from intimate knowledge of the struggle we faced.
He told me his wife kept us in their church’s prayer circle, he complimented my writing, he told me he was so happy about our good reports. And he told me that he knew he tended to overshare.
So, perhaps that story contains the two important things I’d like you to know.
One, that I believe humanity is in a dire place, one where despair is easy and emotional shutdown is the choice so many people make.
At the same time, I think connecting to one another on a human level, with stories, with compassion, with genuine love, makes a difference in our ability to survive and to take action toward not just survival, but profound, sustained, positive change.
And two, I overshare. On that note: coming up on three years cancer free!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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