Sara Zarr, "Story of a Girl," "Sweethearts" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

Sara Zarr had an experience last night that any author would kill for – sitting in the audience at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in Manhattan, her first novel, Story of a Girl, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for young people’s literature.

For a first-time fiction author, such a nomination is remarkable, and it would be fun for both of us to tell you that she won, but it wasn’t meant to be, not this time around.

Don’t shed too many tears for Sara, however. She’s young, talented, and has already completed her second young adult title, Sweethearts, due on Valentine’s Day 2008 from Little, Brown.

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: First of all, congratulations on being nominated.

SARA ZARR: Thank you very much.

ANDELMAN: How are you doing today? Last night must have been a little rough after all the build-up.

ZARR: It was fabulous, and it was devastating all at the same time, and it was a really wonderful evening that I will not soon forget. But it’s definitely, as much as you can say it’s an honor just to be nominated, it would be even more wonderful to win, but it was a great night, and it’s all a positive.

ANDELMAN: You mentioned in your blog entry at 2:00 AM that you had quietly put your acceptance speech aside. I have a feeling you’ll get to use it for something else down the line.

ZARR: It’s interesting, because I, of course, I’ve been pondering this since last night, and when you are in a situation like this, you have to be prepared to win because if you do win, you want to speak eloquently and thank everybody, and you don’t want to trip on your way up to the podium, so you kind of walk through it so much in your mind and practice your speech that some part of your consciousness, even though you know you have just as good a chance of losing, or not winning, I should say, as you do of winning, some part of your consciousness has mentally practiced this so much that it’s a little bit of a shock to the system, I think, when it doesn’t happen because at least I didn’t walk through or practice what I would do if my name wasn’t called, and perhaps I should have.

ANDELMAN: To do the flip side of it.

ZARR: Exactly.

ANDELMAN: Did you meet anyone particularly interesting last night?

ZARR: I met just amazing people. The other finalists in the young people’s literature category were all delightful, and we got to spend most of Tuesday together, the day before the awards. We had a press conference with 250 teens from local schools that had all been given copies of the book and read them and came and did a press conference format and asked us questions, and then we had a signing at the library, and I got to enjoy the company of my fellow finalists there. I really wanted to meet Jonathan Franzen. I’m a big fan of his, and I saw him walking through the reception, but he was very purposely walking somewhere. I’m not the type to chase someone down, so that was unfortunate, but it was a great night, and I met so many wonderful people.

ANDELMAN: I understand that something tipped you off even before the announcement that you hadn’t won. Can you tell us about that?

ZARR: Yeah, well, they call all the finalists’ names and project our books onto the screen, and that’s very exciting, and when the woman, Elizabeth Partridge, whom I’m sure was very nervous, as she was the first presenter, announced my name as Sara Zane, which is not really close to Zarr at all, so that was kind of a tip-off. I figured if I was going to win, she probably wouldn’t have misspoken my name, and that’s when I slid my acceptance speech back into my purse in my lap and got ready to clap for Sherman.

ANDELMAN: Oh my. Is that when you also mentally slit your wrists?

ZARR: It took a little while to catch up to that, but….




ANDELMAN: Ouch. That must have been hard, and I imagine you are sitting at your table, I guess, with your publisher and your publicist and your agent, and suddenly nobody knows where to look.

ZARR: I think what was maybe more challenging about it than it would have been in another circumstance is that the winner, Sherman Alexie, and I have the same editor, and we’re with the same publishing house so we were all at the table together, and so we were celebrating. It was a win for the table, and I think if I had been the only one, then we all could have sort of looked at each other and commiserated together, but the table was really celebrating, as I was, too, because I love Sherman, and I love his books, so that made it a little harder to sort of balance happy for him, happy for the publisher, happy for my editor, sad for me, but also happy just to be there as a first-time author. Being a finalist is a huge honor on its own, but yeah, it was a real, sort of mixed bag of emotions that you’re processing all in a span of ten seconds.

ANDELMAN: I am sure, as you go forward in your career, you will look back at that and, win or lose, you will remember that as a major moment.

ZARR: Absolutely.

ANDELMAN: We’re talking today, I’ll point out, because we share an agent, and he was telling me a couple of weeks ago how excited he was for you. He had never had an author who had been nominated for the National Book Award. You’re both young people. This is coming from someone who’s like 100.

ZARR: He’s younger than me. He’s a lot younger than me.

ANDELMAN: Is he younger than you?

ZARR: I’m older than I look. I’m 37, which I know is not old at all. It’s still very youthful, but so many people in publishing are in their mid to late twenties, and when I’m out with my publicist and my editor’s assistant and folks like that and they were born in the 1980s, and Michael (Bourret)’s a youngster, too.

ANDELMAN: Right. Well, I know he was very excited for you and is still very excited for you. I want to make one more reference before I forget to your blog, and this will be the second and last reference to sarazarr.com, but I was surprised to read there that you actually have a story connecting you to the category’s winner, Sherman Alexie.

ZARR: Well, I’m from the West. I grew up in California, and I live in Utah now, and any writer or reader in the West is very familiar with Sherman and his work, and he’s always been a celebrity in my eyes. About four years ago, I went to hear him speak at the Salt Lake City Public Library, and he talked for an hour, hour and a half, and he was just amazing. He was just super-sharp and had great, funny, true observations about life and politics and writing and parenthood and just the whole bag of what he does. I was really star-struck and too shy even to really talk to him afterwards and say how I enjoyed the talk, and if you had told me that four years from then I would be sharing a National Book Award experience with him, I would not have believed it, and it’s a real treat. And the nice part is he’s truly a kind and warm and wonderful person who I’m glad to have shared this experience with.

ANDELMAN: Was Story of a Girl taking shape in your mind yet at that point? Were you imagining yourself…

ZARR: Yes. I don’t remember what year that was exactly, but Story of a Girl has been with me quite a while. It probably was already at least one draft of it done at that time because I had won the 2003 Utah Arts Council prize, which is given to an unpublished work, and so a draft of that won the prize in 2003, and then it was a process of searching for the right agent and then waiting a long time before that happened. So there were a lot of years in between there. And then, of course, as you know, there is quite a delay between when you sell a book and when it comes out, so I think Michael and I sold that in the spring of 2005, and then it came out in January of 2007. It’s been with me quite a while.




ANDELMAN: Sara, it doesn’t feel to you that that time goes by so quickly?

ZARR: In retrospect, of course. In the middle of it, it’s like eons, like the Ice Age just sort of creeping along.

ANDELMAN: I got paid yesterday for book work I completed in March, and this is now November, so I hate it. I love writing and publishing the books, but boy, between finishing it and seeing it, holding it in your hands, it is an eternity. Let’s actually talk about the book, Story of a Girl. I read it. Like I said, I’m like a hundred years old, and I read it with a little hesitation because a), I’m not a girl, and b), I’m long past being a young adult. But I have to say, after reading about 30 pages, I just couldn’t put it down. I read straight through. I just thought your sense of pacing was remarkable.

ZARR: Well, thank you.

ANDELMAN: How different is the finished product from what you had four or five years ago?

ZARR: It’s different in that it’s better, obviously, in the re-writing and editing process. What I wanted to do, my vision for the story and the emotions I wanted to explore and evoke, the finished book is as close to that original vision as it can be. I think the earlier drafts were more attempts at getting closer to that vision, but in re-writing, that’s when you really get there. There are some details that are different, some plot details. There’s less going on in the final draft than there was originally. I got some feedback along the way that there was a little bit much.

Originally, Deanna’s father actually had Gulf War Syndrome, and that was a source of a lot of his depression and angst in the family. And that kind of seemed like enough material for a whole other book so I decided to give him a more everyday kind of problem of just being a working-class high school graduate and father trying to provide for his family, having one job for twenty years and getting laid off and not being able to recover from that.

ANDELMAN: It’s hard not to want to ask you how much of your lead character is you, or whether you’re lurking in the supporting cast at all.

ZARR: I’m lurking everywhere in the book. Nothing that happened to Deanna, in terms of the details of her story, ever happened to me. I think the emotions that she experiences are definitely part of my experience. In terms of details of characters and their lives, I’m more like her friend Lee, kind of a good girl from a reasonably stable family, eventually, once my mom re-married. And I think there’s a little bit of me in Darren, the big brother, of just kind of wanting to take care of people I love. And the parents, I have a lot of sympathy for the dad and the mom. I can’t break down my personality and say where I am in each character, but they’re all based on emotional truths, if not incidental ones.

ANDELMAN: Do I have this right? It takes place in a place called Pacifica, and you grew up in Pacifica.

ZARR: I went to high school in Pacifica. I grew up in San Francisco from about age two to 11, and then my mother re-married, and we moved to Pacifica. And I went to junior high and high school there, and it’s very close to San Francisco. It’s really just a fifteen minute drive. But in terms of what it was like to live there as a teenager, it was vastly different than what my experience would’ve been in San Francisco. At least at the time, I went from a really diverse, interesting neighborhood to just a really all-white place where no one walked anywhere, and there was nowhere to go if you didn’t have a car, and people just seemed, they were about twenty years behind what was going on, clothes, music, and culture than the city fifteen miles away.

ANDELMAN: From your descriptions and the atmosphere that you create for Pacifica in the book, it sound like a lot of places that I’ve driven through and never stopped or that I’ve seen a little of, or that, my other suspicion is, that they will not be giving you the key to the city anytime soon.

ZARR: Pacifica, as an adult, when I go there now, I really appreciate it. My in-laws still live there, and it’s just a cute, little, coastal bedroom community of San Francisco, and there are some great people who live there. I met my husband there doing community theater. Now that I have a car, I have a lot of love for Pacifica. But as an adolescent, there’s just something about it that I think is hard for a lot of kids, and I don’t think anyone in Pacifica would disagree with me.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.