Sara Zarr, "Sweethearts" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

If you’ve ever thought about writing novels, you might want to think about envying Sara Zarr’s career.

Her first, best-selling, young adult title, Story of a Girl, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Awards. Book two, just released this month, is Sweethearts. It has earned glowing reviews and -- even better -- excellent sales.

I interviewed Sara a couple months ago, the morning after the 2007 National Book Awards. She was a delightful guest, even in the face of disappointment, and I made her promise to come back when Sweethearts was released.

You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Happy Valentine’s Day. How are you spending Valentine’s Day?

SARA ZARR: I am spending Valentine’s Day unpacking from my little Sweethearts tour, and then I’m gonna help a friend move, and then I’m gonna watch “Project Runway,” which was recorded last night. So if anyone calls in and gives it away, I’m going to have to hang up. So that’s my romantic day.

ANDELMAN: That’s it, huh? No plans?

ZARR: Valentine’s Day doesn’t figure hugely in my life or my marriage. What I think about Valentine’s Day is that it’s a good excuse if you have a crush to let someone know. And so when I first met my husband, I did send him a little Valentine’s card to kind of let him know that I was thinking about him, and then, 17 years later, here we are.

ANDELMAN: And he’s still waiting for another card?

ZARR: Probably, yes.

ANDELMAN: Let’s talk books. How different is it publishing the second novel compared to being the first-time author?




ZARR: It’s really different. Well, the writing process was a lot different because Story of a Girl was out while I was kind of finishing the last few drafts of Sweethearts, and Story of a Girl was doing well, and it was hard not to feel the pressure of feeling like there’s something at stake now, whereas before, there wasn’t. And the nice thing is with the second book, now I kind of understand what to expect in terms of what the publisher does, of what I do. Because when you get into publishing and publish your first book, there’s no sort of guide for new authors telling you how everything works and what to expect practically and emotionally and all of those things. Now that I’ve been through it once, I’m a lot more relaxed this time and just enjoying it a bit more and not obsessively reading every single thing that every single person says about the book. That’s probably healthy.

ANDELMAN: Sara, I have to ask you because, as you know, we share an agent. Are you telling me that Michael Bourret, our extraordinary agent, did not give you a copy of “Book Publishing for Dummies”?

ZARR: He did not, and if he has one somewhere in his office, I’m going to find out about it, and he’s going to pay.

ANDELMAN: I don’t know whether to feel bad for you that he didn’t give it to you or feel bad for me that he did give it to me, and he didn’t feel you needed it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m going to have to think about that.

ZARR: Try not to take that for “Dummies” thing personally.

ANDELMAN: One of the other things we talked about last time around was the possibility of the sophomore jinx. I think you were a little nervous about it then. I imagine you’re feeling a little better about it now.

ZARR: I was very nervous although, at the time we talked, the editorial process was finished. It was completely out of my hands so there was nothing I could do about it anyway. But I have to admit that it was a relief to see the first couple reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus and get positive reviews. After that, I just kind of breathed out and figured well, some people will like it better, some people won’t like it as much as a different book, and I’ll get some new readers, and that’s great. I’m very relaxed and, of course, having that nice National Book Award finalist sticker on my first book is kind of good for the self-esteem, if ever I’m feeling a little low.

ANDELMAN: We spoke the morning after the National Book Awards. You didn’t win. My favorite story about that was that you had your speech that you had practiced and got down to the right amount of time. It had never occurred to you to practice your reaction if you did not win, which I thought was wonderful.

ZARR: Right, the game face.

ANDELMAN: But I’m thinking, since then, and I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but as a first-time author, maybe they did you a favor by not naming you the winner because it just seems to me that anything you would do after that would be so hard to live up to having that tag, “National Book Award Winner,” that it would be tougher. “National Book Award Finalist” gets to follow you around just the same, and you don’t have to produce the greatest novel on the face of the earth to live up to that the rest of your life.

ZARR: I think you have a point. Definitely being a finalist was absolutely the best thing that could happen for my career, but at the same time, it’s just an award. I have kind of mixed feelings about awards. Of course, if you get them, you think they’re great, and they mean a lot, and if you don’t get them, you’re like, “Ah, it’s just an award.” Now I have that experience behind me, and I like having the sticker on my book, but I also think writing is still hard. Every book feels like I’m doing it for the first time. I want to do a lot of different things. And I know that when I read award-winning books, I don’t always like them so it’s just the opinion of that particular group of judges for that year, and it’s great for one’s career, but it’s not any kind of final verdict on your ability as a writer or your value as a person.

ANDELMAN: That’s true. I remember -- it’s been about 20 years -- but there was a period of time when I was doing a lot of magazine work, a lot of investigative stuff. Much to my surprise, this magazine had entered my work into a competition, and I actually won awards. I think I won like five awards, which was amazing, because I’d never in my life won anything for anything, and so I was excited. And my editor at the time just decided to bring me back down to earth, and he said, “Hey, listen ‘Pro’” -- that’s what he called me, Pro – “Listen Pro, awards are like assholes, everybody’s got one, get over it.” I was just like, “Ooooo-kay.” From then on, I never cared again.

ZARR: Somehow, I’m glad I don’t have someone like that in my life, but yeah, that’s true.

ANDELMAN: Boy, sometimes we romanticize in the crusty old bastards in the business.

ZARR: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Sometimes we could really live without them, I have to say. Story of a Girl, which was a wonderful book, one I really liked that a lot…

ZARR: Thank you.

ANDELMAN: …and you had the luxury there of keeping that book in the oven a long time. Wasn’t that a couple years to gestation?

ZARR: Yes, it was a few years.




ANDELMAN: And then this one, my sense is that you popped this one out, and I don’t mean that in a deprecating way, but you kind of popped this one out, I’m thinking, in about a year, right?

ZARR: Yes. During the time I was writing Story of a Girl, there was a lot of waiting. There would be periods of four to six months of waiting to hear back from editors and agents, and so it wasn’t like I was literally working on it every day for three years. Now that I’m writing full-time, Sweethearts just happened in a more compressed amount of time, but there was no waiting. I was working on it pretty much all the time. The waiting time is good. It helps you get distance from the work, and you don’t really have that luxury when you’re writing under contract to just sort of let it marinate and stew and then go on with the rest of your life while you’re waiting for magic things to happen in your subconscious. It’s definitely different and faster, and we’ll see if I can keep up that pace with future books. I’m not sure about that.

ANDELMAN: I know you have a contract for the third book. Where are you in the process on that?

ZARR: I hope my editor isn’t listening.

ANDELMAN: No, it’s just me and you.

ZARR: Just me and you.

ANDELMAN: It’s just me and you, yes.

ZARR: Page-wise, I’m probably like a fourth of the way through the book, but it feels really rough to me, and I have to turn it in in December. I’ve got a little while, but this year already feels like it’s going by fast so I definitely need to get cracking now that the Sweethearts promotional stuff is dying down.

ANDELMAN: Certainly, the book’s not written yet. You don’t want to give it away, but tell me a little bit about the process for you on working on the book at this point. You’ve gotten past that first book and the elongated period of time, and now you’re doing this professionally. This is how you’re making a living. So as you approach it, tell me about a typical day. Are you a first-thing-in-the-morning person? How do you approach actually doing the work of the writing now?

ZARR: I have tried a lot of different things in hopes that I hit upon something that is the magic key to making work easy and enjoyable all the time. And what I’m discovering is that there is no such thing, and so I don’t get up at the crack of dawn and start writing. One of the benefits of the self-employed lifestyle is having your own schedule, and so I like to ease into the day and sort of see my husband off to work and have my coffee, and then, ideally, before lunch, it’d be good to get started and then maybe wrap up at three or four. Sometimes that’s just a lot of staring into space and procrastinating, and sometimes it’s three or four hours of actual writing. It just really depends on where I am with the book. Sometimes it’ll really go pretty quickly in the beginning, and then you hit the middle. And you know how it’s going to end, but meanwhile, you have to fill up 150 pages with stuff. Not just “stuff,” but my writer friends and I joke about how we’ll have sections of drafts where we write, “stuff happens here.” We don’t know what, but it’s to remind us that something has to happen in the middle.

ANDELMAN: That’s the way I’ve always read it happens. I’ve always heard that that was the plan usually, that “something” goes in the middle…

ZARR: Something happens, yes. It’s a good sort of rule of thumb for fiction: “Something happens.”

ANDELMAN: Have you found that there’s a particular room that you like to work in, any kind of music, or do you shut off the phone? Really take us inside the process for you.

ZARR: I have a little work area in my house that I share with my husband, and then I also rent an office away from home because offices are fairly cheap where I live in Salt Lake City. It’s nice to have a place that’s just mine that I can go to and get out of the house is the main thing because sometimes you can realize you haven’t gone anywhere for three days, and that’s not a good way to live. Sometimes I’ll work at home and just kind of sit at my computer. I used to work with music a lot, but I’m finding with this book I’m working on now that silence is working better for me. I don’t turn off the phone, but I don’t answer the phone, but that’s nothing new. I never answered the phone before. I just let the machine get it. And I try and keep myself off the Internet for like an hour at a time so that I can get a consistent thought process going. I don’t work in my pajamas, generally. I’m one of those people that I don’t really feel like the day has started until I shower and dress and put shoes on so I’m not lounging around in my pajamas and robe like some writers do. I don’t know if you’re expecting me to tell you something really exciting about my lifestyle. That’s pretty much it - sitting at a computer.

ANDELMAN: Sara, now I’m concerned that you’ve secretly got me on video, and you know I’m sitting here in my robe and underwear conducting these interviews. I thought the green light was supposed to come on if the video was on. I’m trying to get a handle on that.

I don’t do fiction, but I work on a lot of books, and it seems to go through periods where it swings. Right now, I like to get everybody out of the house. I like to get started early, crank up whatever I’ve got in iTunes lately, usually something ‘70s or ‘80s-related because I’m an old man, and I block everything out. You mentioned the Internet, and I wondered about that. It is one of the most fascinating things in our lives, and it is the biggest time-killer around. I’m curious if that is a problem for you at all. You do wind up devoting too much of your workday to it, and before you know it, you’re into the next day.

ZARR: It is a problem, and the problem with it is just what you’re describing, that it is work. As you know, you have to promote yourself, and if you want people to come back to your website, you have to have dynamic content that’s changing, hopefully daily or at least a few times a week, and then there are emails to deal with. You feel like you’re working, and you are working, but that work never actually ends, and so you have to end it and just say, “I’m stopping this now for a few hours.” It’s definitely a challenge. It’s something that will be the number one thing that keeps me from being as productive on the creative front as I want to be. It’s a positive for my career because a lot of the success that I’ve had has come from word-of-mouth and people who have followed my blog, and I feel like they know me and want to support me and then tell their friends. And that’s really good, and it’s been a positive for me, but at the same time, there does come the moment where you have to say, “Okay, I’m done with this now,” and I have to write. And that’s definitely difficult because writing, as you know, is hard, and for some of us, writing blog posts or answering fan mail or dealing with publisher stuff is easy, and so what are you gonna do? You’re going to take the path of least resistance, which is the business side of it, at least for my type of personality. The creative work is the part that’s hard and scary, and so, of course, I don’t want to do it so I delay that as long as possible. So it’s a good thing I have deadlines.




ANDELMAN: Is there a caller with a question for Sara?

MICHAEL BOURRET: Yes, there is a question for Sara.

ZARR: Oh, hi, Michael.

BOURRET: Why isn’t she working now?

ZARR: I’m busy doing publicity!

BOURRET: Oh, so that’s that “other” kind of work you were talking about.

ZARR: Exactly.

BOURRET: Very good.

ZARR: And, hopefully, we can stretch this out all day.

ANDELMAN: We have a limit because I’ve got book work to do, too, Sara. Folks, this is Michael Bourret with Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. He represents Sara and this other loser, me.

BOURRET: It’s true.

ANDELMAN: Michael, do you have any stories you can tell us about Sara? You want to take us back in time a little bit to maybe when her work first crossed your desk?

BOURRET: Yes, she was a wee lass before she’d written anything of substance. No, Sara’s an amazing success story, obviously, of her own and for her own reasons, but for me, as a writer who did come in through slush with a very attention-catching query letter that referenced Freaky Friday. Whether or not I had liked the original or the Lindsay Lohan version better. If anyone actually cares, I think they are both very different, different films, but they both have their merits.

ZARR: Okay.

BOURRET: It’s important. But anyway, then she sent me her material, which was really great, and it was immediate from the first few pages and obvious that Sara’s a terrific writer. And in reading the novel, it was 90 percent there and really didn’t need much work because she’d been working on it for so long and really honing her craft and doing all of her homework and obviously approaching the right agent, which is so important.

ZARR: So modest.

BOURRET: I know. Well, the right agent isn’t necessarily some sort of number one agent on the list. It’s about getting the right fit. Obviously, I think it’s been a good fit.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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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.

Sara Zarr, "Story of a Girl," "Sweethearts" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN: Why do you think kids get so absorbed by drama at that age? One of the things that kept hitting me was that, for Deanna, she obviously had a hard time seeing that there was any life past the city limits of Pacifica or that she couldn’t escape past those limits. It kind of reminded me of one of the Planet of the Apes films where they had their territory, but they couldn’t go beyond a certain point because it was the great unknown back there, and it was dangerous, and they’d never go past it.

SARA ZARR: I don’t know if I can really articulate enough to answer your question, but I do think adolescence is a particular time that is not childhood, and it’s not adulthood, and you are becoming something that you’re going to be, and at the same time, you’re living in occupied territory, basically. You don’t have a lot of control over your life. You’re living on the property and under the roof of other adults who you may or may not respect and/or get along with, who may or may not respect you or get along with you or make efforts to do so. I think there’s a sense of being in limbo, that you’re just waiting for this life to end and to just have some freedom and be able to make some choices of your own and break free of whatever role your family or your friends have put you into. And that, in itself, generates a lot of drama and angst and existential pondering. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if there’s a biological/psychological reason. I know there’s been research lately about how adolescents’ brains are different than adult brains and different than children’s brains, and they just function in different ways, and I think there’s something biological, too. Adolescence is kind of a new concept in America. A hundred years ago, people Deanna’s age would be married and working on a farm or working in the city but being expected to contribute to society and start living their lives. And then this whole idea of high school and adolescence is pretty new when you look at the long-term arc, the big picture.




ANDELMAN: I was thinking about high school, obviously, while reading this and reflecting on it, and I was thinking, I wondered if there’s anyone for whom high school doesn’t suck on some level. I’m approaching my 30th reunion at, and I’ll mention it by name, North Brunswick Township High School in New Jersey, and my memories of the psycho-social drama of those days still sends a shiver down my spine.

ZARR: I think that’s why people respond to Young Adult fiction, and that’s why I’m always encouraging people of all ages to read more Young Adult fiction. You never do forget. As you just said, you never forget what it feels like to be 13 or 14 or 15, and a lot of us still walk around in our 30s and 40s really in touch with that insecure 13-year-old that wants to be accepted and wants to be liked and is not quite sure if we’re worthy of that. And I think young-adult fiction is just a great place where all those things are allowed to be explored in a way that’s not quite yet cynical. I don’t think good Young Adult fiction should go to the side of sentimentality about it, but there is sort of a freedom to say these little things do matter, and I don’t have to look at it from this jaded adult perspective all the time. And the little emotional deaths that happen to us everyday are important. It’s not always about the big epic adventure stories.

ANDELMAN: I was completely sucked into this story of a 13-year-old girl who made a mistake and is made to pay for it for years to come. And that leads me to something else that I have to ask you. By the end of the book, I had developed this intense curiosity about Deanna Lambert. And as successful as the book has been, I wondered if you’ve felt pressure to write a sequel -- because I would buy it.

ZARR: Good! I get a lot of messages from teen readers on myspace.com, and this question comes up a lot. They feel like the ending is pretty open-ended, and they want to know what happens, like right after that moment, what happens the next day, what happens the next year. I haven’t thought seriously about writing a sequel. I think sequels to work, you have to have the right story for the characters and be as inspired by a particular journey they are going to go on to write a sequel and make it work. I wouldn’t want to write one just for the sake of capitalizing on people’s interest in Deanna, so if the right story comes up and the opportunity comes up, I would never say no, because I love those characters, and I would love to see what they do, but I haven’t given them much serious thought.

ANDELMAN: You’re not ready for it yet.

ZARR: No, no, not yet. There are other irons in the fire.

ANDELMAN: Maybe you would have to live some more of your own life to be able to picture how maybe her life will be in 10 years.

ZARR: Definitely.




ANDELMAN: Like I said when we started, I got 30 pages into it, and I was like, well, okay, and then suddenly it just grabbed me, and I had to read the rest of it. I was quite surprised. You were talking about the Young Adult category. I sometimes go back to this. I have an 11-year-old, and she had seen the film Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and wanted to read the book, which is great, and she read the first book and then found that there was a second and a third, and she read those, and she can eat these books; they are like candy to her. Then I remember seeing, and I can’t remember the name of the author of the Sisterhood books, but I saw that she had endorsed another book by another author who is called Peaches, and I thought, well, great, if she’s endorsing it, it must fit into that genre, it would probably be okay for my daughter to read, and I got it, and I gave it to her, and then she came to me and said, “Dad, there’s a lot of language in here that I probably shouldn’t be reading.” And I thought, Really? And I looked at it, and I went, Oh, my God! It’s like, Oh, my God! And then we were going to buy the fourth Sisterhood book, and then we heard all the warnings that these aren’t the same girls that they were… It’s the same characters, but they’re like six years older, five or six years older than they were when the series started, so if you have a younger child who’s reading this, don’t. So where I’m going with all this is I wonder if there’s a fine line in this category that you’re in of, there’s no graphic sexual content in Story of a Girl, there’s a lot of stuff that’s implied, but it’s not graphic, and I wondered, where is that line that keeps you in the category, and what goes over the line?

ZARR: Well, that’s an ongoing dialogue among writers and publishers and editors. Young Adult fiction has become a category that encompasses so much, and they are, in fact, starting to add other categories, like lower YA and upper YA, to kind of help people know if it’s more like 11 to 13 or 14 or more like a 14 to 19 or 20 kind of a book. There’s a huge range, and also, when you look at adolescents’ lives, there’s a huge range of maturity in terms of thought and behavior and ability to look at stories and think about what they may or may not mean for their own lives, and it’s hard to say that a book that’s okay for one 13-year-old would be okay for another 13-year-old, and I think this is where it’s important for parents to pay attention to what kids are reading and have those conversations. I think the fact that your daughter brought the book to you and said, “I am not sure I should be reading this,” is a great sign that you have that kind of relationship where you talk about these things, and she has her own sense of what’s appropriate for her, and I think that’s great. I think that’s what every parent should kind of be working toward. It is tricky.

All writers, I think, most writers that I know, what we really want is to be true to the particular story we’re telling, to authentically tell a story to be true to those characters in that story, and though there is sometimes an expectation when you are writing for younger readers that you have a responsibility to the readers, for a lot of writers for young adults, that can just be a big burden. We get a little defensive. We feel like there’s a lot of stuff on TV that parents don’t seem to have any problem letting their kids watch that is a lot more questionable in our eyes than the context of a work of literary young adult fiction, and it’s just one of those things, like I said, you have to be in conversation with your kids and know your kids. When you see an author’s endorsement of a book it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be the same type of book that that author has written or that it’s going to be appropriate, and it’s just one of those awareness things. Young Adult fiction is not like it was 30 years ago. It’s not sort of a safe go-to genre for anyone in their teens. There’s a huge range, and now, really, nothing is taboo in terms of content, so you really do need to read those story descriptions and figure out if that’s something that’s going to work for your kids.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, and I should say that her bringing that book to me, that was six months ago. Now, she’s watching “Ugly Betty” with her mother and I suspect being exposed to far more adult story lines than were in that book.

And along the line of movies and TV, I was just kind of curious if you had had inquiries about adapting the Story of a Girl for Hollywood?

ZARR: In fact, yes. Actually, Kyra Sedgwick and Emily Lansbury have a little production company, I shouldn’t say little, I don’t know, have a production company together called Mixed Breed Films, and they have optioned the movie rights….

ANDELMAN: Oh, congratulations.

ZARR: ….to the Story of a Girl, and I’m really excited about that. I love Kyra Sedgwick, and I just think she’s the right person for it, and I’m excited to see if that goes anywhere.

ANDELMAN: So, let me see if I remember how the game works. So that puts you one degree away from Kevin Bacon?

ZARR: I believe that is correct. One degree, and then now you would be two degrees, and anyone who sells you would be three, etc.

ANDELMAN: Beautiful, beautiful. I feel my life changing already.

What can you tell us about your new book, Sweethearts, which I think I mentioned will be out Valentine’s Day 2008.

ZARR: Sweethearts is the story about two kids who in elementary school were each other’s only friend, a boy and a girl, Cameron and Jennifer, and they were sort of outcasts for different reasons, and something happens that they experience together in fourth grade, something traumatic. They end up getting separated and don’t hear from each other for a long time, and then it’s now senior year of high school, and Cameron moves back into town and starts going to Jennifer’s high school, and as we say in the YA world, “Drama ensues.”

ANDELMAN: That would be the counterpart of “Hilarity ensues” in a sitcom?

ZARR: Yes, exactly. There’s not a lot of hilarity in this book.

ANDELMAN: I’m sorry. Obviously, from the title, I think I understand why it’s tied to Valentine’s Day, I think.

ZARR: Yes. Originally, the book was going to come out in April, and then Little, Brown did such an amazing job with the cover, the cover art -- there’s a pink cookie heart on the cover -- and with the title, it just seemed a natural fit to move it up to February.

ANDELMAN: You spent all those years writing the first book, which is not unusual. How long did you have to write this one, and then how hard or easy was it to kind of slip back into that mode?

ZARR: It was very fast and very difficult. Although when I say fast, it’s a little bit hard to tell exactly if you broke down how many hours for Story of a Girl to versus how many hours Sweethearts took, because when I was writing Story of a Girl, I was working full time, and there would be long chunks of time when I wouldn’t be working on it at all, and then there were long chunks of time when it was out with different agents and editors were looking at it, a lot of waiting and not doing anything with it. So to say three or four years is a little bit deceptive, because I don’t know how big a percentage of that time was spent actually working on it.

But when I was writing Sweethearts, I was writing full-time, and I was working on it nearly every day and several hours a day, so it did feel fast, and it was very difficult, not the work itself, but that whole second book psychosis thing where you feel like you might be under the sophomore curse, and Story of a Girl was getting such positive reception, it was easy to feel like there was nowhere to go but down and be worried about disappointing everybody with a follow-up. But my editor and my wonderful agent sort of counseled me through that whole thing, my agent especially, a lot of hours on the phone, where I was almost crying but not quite, just holding it together and having to put down the phone and say, “Excuse me, I have to blow my nose now.” But it was all psychological. I don’t think it really had anything to do with the actual work, and I realized it was really important to just finish it. I talked to Chris Crutcher, who is a great author of Young Adult fiction, and he’s been writing for 20-some years, and I met him at a conference at one point last year and talked to him about the second book stuff, and he said he knew more writers who just almost literally had nervous breakdowns in the writing of their second books and never finished them, and I just knew I had to finish this book to just get over the symbolic hurdle, if nothing else, and just get it done, and it’s turned out great. I’m really excited for February.

ANDELMAN: So not so concerned about meeting unreasonable expectations at this point?

ZARR: I think it’s a different kind of a book. I think it’ll attract maybe a little bit of a different audience, maybe some new readers. Maybe some people who loved Story of a Girl won’t love it, but I think people who didn’t love Story of a Girl might love this one. You just never know, but I’m over the unnecessary anxiety about it. Now I just have the normal anxiety.

ANDELMAN: And I understand you are already working on a third book.

ZARR: I am, yes.

ANDELMAN: Anything you can let out about that at this point?

ZARR: No. It’s a little early… it’s not superstition, but I just don’t want to talk it to death before I’m really done writing it.

ANDELMAN: I would have been very disappointed and surprised if you had said anything more than that, so I think that was a good answer. Before we wrap up, I’m kind of curious, when you were writing the first book, what were you doing professionally? Where were you in your life?

ZARR: I have held a variety of dead-end administrative jobs ever since I graduated from college. I didn’t study writing in college. It wasn’t until I was 25 that I decided to really go for the whole writing novels thing, and I kept taking jobs that wouldn’t be too stressful, that I wouldn’t have to sort of bring home with me, jobs I could just leave at the door so that I could write in the evenings, and so I think when I started it, maybe I was working as an indexer for the Gale Group, just indexing periodicals. That was pretty exciting. I’ve worked as a church secretary, I’ve worked as an office manager for a small company, but for most of the writing of it, I was working as an indexer and then a church secretary.




ANDELMAN: Have any of these people that you worked with in the preceding years, have they caught up to you? Have they figured out what’s become of you?

ZARR: I write under my maiden name, so I have a different name, a different last name at all those jobs, and I don’t know that everyone’s really made the connection. But I have heard from some people who, at the indexing job, I worked under my maiden name there, as well, and some people tracked me down, but it was kind of a secret second life, so I don’t know how many people really know. But the important thing is, people that I knew in high school, if they ever Google me, they will find me and see that I am successful.

ANDELMAN: They will be surprised. Well, it seems to me like you are doing okay.

ZARR: I am. I am doing well.

ANDELMAN: As I said in the introduction, fear not for Sara Zarr. I think she’s going to come out of this okay. Sara, thank you so much for joining us today on Mr. Media.

ZARR: Thank you. It was a pleasure.


© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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