(I don't blog much
about my authors' books while they're in-progress toward publication. In part,
this is out of respect for the writing/editing/revising/ publication process: a
lot can change for a story as we work on it. It's also out of respect for readers—because I think it's
mean to taunt you with tales of fantastic books you can't yet buy! Thus this
series of publication-day "Editorial Love Story" posts was born: to
celebrate the fact that, at long last, an author's book is out on shelves, and
to offer a glimpse of each book's
unique "making-of" story. I hope you'll enjoy and be inspired by
this post, and that you'll soon have a chance to read this great book, or
share it with a reader who you think might like it!)
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Things you earnestly believe will happen while
your parents are away:
1. You will remember to water
the azaleas. 2. You will take detailed, accurate messages. 3. You will call your older brother, Denny, if
even the slightest thing goes wrong. 4. You and your best friend/bandmate Lukas will
win Battle of the Bands. 5. Amid the thrill of victory, Lukas will
finally realize you are the girl of his dreams.
Things that
actually happen:
1. A stranger calls who says
he knew your sister. 2. He says he has her stuff. 3. What stuff? Her stuff. 4. You tell him your parents won’t be able to— 5. Sukey died five years ago; can’t he— 6. You pick up a pen. 7. You scribble down the address. 8. You get on your bike and go.9. Things . . . get a little crazy after that.*
*also, you fall in love, but not with Lukas.
Both exhilarating and wrenching, Hilary T.
Smith’s debut novel captures the messy glory of being alive, as seventeen-year-old
Kiri Byrd discovers love, loss, chaos, and murder woven into a summer of music,
madness, piercing heartbreak, and intoxicating joy.
|
This editorial love story post--and it’s a long one!--is about connections. One of the most amazing parts of being an editor
(and I suspect it’s much the same as a writer or artist of any sort) is that
the ideas and experiences that intrigue/fascinate/perplex you inevitably find
their way into the art that you help shepherd into the world. Which is kind of
the point of my job, really: it’s when a book connects with you as an editor that you, in
turn, ask yourself if you can see it doing so on a larger scale, for thousands
of other readers, too. If the connections the story has captured are
vivid and new enough that they’ll seem as magnificent to the whole reading world as
they did to you.
***
It’s 1997, the start of my sophomore year of college. After
a year of living with a horrid assigned roommate (seriously, the only thing we had in
common was that we had the same first name), I’m finally living with a friend,
in a dorm room in a cool building near all our other friends. We’re no longer clueless freshman. It’s
going to be great.
And it is, at first. But partway through the year, something
unexpected happens. Almost overnight, my roommate unravels in front of my eyes.
At first I just think she’s being annoying; that she’s being weird; that maybe
she’s been drinking too much or is enamored with some odd guy or is trying on
new personalities the way you kind-of do in college, and that’s why she’s
acting strangely. But then it intensifies. She doesn’t sleep. She
hallucinates. She talks about meeting people I know she’s never met, but she believes
these encounters like they are real. When I leave our dorm room for class, I
come back to increasingly bizarre scenarios. My friends and family recount confusing stories, outright crazy lies
they’ve heard from her when she’s answered our phone. She’s losing weight,
rapidly. My R.A. is no help, so finally a friend and I call her parents. They
swoop in, take her home for a weekend, and return her to a few days later, announcing
that she just needed more rest, and a good family dinner. They suggest that
maybe we’re not a good match as roommates and she’ll move into a single room next semester.
My roommate’s only been back for a week when her off-kilter
behavior turns downright scary. This time my R.A. listens, sees the signs. We
call her parents together. They swoop in again, this time taking her and all of her things home in one afternoon. This time, she doesn’t come back. Months
later, she starts calling: medicated, painful phone calls. She’s been diagnosed.
She’s trying to piece together what happened in that crazy month because she doesn’t
remember any of it. I remember it all too well, but am afraid to tell her. The
phone calls are hard for us both, and slowly, we drift out of touch altogether.
But the experience isn’t one I can shake. I tell my family
and friends that if I weren’t so sure of being an English major, I’d probably
want to become a Psych major, to study mental illness, instead. Because I don’t
understand what happened, but I want to. I want to know how it could be that what was true inside her head was so different than the reality around
her. I want to comprehend what it felt like for her. I want to understand the inexplicable.
***
Fast-forward. It’s 2009. I’m an junior editor at HarperCollins, and
it’s the era of anonymous blogs. A new one has popped up: INTERN SPILLS. It’s the blog of an anonymous intern in publishing, and everyone’s reading and chattering about it—authors and publishing folk alike. No one can figure out who
it is, or where she works, which intrigues us all the more. This blog defies
the standard style of anonymous blogs, though—there’s snark, but there’s more
to it than just that. There’s real wit and smarts and heart, between the snarky observations and the salacious insider-y tidbits about working in publishing. There’s
a voice. And it’s a hell of a voice. And it gets stronger with every post.
***
It’s 2010. INTERN has started talking on her blog, occasionally, about her own writing efforts. INTERN has also begun talking on her blog, occasionally, about reading more YA books. All the while sustaining a voice
that’s clearly put-on: an exaggeration of the author’s own voice, perhaps, or maybe an altogether made-up one, but it’s exceedingly controlled and well-sustained regardless.
I’m still a young editor, but already I’ve been trained by
my editor-bosses to pounce, when your instinct tells you to do so. Cautiously, and without promising anything at all on behalf of your company, but to pounce all the same.
So I shoot an email off into the ether, introducing myself to this INTERN
persona, asking if, maybe, perhaps, INTERN is writing YA? Hinting that, if so, I’d maybe, perhaps, love to see it. INTERN responds. She doesn’t give a clue to her identity, but acknowledges
that she’s trying her hand at writing YA. She’s still polishing, she says. It
may be a little while.
It’s okay, I say. I’m happy to wait. Editors are good at
being patient, once they’ve found a voice worth waiting for.
***
It’s 2011. INTERN and I have kept up an occasional, still-half-anonymous
correspondence. I try hard to keep myself from asking in each email about the
book, about its progress. I am learning that books come ripe when they’re ready, and never before.
And sure enough, before the year ends, there’s a manuscript
in my in-box. It’s from an agent, one who has taken on a new client. She has a
name, the agent explains, but she’s perhaps better known as INTERN.
And this manuscript. This
manuscript. It is raw, still. Still on its way to becoming a wholly book-shaped
thing. Right now it’s all specificity and not quite enough universality. But
there are lines in it that give me chills ("When
she died, it was like my house burned down.") I don’t know it yet, but
these lines are going to haunt me for two more years, until others finally read them too.
And perhaps well beyond that point, perhaps forever, the way the best lines in the best books do.
And that voice. It’s
a thousand times more powerful as a narrative tool than it ever was on a blog (and it was pretty darn effective back then). This author has an
ability to craft a stunning metaphor that combines the two unlikeliest of things,
drawing connections I’d never imagined, making me see things anew.
And the story—it shakes things up inside me, in a way that
scares me and stirs me all at once. It’s the story of a girl, caught
off-guard by a spiral of mania and mental illness. It puts words to the things
I thought were inexplicable. It helps me understand things I have wanted to
understand for almost 15 years now, and I know if it does that for me, it can do that for
other readers, too. It terrifies me, and it challenges me, and most of all, it
connects, deeply.
But this manuscript is also bigger than just being a book about
a single thing. It is a book about everything.
About love. About loss. About grief. About family. About change. It makes me
laugh and cry and see hope-squirrels and love-bisons everywhere I look, even though I didn't know that such things existed until I read this story. It
makes me feel things, deeply, which is probably the greatest compliment I can
give to a book, whether it’s one I’ve experienced as a reader or an editor or
both.
And so I pounce again. I buy INTERN’s book. This one, and her next one, too. We work, together, until her story has transformed into one
I wish I could time-travel and give to my nineteen-year-old self, sitting in a half-empty dorm room. Because it gives
words to the things that I had no words for back then. But it also gives words
to something more important—the simple experience of being human. Which, I
think, is the pinnacle of what a book—any book—can do.
***
INTERN has a name now. It’s Hilary T. Smith. Her book has a
name, too. It’s Wild Awake, and it
comes out today. It is powerful, it is profound, it is startlingly funny, and
though it is fiction, it is also deeply personal. It has brilliant passages and lines full of truth: stark and gorgeous and chaotic and painful and real. It is a book about
connections: about finding them, about releasing them, about recognizing them
for what they mean at every point in your life. I hope you will read it. I hope
you will read every book that Hilary T. Smith ever writes. Because that voice. It is magnificent, and it is only just the beginning.
***
Friends: Want to help Hilary celebrate her the debut of WILD AWAKE, her first novel? Buy a copy for yourself or a teen reader you know (especially the ones who are craving contemporary realistic reads, or stand-alones instead of trilogies, or love interests of an entirely different sort than the hott-boy-with-abs-and-blue-eyes-sort); or for an adult you know who likes remembering what it felt like to be a teen; or especially for a teen trying to make sense of mental illness. You can get it from your favorite bookseller, or check it out at your library.
Also, follow Hilary on Twitter, or read her blog, or peruse her delightful Tumblr and send her a photo of yourself with WILD AWAKE. And if you're reading this on 5/28, join in a WILD AWAKE-themed rap battle at 7pm Central Time (details here), and check out the plan for a week of WILD AWAKE celebrations here.
Happy publication day, Hilary and WILD AWAKE! May your book find countless readers and make powerful connections for them, and may it live for a long, long, time.
