Patricia Forde’s The List, her first book for children to be released in the U.S., is set in a world where language has been restricted to 500 words. Forde is a speaker of Irish Gaelic, mistakenly considered by some to be a dead language, and knows a thing or two about the preciousness of words.

One language dies every 14 days. As many as half the world’s minority languages are expected to be extinct by the end of the century. My native language is one of those. We call it Irish, the rest of the world calls it Gaelic. Reports of the death of the Irish language have been, to misquote Oscar Wilde, greatly exaggerated. The language is still alive—it is in the critical care unit and the prognosis isn’t great, but it has a heartbeat. That heartbeat resides in places like Connemara, where I live.

Here, in the west of Ireland, people still speak Irish on a daily basis, in the shop, at school, at work. But it is a language with fewer words than ever before and that list grows shorter every year. Does that matter? I think it does. There are words in Irish that don’t translate into English. They don’t translate because they carry within them the psychology and the history of a people. The word macnas is a good example. Macnas is the term used to describe the mad cavorting of a calf on first being introduced to a meadow. How do you say that in English? You don’t. Or what about fíbín? It’s the way an animal reacts after it has been bitten by a gadfly. Those words reflect our relationship with our landscape and our traditional way of life. A language, it seems, is more than the sum of its words.

When I began to write The List, I didn’t know that one of the things it was about was language. I only found that out when I had written it, but I was not surprised. Language has played a big part in my life. I have been bilingual since I was 4 years old, and for most of my life I have been aware that we may be the last generation to speak Irish. In the novel, the story opens in Ark, where the list of legal words has just been reduced from 700 to 500.

With every generation in Ireland, the list of commonly used Irish words grows shorter. Words that were once commonplace are now exotic, words that were used every day on farms are now preserved only in dictionaries, words used to describe certain elements in nature no longer exist at all. When we lose the words to describe the landscape—the words for a hundred different types of seaweed, for example, or the word for a tune that you can’t get out of your head, the word for the madness of a newborn calf—when we lose those words, do we also lose the ability to see that diversity of experience in our own lives? And if we don’t see the diversity, can we lose something invaluable, almost without knowing it?

In The List, the young protagonist, Letta, wonders how we can dream if we don’t have words, how we can even hope if the word itself is now forbidden. Language and our relationship with it is a deeply mysterious thing. An Irish philosopher, John O’Donoghue, once said: The place between silence and language is where you find poetry. I love that thought. I hope The List inspires people to see that every word matters, to see that we need words to forge relationships and to fix them when they fall apart. We need to respect the need for our words to be accurate and exact, not to throw them about without due care and responsibility. How many words do we need to survive? As many as we can remember, and if that isn’t enough, then as many as we can invent. Every word matters. Every language matters. If we use words wisely, they are an enormous force for good and will help us to know exactly who we are. What could be more important than that?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The List.

Author photo credit Philip Smyth.

“Maybe more than any other sport, cross-country is about not quitting.”

Joseph has ADD, but he has a sense of humor about it: At least he doesn’t have the “H” part. Since his focus wanders, team sports are especially exasperating, and he’s not a natural athlete anyway. When he joins the cross-country team, a healthy bond is formed away from the usual teasing and frustration. Then comes a fast new girl, Heather, who is brave enough to stand up to the bullies and accepting enough to befriend Joseph exactly as he is.

With Sidetracked, debut author Diana Harmon Asher offers a story devoid of pity and replete with humor. Here, she shares the inspiration behind her heartwarming cross-country tale.

When my oldest son started running cross-country, I learned about singlets and starting guns, warmups and runners cramps, muddy trails and fartleks.

And really, what aspiring children’s book author could resist writing about a sport that has a term like “fartlek”?

The hero of my debut novel, Sidetracked, is a seventh grader named Joseph. He has Attention Deficit Disorder, he’s a terrible athlete, and he’s loaded with anxieties. Just for starters, he’s afraid of gargoyles, street sweepers and stewed prunes. To Joseph, middle school might as well be the running of the bulls. He just tries to keep up or stay out of the way or find someplace to hide.

Heather is new to Lakeview. She seems to be Joseph’s opposite—smart, fast and strong. But it’s not so easy being faster than the boys and stronger than the bullies. In fact, as Joseph puts it, “I wonder if you can be as miserable being good at something as you can being bad at it. Maybe things are reversed somehow, when you’re a girl.”

Cross-country gave me a starting point for their stories, because it’s a place where doing better than last time has a name. It’s called a “personal record.” It’s a place where boys and girls train together, where talented athletes come together with kids who have been cut from baseball and tennis and soccer, to make a team. It’s a hodgepodge of abilities, a virtual trail mix of kids, but it’s a team.

Maybe more than any other sport, cross-country is about not quitting. There’s no bench time, no timeouts, no substitutions. You run, and you try to finish. Middle school can feel like that—especially to kids with ADD and other learning differences. They’re constantly reminded that they’re not living up to expectations. But that makes what they do accomplish even more noteworthy. As my son who runs marathons and climbs mountains for fun reminds me, “easy” isn’t a story.

There’s no one tougher than a cross-country runner. But I have to admit, there are a lot of comic possibilities when you put a bunch of seventh graders in their teeny tiny shorts and singlets on a cross-country trail. I hope Sidetracked will be a fun read for kids, and I hope it encourages them to give themselves a chance. A chance to compete, even if they’re not the best. A chance to be a good friend. And I hope it gives them license to ignore the people who try to tell them who they’re supposed to be and box them in with their expectations. Because really, which of us, even as adults, feel that we’re everything we’re expected to be?

Is Joseph a great runner? No. But he’s in the race. He does the best he can, like we all do. We start slow and get better, and we try not to give up. If we’re lucky, we find our team. And however we live or run or write, it’s of value, because no one else can do it in exactly that same way.

Author photo credit Alison Sheehy Photography.

My childhood had a dramatic setting: a bridged island in Maine with mountains, thick woods, a thundering sea and granite boulders strewn over the coastline. It was just the place to come up with stories. It was also just the place to feel the crushing isolation of rural life. And so as a child, I read.

Books were my earliest link to a world beyond my own. I read widely—whatever was in the house, whatever sparked my interest on the library’s shelves. But what I loved most were fantasy adventures: stories of a bold character who sought to gain a treasure, win a contest or defeat evil, all while mastering new skills and exquisite weaponry and learning what it meant to be a hero.

The hero of these stories was nearly always a young man. During my formative years, I read no story in which a young woman played this role.

The heroine was quite different. Often strong-willed, she was also often in need of a boy or man to protect her or give her purpose. Some stories starring girls lacked a “hero,” but they usually didn’t include a lot of action and ended with the protagonist’s marriage or the promise of marriage.

Those were my fictional worlds.

In the difficult years of middle school, I found an additional world that helped me both persist and thrive: writing. I wrote my first novel at age 14. It was a wild tale of adventure with swordplay and rescues, danger and escapes. I remember a scene in which my young protagonist (a girl) held a sword for the first time.

But the weapon wasn’t hers: It belonged to the young male hero.

Even then, in a world I controlled, the stories I had read dictated the roles I could imagine. Of course, the girl was there to be rescued, to be aided in her escapes. Of course, the young man had the sword and was both brave and strong. Those were their roles.

And those are the roles that still exist today in hard-core adventure novels for the middle grade crowd. There are some exceptions, but not many. And when we have them, it’s often a transposition of genders—a girl takes the traditional boy’s role. But what about girls who are strong on their own?

I needed to write a novel to confront the gender roles in the novels I had grown up with and to offer new concepts of what a girl could be to readers today. And so in my fantasy adventure, The Mad Wolf’s Daughter, my protagonist Drest is more than a girl with a sword masquerading as a boy. She embodies the person I wanted to be when I was 12: strong, brave, determined and focused on doing the right thing. She lives in medieval Scotland when tales of men’s strength and bravery dominated all discourse. This was a world where no one expects her to play the boy’s role.

I gave Drest the support of her father (the villain of the story, by the way, another of my tweaks to the genre) and five vicious but loving brothers, who never see her for her gender but for who she is beyond it, and include her in their infamous war-band. She also learns from them how to care about other people. In her own way, she’s nurturing. She loves deeply and fiercely.

But Drest also begins with a kind of masculine arrogance, commonly seen in the adventure genre, where brash heroes need to learn humility. Like her brothers, she adopts a seemingly noble but ultimately unsettling part of her family’s war-band code: to honor and protect all women and girls. The code exists because women are weak and vulnerable, her father says, while he’s told Drest that she “was as tough as any of her brothers.”

And yet when she first meets girls and women, she realizes that they’re powerful in ways she’s never known. They are each as tough and strong as her brothers and make significant differences in their worlds—including one she only hears about: a girl long dead whose story motivates much of the action. Drest slowly learns that the gender roles she once understood don’t exist and that there is no one kind of woman. And in that process, she also learns about her own potential to be a true hero.

I hope that Drest, the women and girls, and the sensitive and physically weak boys in The Mad Wolf’s Daughter will help to dismantle the traditional gender roles of heroes and heroines in the fast-paced adventure genre. I hope my young readers take to heart these examples and understand that there are different ways of being a girl—and different kinds of strength and power.

“Everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.” —Guy Gavriel Kay

When you hear the word leper, what do you think? When I do school visits, the subject is greeted with either confusion or disgust. If it’s the former, I explain that it is a bacterial disease that damages nerves, often leading to the loss of fingers, toes, or noses. The disgust follows quickly after. I wrote The Island at the End of Everything because I used to feel like that too, and because I came to realize the error of my ways. Before I wrote stories for children, I wrote poetry for adults. I was at a poetry prize ceremony when someone stood up and read a poem entitled “Culion.” It spoke of abandoned hospitals, forgotten patients, a beautiful island haunted by a dark past. I was instantly intrigued. Afterwards, I asked the poet how they had gotten the idea, and they told me that Culion was a real island in the Philippines, which between 1906 and 1998 grew into the largest leper colony in the world.

That night, I stayed up late Googling Culion. Initially, I was driven by a sort of morbid fascination, but this quickly evolved into a deep sadness at both my reaction and the lives and deaths of the inhabitants of Culion. Throughout history, people with leprosy have been treated appallingly. Their disease and subsequent deformity were associated with sin and poor hygiene in everything from law to the Bible when in actuality it is caused by bacteria similar to a cold, only much harder to catch. One solution was to isolate them from society, and the most extreme implementation of this was the conversion of islands into leper colonies.

Culion was far from the first island leper colony, but it was the biggest. In 1906, a law was passed in the Philippines segregating healthy inhabitants from those with leprosy. On paper, this may seem a good idea; in practice, it was devastating. Children were taken from their parents, and families were ripped apart, never to be reunited. When I actually stopped to think of what the word segregation means, it horrified me. And I knew I had a story to tell. Ami lives happily on Culion with her Nanay, who has leprosy. She spends her days caring for her mother and watching for butterflies, but their peaceful existence is wrecked by the arrival of a cruel government official, Mr. Zamora. He oversees the segregation, and along with several other children, Ami is taken from her mother and transported to an orphanage across the sea. Mr. Zamora, an avid butterfly collector, runs the institution and makes the children’s lives a living hell. But Ami forms a friendship with a honey-eyed girl named Mari, and together they set out to try and find a way back to the island at the end of everything.

Placing a child at the center of the story enabled me to enter its emotional heart. Children are so often underestimated and overlooked, and this allows them freedom from both scrutiny and responsibility. Ami and Mari are brave and bold, and driven by an uncomplicated love of both each other and Nanay. Ami’s greatest strength is kindness, and a willingness to see the best in anyone, and this protects her from much of Mr. Zamora’s threat. But time and the tide are against them.

Writing The Island at the End of Everything taught me that disgust is often driven by fear, and that tolerance is perhaps the best path to love, which is the opposite of fear. Telling Ami’s story grew my heart and my mind. I hope it does the same for my readers.

“For decades, I wrote adult novels advocating for race, class, religious and gender equity. I write for children now. I believe they are our best hope for a better world.” 

The heightened national awareness of police brutality's effects on American minorities has brought a wave of brilliant, devastating novels for teen readers like The Hate U Give and Tyler Johnson Was Here. Award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes’ (Sugar, Bayou Magic) Ghost Boy, which follows a 12-year-old boy named Jerome as he navigates the afterlife following his death in a police shooting, is one of the first books to breach this sensitive, necessary topic for younger readers. Here, Rhodes opens up about motherhood, the legacy of Emmett Till, the importance of honesty in stories for children and the issues of racial and social justice that fuel her writing. 

I was born a year before Emmett Till was murdered, and I still recall seeing images of his mutilated body in Jet and Ebony magazines. I grew up with images of men lynched—one that still haunts me had corkscrew holes all over his body. I was raised in a segregated ghetto in Pittsburgh, where no one shielded children from racist actions and images. I watched civil rights battles and cheered Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I believed during my lifetime, a time would come when people were judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I married Brad, a white man, in Maryland (a state that didn’t recognize interracial marriages until 1967). We had a son with brown skin and a daughter with white-toned skin. And within our own family, we experienced how the world treated our children differently. Our daughter was given the “privilege” of being white, and I was considered her nanny. Our son, the older he grew, was seen as more suspect, and his father was presumed to have adopted him. Dozens of strangers declared there was no way our daughter and son could be siblings.

Rodney King was battered when our son was 2. I wrote an essay, “Evan,” for Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Talk About Having Sons and Raising Men, that spoke of our family’s anguish that 2-year-old Evan—who loved Legos and ants—would one day as an adult be stopped and attacked by police. When the officers who beat and hog-tied King were acquitted and the LA riots began, our family drove north—as far as Monterey Bay—to find a refuge.

My son heard my worried “walking, talking [and] driving while black” speeches. But as a high school student when President Obama was elected, Evan believed his mother, in particular, was too traumatized by past racial woes. However, as a graduate student stopped almost daily by police, he learned how some systematically devalued him and doubted he knew “his lowly place” as a black man. The constant harassment was horrific. More horrific were the numerous contemporary media examples of police officers who brutalized and killed black men across America.

I thought the world had gotten better, more tolerant. Now, as a grandmother, I worry racism and racial bias are again tearing our nation apart. I worry that my generation lost the battle for more tolerant hearts and minds. I worry that my children and grandchild have to fight and struggle on for equity and social justice.

For decades, I wrote adult novels advocating for race, class, religious and gender equity. I write for children now. I believe they are our best hope for a better world. The young are curious and have such open hearts. I write challenging stories not to embitter them but to empower them to “be the change,” to remember always the sense of justice and fairness they knew instinctively as children when they become adults. Writing stories about ending all forms of bias and discrimination, I hope will be my legacy—my own personal attempt to “bear witness” beyond the grave.

Author Kyandreia Jones kicks off an exciting new Choose Your Own Adventure SPIES middle grade series featuring historical figures with her tale of James Armistead Lafayette, a hero who fought for marginalized peoples and who played an instrumental role in helping America win the Revolutionary War.

When asked to write a Choose Your Own Adventure book about real spies from American history, I was particularly captivated by James Armistead Lafayette’s story because it was a tale that I would have loved as a child. I did not know that there were real-life heroes whose stories teach children and adults alike about loyalty, about liberty and, most importantly, about empathy.

I would have been thrilled to learn about James, a former enslaved person turned spy, who helped America win its independence while his fellow brothers and sisters remained in bondage. As a writer, I was interested in the fact that there isn’t a lot of information about who James truly was. I had to—in part—imagine that James had a very unique role in American history, which inspired me to understand U.S. history from a new, more empathetic perspective. If everyone was cruel, how was it possible for the real James to strike up a deal with General Marquis de Lafayette, allowing James to fight for his own freedom and for his country’s? If James did not make a genuine connection with Lafayette, why did the two embrace when they were reunited after the war? If James was not an important historical figure, why was I inspired to honor his legacy and to educate my readers about his existence? The real James’ relationship with history made me wonder what history would look like if we were able to see it from multiple angles and from different perspectives.

In creating the character of James, some questions that launched his development were: What is loyalty to a slave? What is loyalty to a spy? Is it possible for these two identities to agree in the definition of loyalty, or do these identities allow the reader to constantly redefine what it means to be loyal to one’s mission, to one’s country and to one’s self? In the threads of the book, James must choose between war and freedom, duty and loyalty as well as self and country.

Through these choices, he demonstrates the ways in which his past as an enslaved person contributes to both the richness of his character and the internal struggle he endures. By incorporating these crucial questions and ideas, James becomes a positive example of how to lead with empathy, considering his own feelings and that of those who are different from him. In the book, this also leads James to advocate for Native Americans and to ask his white counterparts to treat him with kindness, respect and consideration as they fight side-by-side in the Revolutionary War.

Throughout the writing process, I connected with James’ courage, his compassion and his clumsiness. (I would definitely concuss myself while trying to be a hero.) Writing, and essentially becoming, James meant facing the hard choices and trusting myself to respectfully depict a real American hero. Thankfully, James has a really strong voice; I learned early on that all I had to do was follow it. Still, it is safe to wonder what I offer James as a black woman that’s different from what a black man would have offered James. I cannot speak to what could have been, but I will say that I offered James a combination of empathy and vulnerability that makes him, I hope, more compelling.

Although I was writing a fictional account of a real American hero, I wanted to write about history in a manner that excited and inspired middle grade readers. In Choose Your Own Adventure SPIES: James Armistead Lafayette, readers decide how James navigates impossible choices with a levity that prompts laughter and quick thinking while also being reminded about the horrors of slavery. It is not easy walking in someone else’s shoes. It is even harder to walk in that of a former enslaved person. However, it is important to recognize that history is often ugly and that American history has had its fair share of ugliness. Some of us may forget this truth because we focus on America’s glorious beginnings. Nonetheless, to shy away from or to ignore this ugliness is unacceptable. Kids have always learned about how Europeans conquered the land we now call America and made it their own. But what about the lives they took? What about the stories they cut off mid-sentence?

I feel that the power of telling James’ story is that it allows us to look at history from a unique point of view—from that of the forgotten, the overlooked, the ignored—and to choose how we would like our version of history to be remembered. That is what I believe is most important for middle grade readers today, who will be thrilled to add James Armistead Lafayette to their list of American heroes.

When I was in middle school, my body changed earlier than many of my classmates’ bodies did.

Suddenly, I was “developed,” as grown-ups put it.

Suddenly, my off-white ribbed turtleneck—the same one several of my friends had, too, because we went to a school with a strict dress code and only had so many options—fit differently than it had before. It fit differently than my friends’ identical shirts did. It clung to brand-new curves and made me feel attractive and mature.

I wasn’t used to being noticed for how I looked. I had a close friend who was the beautiful one people always had crushes on; I was the one boys talked to when they wanted to find out if she liked them back. But when I wore that ribbed turtleneck, I got the dizzying sense that I was becoming a more exciting version of myself.

I wore that shirt once a week, and, honestly, I would have worn it more if I’d thought I could get away with it.

One time when I was wearing the shirt, I noticed the letters “BBC” scrawled on a notebook inside my desk. A couple of other girls found the same letters written on their stuff, too. A sweet, mortified boy who was in love with my beautiful friend confessed what the letters meant: “Big Boob Club.”

I was pretty sure I was supposed to feel embarrassed and angry when he told us that, but I was flattered. I was in awe of this body of mine that had showed up out of nowhere—this body that I now got to integrate into my understanding of what it meant to be me. I was giddy knowing that these boys who’d never paid attention to me were noticing me now, and I was happy that my beautiful friend was still flat-chested, so none of her things had been touched.

But then something else happened, and that same kind of attention had a very different impact.

I was in 8th grade, and my class went on an outdoor education trip. We did all sorts of bonding activities on the trip, but the big thing—the thing everyone had been talking about for days ahead of time—was rappelling. We all took turns getting hooked into a harness that was clipped onto a rope, and then we had to make our way down a tall vertical wall, trusting that the rope and the person holding it would keep us safe, while our supportive classmates cheered us on from below.

I didn’t want to do it. The year before, on the 7th-grade outdoor education trip, I’d panicked on the ropes course. I’d cried because I was scared to be up so high, and then I’d fallen off a skinny, wobbly bridge. I’d landed in a safety net and hadn’t been hurt, but I’d felt humiliated. No one else in my group had gotten that worked up. No one else had lost their balance.

So I was already terrified that I might humiliate myself again. And then as I stood there at the bottom of the rappelling wall, calling out encouraging things to my classmates and dreading my turn, something became clear.

A bunch of the boys were rating the girls’ butts as the girls rappelled down. They were doling out 2’s and 4’s and 7’s and 9’s.

They were judging this intimate part of each girl’s body that was on display because of the vulnerable, awkward position we had to take coming down that wall. They were using some inscrutable criteria to pass judgment on our bodies.

I had to take my turn when my name was called. I had to make my way down that terrifying wall, battling my anxiety about looking like a wimp again and my worry about what these boys would see when they looked at my body from that angle—whether they would judge me favorably or not.

Before, I’d felt powerful to know that people were looking at my body; now, I was powerless. I felt sick, but I didn’t think I was supposed to. Everybody else seemed to find the situation funny.

My new middle grade novel Up for Air is about a 13-year-old girl named Annabelle who is a star swimmer, a struggling student, a conscientious friend and an “early bloomer.”

During the summer before 8th grade, Annabelle is asked to join the high school swim team. And when she wears a flattering new racing suit, she gets positive attention because of the way her body has developed. That attention thrills her, especially when it comes from Connor, an older boy she has a crush on. Especially because she’s coming off a school year that made her feel terrible about herself.

But that same attention also sets her up for some situations she’s not quite ready to handle—situations that leave her feeling powerless and embarrassed for doing things “wrong.”

It’s complicated, what happens when a middle school girl’s body changes and people treat her in a new way. I know that from my own life, and I know that because I taught 6th, 7th and 8th grades for 10 years and watched many girls navigate similar experiences.

But it isn’t easy to find novels that address this reality. Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead is a wonderful exception, and my students and I were tremendously grateful for that book and the conversations it helped us have.

But if, by and large, middle grade novels don’t explore the intense, confusing feelings and situations that come along with puberty, what message are we sending to adolescents about which topics are important and how they should behave?

I wrote Up for Air in part because I don’t want kids to have that sense I had—that there were certain things I wasn’t supposed to feel or talk about. I don’t want kids to internalize the message that girls’ physical development is embarrassing and somehow “inappropriate” to discuss. I don’t want them to believe that girls should feel shame if they don’t handle sexualized attention “right.”

In Up for Air, Annabelle gets caught up in the way other people see her—as I did, and as all of us do at times. There is a power imbalance between Annabelle and Connor, and readers will likely recognize it before she does. Annabelle messes up a lot—with Connor, with her friends and with her family. She is vulnerable and she is strong.

Annabelle is not strong in spite of the mistakes she makes and the ways she misunderstands Connor’s intentions. She is strong because she endures these experiences, learns from them and ultimately claims her own kind of power that’s more about how she sees herself than how other people see her.

I hope the kids who read this book will feel Annabelle’s joy, despair, embarrassment and triumph right alongside her.

I hope it will help readers think about how they can claim their own power on their own terms and how they can make sure they don’t act in ways that take power away from someone else at a time when so many things feel intense and new and embarrassing.

Up for Air is a book I wanted to read when I was in middle school and wanted to give to many of the students I taught. I hope Annabelle’s story will send the message that we can talk about the social and emotional changes that accompany the physical changes of puberty. We have to because they are thrilling and empowering and isolating and scary.

I hope it provides an opening for those conversations.

I never intended to write Fighting Words, except, of course, that I always did.

In the fall of 2018, I finished the third draft of a historical novel and sent it to my editor. I planned to rest while she read it, because I wanted to come at the next draft with fresh eyes. It’s what I usually do.

Then I watched some news on television. When I tell this story, I no longer share which exact news report tipped me over the edge into rage, because I’ve found it derails the discussion into whether my rage was justified or whether the report was real. It doesn’t matter. Something happened in the world, and I’d. Had. It. I felt angrier than I’d ever allowed myself to feel.

The next morning, still on fire, I sat down to my computer and opened a new document. I typed a furious one-word title: WHATEVER. By. Kimberly. Brubaker. Bradley. 

And then I let loose. I didn’t think. I wrote. As fast as I could, without pause, making absolutely everything up as I went along. 

My new tattoo is covered by a Band-Aid, but halfway through recess, the Band-Aid falls off.

That’s the first sentence I wrote that day. It remains the opening line of Fighting Words. Della’s voice, pure Appalachia, tough and wise, came from a place I’d never accessed before.

Rage.

Children who have been abused often can’t allow themselves to feel anger.

That day, I did.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Fighting Words.

I wrote 19 pages (for me, a remarkable output would be 10 pages). The next day I wrote another 20 pages, and by evening, I’d actually completed a narrative arc—beginning, middle, end—though what I was writing was not entirely clear. 

It had no chapter breaks. There wasn’t much plot. Anytime I didn’t know what happened next, I skipped a line and started a scene I did know. I littered the pages with XXXX, which is what I type when I’m missing facts.

Please understand that the contents of those 39 pages were not in any way a novel. Nor was it an outline. It was a hot mess.

Still furious, I emailed what I had written to my editor and to my agent. 

Twenty years ago, when my debut novel had just been accepted by a young editor at Random House named Lauri Hornik (now president of my publisher, Dial, always my champion and trusted friend), I sent her the nearly finished draft of a second book. It was about childhood sexual abuse. She responded thoughtfully: “You’re not ready to write this story yet. Try again in five years.”

It took me 20.

So, on some level, the story was always in my mind. But on every other level, Della caught me entirely by surprise. I did not expect her story, not that day, not ever.

I loved her. I knew before the end of my second writing day that I’d fight for Della even more fiercely than I’d fought for Ada Smith, the heroine of The War That Saved My Life, who was born with a clubfoot. I felt the sort of protectiveness for Della and Ada that one feels toward one’s own abused and neglected inner child.

In fighting for Della, I fought for myself. The story of Fighting Words is informed by my own personal experiences, which is all I’m going to say publicly about that. Forever. 

I gave everything I had to this book—not just in the opening salvo, but in the seven-and-a-half full drafts I wrote over the next 10 months. It was the hardest and fastest I’ve ever worked on a novel. 

After Jessica Garrison, my beloved editor, read those first pages (which she’d later describe as “lightning in a paper bag”), she called, excited, and asked, “What the hell is this?”

I answered, “I swear I can make it into a novel. I swear I will do the work.”

She said, “We’re in.”

I pushed her a little bit. Could I keep the suicide attempt? The meth explosion? The word “snow” substituting for profanity 86 times? THE TATTOO? Because if I couldn’t—

“Yes, yes,” Jessica said impatiently. Then she held me to my word and made me do the work and held my hand while I was doing it. And she worked alongside me just as hard.

I gave everything I had to this book—not just in the opening salvo, but in the seven-and-a-half full drafts I wrote over the next 10 months. It was the hardest and fastest I’ve ever worked on a novel. 

I told the folks at Dial that I hope they like me, because after this book I will never leave them. They are stuck with me now.

I told friends when I sent them copies so they could consider writing blurbs of recommendation that this book is the hill I’m willing to die on.

This book means the world to me. 

It is—and I say this without a smidgen of exaggeration—the book I was meant to write. The work I was put on this earth to do.

I’m hanging my winter coat on the hook in our fourth grade classroom when my teacher, Ms. Davonte, gasps. “Della,” she says, “Is that a real tattoo?”

It’s so real it still hurts.

Della, like Ada, is more than a survivor. Della, like Ada, manages to bloom. Both characters are uniquely themselves, and though as a child I was not like them, they all understand each other well, Della and Ada and my long-ago self, and when they’re together they laugh and dance and run.

Fighting Words was the hill I was willing to die on, but I didn’t die. I bloomed. 

Author photo  © Amy MacMurray