Novelists From The United States

"Robbie Couch: A lot has changed since They Both Die at the End was published in 2017. How have the last eight years of real-world changes affected how you've written the series? Adam Silvera: I never thought I would get super political in this series, but as I was expending the world and creating the Death Guard and pro-natural ideologies, I couldn't help but draw from the information wars this country has been facing. I truly hated how easily it was to create a cult that hates the truth."

"The other element was Paz's borderline personality disorder, which I modeled after my own experiences. I received my diagnosis in 2020, as if that year wasn't hard enough, and while I was strangely grateful to discover that my worldviews and behaviors were linked to a disorder instead of all my negative impulses and reactions being me and nothing but me, it was still really suffocating and made me feel powerless. What was extra hard about writing Paz's BPD is that while I have the perspective of someone who went through dialectical behavior therapy, Paz doesn't, so I had to keep forcing him to make the wrong choices since he's yet to learn how to self-regulate. It broke my heart and made me feel so cruel as the author, but it was important to make sure BPD was reflected accurately to help others better understand how the headspace of someone with the disorder might think. I love Paz so much and I feel so protective of him, which, in retrospect, became a big lesson for me because if I can love this fictional character so much, I needed to show my very real self that same love."

"Robbie Couch: After meeting Paz and Alano as children in The First to Die at the End, readers got to follow their journey as teens in this book. What was the most exciting- or agonizing- aspect of writing each character? Adam Silvera: Okay, well, Paz Dario is the most Adam Silvera character I've written since Aaron Soto in More Happy Than Not. That was my debut novel, and it's not uncommon for a writer's first protagonist to be modeled after them and their life, but I definitely didn't expect to feel this connected to a character in my tenth novel. I haven't written a suicidal protagonist since Aaron, so to be doing it again a decade later with Paz definitely came with a lot of baggage, especially since my mental health was at a terrible low. This novel was so painful to write because it kept me locked in that headspace. Sometimes I'd write a scene and then I couldn't go back to the manuscript for days or, in a couple cases, weeks. This novel was ultimately therapeutic but, wow, so, so, so hard to write."

"The Death-Cast universe is my favorite universe that I've created. It was born out of my fear of unexpected death and has ultimately changed my perspective on life. I make bolder choices in my life, almost like I have nohing to lose, but I could definitely take more risks. One of the worst parts about creating this universe, though, is that I spend so much time in it, and it's not real! I truly wish Death-Cast existed, and I often have to remind myself that it doesn't."

"I succeeded in making you care. If you feel nothing, I failed you as a storyteller. I love happy endings, but some readers need the darker stories, too. The stories that don’t make them feel disturbed by their own reality because it doesn’t reflect what they’re used to seeing in fiction. There’s some comfort in harsher stories, and witnessing how one character rebuilds after tragedy can provide hope for the reader."

"All stories that are centring queer kids and their experiences are all valid whether it’s dealing with the trials of having parents who aren’t as welcoming about it or parents who are totally chill about it, which is obviously the hope for all teenagers. I think there are some things that could be said too, especially culturally, like there’s a lot of stigma in the Puerto Rican community that fathers especially are so hyper masculine that they will always be uncomfortable with their children being gay…"

"Some people like ‘happily ever after,’ but I don’t think that’s me. I’m always writing from some difficult place and seeing how the character survives … or doesn’t. When I really want to be comforted myself what I look for is a story about how somebody could survive something really difficult. There are happy stories out there but I think some of them may raise false expectations for teens…"

"I don’t ever see any character as 100 percent good or 100 percent evil…"

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"I lived most of my life feeling like an outsider. I remember in second grade being bullied, taunted and beaten up. I am bicultural, biracial – my mother is Japanese and my father is caucasian. I grew up in Connecticut; it was a fairly white culture and I grew up thinking I was Japanese. Then when I went to Japan I realised that I was American. That was shocking but also a wonderful completion, realising that I was neither here nor there but occupied some liminal space, neither in one culture or the other. That's a great vantage point."

"As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist."

"All through my childhood, I wanted to be a novelist. I stopped writing at various points because I would get frustrated because there were things I didn’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to move a story through time. Pacing. My character would enter a room and need to get across the room to the action, and I would walk her ploddingly across the room. I didn’t know how to move the plot along quickly and efficiently through time…"

"We’re afraid of saying the word “suicide” and talking about it. Certainly the word suicide has a kind of energy that is frightening, and people can be afraid of talking about it. Why is it that we forget we were adolescents once? I don’t forget that. Writers need to keep that part alive in order to write. What’s important (for adolescents) is that you have a lifeline; it can be your friends, it can be your family, church, writing practice, a teacher, your cat, your gerbil. And little by little, the hormones subside and you develop coping skills and you develop passions and things that are really worth living for, and you get through that difficult period."

"In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: "The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering." One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco's Chinatown. (p 196)"

"As writers, of course we’re interested in human beings, human stories, human trauma, and all that is very compelling for readers. But when we write these powerful stories about individual people, we have the illusion that we’ve made a difference. And of course we have—people read the books, they’re touched emotionally by these kinds of stories, and that’s great. But to the extent that the stories that we’re telling are about people who are weaker, in some way—they come from a small country, or a forcibly removed population, they’re underrepresented collectively—individual stories don’t change the conditions that produce those refugees in the first place…"

"It's taken me a long time to understand how deeply traumatic that was, that that experience remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades. And in many ways, I've been - I spent a lifetime trying to make sense of what that trauma has meant to me."

"Implicitly, the novel insists that a true war story has to take into account not just combat and soldiers, but civilians, the home front, and the military-industrial complex. For me, war is more than guns and shooting. That’s the spectacle that distracts us from how pervasive war is throughout a society and how it makes all of us complicit through things like paying taxes and watching horrifying images on TV without doing anything to stop them from happening…"

"Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn’t get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn’t say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist."

"I follow in this tradition because I believe literature matters, and in this book I insist that Asian American literature literally embodies the contradictions, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture"

"There were safety issues, the City let the lights remain off in certain areas, and there were no services. I wondered, how did this happen? I was exploring what it feels like to know things are changing and shifting."

"It’s important for African Americans to find sources of pride as society turns away from valuing us."

"There is a reason for African Americans to feel a lot of pride. Detroiters faced a lot of obstacles related to home ownership, which was a cornerstone of the American dream, but they achieved it nonetheless."

"These women, they don't just have deep emotional lives, but they are, you know, thinking about the world. They're thinking about art. They're thinking about things that are bigger than just reactions to circumstances."

"You've got to navigate what might feel just completely opaque by yourself in a lot of ways. There are the sort of fellow travelers, but you have to decide what is it going to feel like? What is going to feel satisfactory to you? And that is what I think about when I think about the title, is these women are navigating the wilderness."

"There's something universal about the experience of navigating middle life or into middle life, which is that there are just a lot fewer guideposts."

"I wanted to think about the beginnings and what it feels like to have a kind of rupture with someone you love, or you grew up loving, and for it to kind of just bloom into this insurmountable distance between the two of you."

"Whether it's 'cause you move away or because your lives are just sort of diverging, you have to keep choosing to be a part of this friendship."

"Write about whatever random-ass black thing you want to write about. Or not. The only way that our literature will continue to grow is if we accept and acknowledge that nothing we write will change the hearts and minds of people who don’t want their hearts and minds changed…"

"I don’t think I need to succeed so that the race can succeed. We’ve seen that. We’ve been succeeding since we were sneaking to learn how to read. We’ve been showing ourselves to be exceptional, and it doesn’t change anything. I understand that burden; I do not feel that burden. I feel the burden on the page when writing a story to do justice to the black people I am rendering, but I don’t necessarily believe that my successes or failure will have some greater impact on the way that people view black people…"

"Any realistic depiction of Detroit should include the blight and frustration that come with living there, but it should also show regular people experiencing joy."

"No outside pressure could live up to the pressure I’ve always put on myself as a writer…"

"If you tell stories about a really cool kid that you can relate to, and then you hear about kids being mean to that kid, then you feel what it is like to walk in his shoes. And you think, that is not right. I think the best way to write is to want to build empathy for your characters. You want the readers to feel the things they are feeling."

"Given a chance, most children will do the right thing. I was hoping to make them aware that sometimes all it takes is a nice word to really make someone else’s day. Consequently, a thoughtless remark can really hurt someone’s feelings."

"Little did I know — I mean the "choose kind" quote was not mine. It's one that I heard a couple years ago, by [author and motivational speaker] Wayne Dyer, and I put it in there because I think it's such a beautiful quote, and it's so true. And it's something that really resonates with kids, because they kind of get it right away. You know, sometimes because especially at that age, you're in an argument with a friend and you know you're right, [but] you need reminding that ultimately the important thing is to choose to be kind, not choose to be right."

"I'm writing the West that exists. You have to remember that Westerns are complete mythology. If you talk about the historic West, a third of the cowboys were black. The railroad was built by the Irish and the Chinese ... and black workers. All of this supported by women, all the time, and yet you can find any number of Westerns that have no women in them."

"I have no desire to offer a political message in a novel. An artist cannot hide from her or his political beliefs; they will be in the work. But to presume that I am smart enough to preach a position runs counter to my artistic sense."

"The interesting thing about irony for me is that real irony is far more sincere than earnestness. To accept the absurdity of a situation is to accept the humanness of it. Utter sincerity suggests a kind of belief that one knows all there is to know about a given circumstance. That is not to say that one should ever make light of serious and grave and important issues, but that open and genuine intellectual curiosity should never be a casualty in any situation. Irony is not always funny. Humor is not always ironic."

"There are two ways to approach the race thing. One is the unfortunate marginalization of American writers who happen to be black by calling them “black writers,” which tacitly acknowledges the existence of something else that would be mainstream, and so ghettoizes the work immediately. That is the unfortunate part. If one allows that, one fails to acknowledge the truth that there is no such thing as a “black American experience”…"

"The truth is that our men writers get a lot more attention than our women writers. There are some very good female writers, like Magali Garcia Ramis, who has a beautiful novel, Felices dias, Tio Sergio, translated as "Happy Days, Uncle Sergio." Her novel is as good as Luis Rafael Sánchez's La guaracha del Macho Comacho, published in the United States as Macho Comacho's Beat, but it hasn't been admired as much."

"Remember that Puerto Rican literature always experienced a kind of shortcoming because there was a moral obligation to write realistically, to dramatize our struggle for independence—our colonial drama. If this was ignored, it became a faulty literature which should be punished with oblivion. Imaginative literature was practically disqualified…"

"…The resistance to English, the fear of English, has made us bad readers of English literature, because of our fear of contaminating the Spanish language, of losing it in the avalanche of North American influence…"

"…every day I’m convinced that if one is firmly planted in his own world, the work necessarily appeals to a greater number of people. In that sense, I want to profit from my Caribbean self and incorporate it into my literature, hoping to give testimony to who and what I am…"

"…I have discovered that plays are easier to write than novels if the writer has a certain verbal facility, a certain capacity for the colloquial, an ear for the secret cadences of the spoken word. A play can be written with more ease than a novel…"

"…And I was only concerned about the migrant worker, the people I had known best. I had been a migrant worker. So I began to see that my role—if I want to call it that—would be to document that period of time, but giving it some kind of spiritual strength or spiritual history."

"When people asked what I wanted to be, I'd tell them a writer. They were surprised or indifferent. If people don't read, what is a writer?"

"I wanted to document, somehow, the strength of those people that I had known . . . when the migrant worker was living without any kind of protection."

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

"A great writer in the purest sense...makes my head bop from side to side."

"I love these kids. I’m just here to bear witness to their lives, because I believe that it is in bearing witness that everything is made real."

"Who else is there to write for, as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather go ahead and tap into these kids, who still are malleable, but who also have insight into things that we don’t know, with vision that we no longer have; who have imaginations that have already been zapped from us."