I'm thrilled to announce that author Julie Halpern will be visiting the Writing Room for a week beginning Tuesday, 13 July 2010. Julie’s young adult books include Into the Wild Nerd Yonder, a romp through the world of high school cliques following sophomore mathlete Jessie, and Get Well Soon, an uplifting story about sixteen year old Anna’s stay at a psychiatric hospital. (The synopsis says it all: “Who said depression has to be depressing?”) She also wrote a children's book, Toby and the Snowflakes.
Check out her website for a fun look at how she became a writer, a journey that involved lots of pen pals, many Saturday nights at her family’s typewriter, a hideous patchwork flowerpot and time in Australia.
Just a week until Julie Halpern's visit! In the meantime, here's a bit about her first novel, Get Well Soon, which follows Anna, a depressed teen who ends up in the teen ward of a mental hospital. Based on Halpern’s own experiences, Get Well Soon is honest, realistic and funny. Funny? Yes, funny. What a refreshing take on the subject. It’s told in a series of letters that Anna writes to her friend Tracy. Here’s a taste of Anna’s wry voice:
Day 1I am sitting at a desk in the middle of a hallway, and all of the lights are off. No one will tell me what they’re going to do with me or how they’re going to help me or how long I have to be here. They just plunked me down in this freaky place, told my parents not to worry, and now I’m stuck.
They told me to write. Write down your feelings. It’ll help you. Have some paper. Have a pencil, they said. I don’t like pencils, I told them. They smudge. I once kept a journal all in pencil, and when I went back to read all of the depressing stuff that I wrote, it was gone. Smudged away. I wrote it all down, the stories of my life, my feelings, all of the crap you’re supposed to say in journals so you can look back and see what a big loser you used to be. But it was all gone, mushed together as if none of it mattered in the first place. Which it didn’t. Because I still wound up here.
Screw journals. I don’t need a journal to tell myself what I already know: Life sucks. I’m fat. Nothing interesting ever happens to me.
Julie describes the inspiration for Get Well Soon and Anna’s character in an interview at Kaleb Nation:
Get Well Soon is a story about a girl in high school who’s hospitalized for depression, and I was hospitalized for depression in high school. Much of it is based on the weird things and people who I met while I was there. So much of it was so bizarre, almost unbelievable, that I always thought it would make a great book. . . Anna’s a mix of who I was then and who I am now, but in a much more extreme way. I have never been that sarcastic. I think my sarcasm comes out in my writing because I generally think of sarcasm as a sort of negative force, and I try to be a more positive person. But it’s fun to be snarky in writing. Also, I’m such a different person than I was in high school, so it was hard to go back and write Anna completely as what I was then. I was probably too depressed at the time to be as funny as Anna is, although I’d like to believe that I was. Or even that I am now.
In an interview at The Ya Ya Yas, she discusses why she fictionalized the experience:
I think a big part of it is that I didn’t remember every detail enough to write an autobiography. Many of the characters in the book are based on real people, but I had to make up a lot of information about them. I also did not want to write about my family, since I knew it would really upset my mom. I tried to fictionalize the family as much as possible. My real life wasn’t as instantly revelatory as in the book, and there also wasn’t as much romance. But a lot of the really weird stuff, particularly the satanic business, actually did happen. It was a lot of fun to intersperse truth with fiction. But now it’s hard for me to remember which real details I included in the book and which ones I made up!
Into the Wild Nerd Yonder is Julie Halpern’s most recent young adult novel. Check out the book’s trailer.
Here’s a synopsis from the publisher:
It’s Jessie’s sophomore year of high school. A self-professed “mathelete,” she isn’t sure where she belongs. Her two best friends have transformed themselves into punks and one of them is going after her longtime crush. Her beloved older brother will soon leave for college (and in the meantime has shaved his mohawk and started dating . . . the prom princess!)
Things are changing fast. Jessie needs new friends. And her quest is a hilarious tour through high-school clique-dom, with a surprising stop along the way—the Dungeons and Dragons crowd, who out-nerd everyone. Will hanging out with them make her a nerd, too? And could she really be crushing on a guy with too-short pants and too-white gym shoes?
If you go into the wild nerd yonder, can you ever come back?
Here’s an excerpt:
I so used to love the first day of school. Ever since my mom let me pick out my first pair of first-day-of-school navy Mary Janes with the flower pattern puckered into the top, I knew I’d like the newness, yet revel in the sameness that the first day of school always brings. New pens I’ll lose after first period, new schedules with the promise of a cool new teacher or intriguing new exchange student, and new classes to ace. Not in a braggy, nerdy way, just in an I’m-smart-and-I-kind-of-like-to-study way. It’s not as though school defines me. Although, I guess I don’t really know what defines me. Yet. Not like my best friends, Bizza and Char. Would it be lame to say that they define me?
Want to keep reading? The excerpt continues here.
