Interview with Amy Reed

AUTHOR BIO:
Amy Reed was born and raised in and around Seattle, where she attended a total of eight schools by the time she was eighteen. Constant moving taught her to be restless, and being an only child made her imagination do funny things. After a brief stint at Reed College (no relation), she moved to San Francisco and spent the next several years serving coffee and getting into trouble. She eventually graduated from film school, promptly decided she wanted nothing to do with filmmaking, returned to her original and impractical love of writing, and earned her MFA from New College of California. Her short work has been published in journals such as Kitchen Sink, Contrary, and Fiction. Her first Young Adult novel BEAUTIFUL was released October 6, 2009 (Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster).  Her upcoming book THE WALLS has been described as “The Breakfast Club in rehab.” Amy currently lives in Oakland, California with her husband, two cats, and one dog, and has accepted that northern California has replaced the Pacific Northwest as her home. She is no longer restless.Be sure to stop by Amy’s website and blog!

INTERVIEW:
Ashlyn: When did you get into writing?
Amy: I started writing really bad emo poetry when I was about 13 and continued to do that for several years. I was also a songwriter, so a lot of my creative energy went into that.  I studied screenwriting in film school in my mid-20’s, and only really started writing fiction during my MFA program.  I wrote short stories for a while and published a couple before writing Beautiful, which was my first novel.

Ashlyn: What is your favorite/least favorite part of writing?
Amy: What I love is being able to let a story and characters consume me, entering a world with them and not really know where it’s going to take me.  The hardest thing is when I can’t find the right way to express what I need to say, when the world inside my head can’t quite translate to the page.

Ashlyn: Did you ever think you would become an author?
Amy: I always fantasized about being an author, but I don’t know that I ever really believed it was possible.  It still doesn’t really seem real.  I still get goosebumps whenever I see my book in a bookstore. I’m still afraid to tell people I’m an “author,” like it somehow feels like I’m lying.

Ashlyn: Do you use your own experiences when you write?
Amy: Absolutely.  I started writing poetry as a way to work through things I was going through as a teenager, and in a lot of ways writing has continued to serve that purpose for me.  I usually start a with an experience that’s very close to me, then allow it to go somewhere new, with new characters and settings and conficts, and then develop into a story.  Sometimes it ends up very different than the original experience that inspired it, but there is always something that I connect to personally.

Ashlyn: Who are your favorite authors? Why?
Amy: Laurie Halse Anderson is pretty much my hero as far as YA writers go.  She isn’t afraid to tackle difficult and diverse material, and she always takes chances with her work.  Her characters are complex and imperfect, and her writing is absolutely stunning.  If anyone questions the literary merit of YA fiction, they need to read her.  I also love Julie Anne Peters, John Greene, and Courtney Summers. They’re deep and smart and edgy, and they expect the same from their readers.  Other writers I love are Toni Morrison, Richard Russo, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Dorothy Allison. Their work is considered adult, but they’re masters of storytelling and they write incredible young people, so I strongly suggest that teens read them.  I’d also like to give a shout-out about a few books that changed my life that everyone should read as soon as possible: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey; The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold; Push, by Sapphire; and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

Ashlyn: What advice would you give to future writers/authors?
Amy: Don’t be afraid to tell the truth.  Don’t be afraid to write something bad or scary or controversial. Don’t be afraid to write something no one will like. Write what your heart says you have to.

Ashlyn: What are the other books you are planning to write/publish in the future?
Amy: I just turned in the manuscript for my second YA novel, tentatively titled The Walls, about a group of teens in treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.  It’s been described as “The Breakfast Club” in rehab, and I think you’ll really like it if you liked Beautiful.  It’s being published by Simon Pulse, probably in the Fall of 2011. I’m also just starting my third novel, which is just in its infancy so I don’t want to give anything away just yet.

Ashlyn: Beautiful, your first novel, is about a girl who claims she has become “beautiful” by becoming friends with “popular” people and doing drugs. What gave you the idea of writing a book like Beautiful? Were you anything like Cassie or any of the characters in the book?
Amy: Beautiful is very much based on my own experiences starting a new school in seventh grade, and Cassie is definitely based on myself at that age.  I wanted to write about the extremes someone can go to in order to fit in, how much we can hurt ourselves in an attempt to do what we think other people want us to do.  It was a very painful time for me and I did a lot that I regret, and I hope that writing about my experience might help someone else avoid the same pain.

Ashlyn: How hard/easy was it to write Beautiful?
Amy: It was very difficult at times to relive some of the events in Beautiful. It felt sometimes like I was going through those horrible things all over again. Probably the hardest parts to write were about Sarah. While she is actually the character most based in fiction, I felt somehow closest to her while writing Beautiful.  What was hard is that she was just so sweet and totally innocent and didn’t deserve any of the awful things that happened to her.  I guess she represents the worst-case scenario of what can happen to kids when nobody’s paying attention, when they’re allowed to get so tragically lost.  In some ways, she is who I could have become if I didn’t have the support system of my family. I was able to turn to them for help before things got too out of control, and I’m so incredibly lucky for that.  There are too many teens without that support system, and I just hope they can find someone they can trust and turn to for help. There are many resources out there, and I’d be happy to help point readers in the right direction if they feel they need help and don’t know where to turn. ❖