Nina LaCour signing my copy of Hold Still!
AUTHOR BIO
Nina LaCour grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has tutored and taught in various places, from a juvenile hall to Mills College, where she received an MFA in Creative Writing in 2006. She currently teaches English at an independent high school and is the co-founder of Write Teen, a series of YA writing classes.
Hold Still, Nina’s first novel, was published by Dutton Children’s Books in 2009. Hold Still is a William C. Morris Honor book, a Junior Library Guild selection, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and a Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Books of 2009. Nina won the 2009 Northern California Book Award for Children’s Literature and was featured in Publishers Weekly as a Flying Starts Author.
Nina is working on her second YA novel, The Disenchantments, which will be published in 2012 by Dutton Books. She lives in Oakland, California with her wife, photographer Kristyn Stroble.
Be sure to visit Nina on her website and check out my review of Hold Still!
Nina Lacour and I!
I was so lucky to meet up with the Nina LaCour before school started and got to ask her some questions (including The Disenchanements)! We met up at The Grove in LA and ate some tasty Bennett’s Homemade Ice Cream!
Ashlyn Rae: What were some of your favorite YA reads that you’ve read during your teenage years?
Nina LaCour: I didn’t read very much YA when I was a teenager. I’m sure there were some really great books out there, but YA wasn’t thriving the way it is now, so I read books that weren’t published as YA but that had teen appeal. One of my favorite books was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges. Gilbert, the narrator, really spoke to me. He’s living in this tiny town and his life seems like it’s at a dead end. He is trapped by his family’s dependence on him and by the limitations of this tiny town he lives in, and then this girl comes to town and wakes him up. So it has a great romance and also captures this sense of longing for something new that I think is a pretty common teen experience.
Ashlyn: I’ve heard that you’ve always waned to be a writer. What is the hardest and easiest part?
Nina: When I write I get the feeling that it’s what I’m meant to be doing. When I go too long without writing I get restless; I feel like I’m missing something, which I am. Now that writing is my main job, I have a freedom with my days that most people don’t get to have. At the same time, though, writing can be overwhelming and daunting. I constantly worry that my ideas aren’t good enough or that I’m not capturing what I’m trying to capture. So there is a 
lot of doubt, a lot of insecurity that comes with this job. Still, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Ashlyn: How do you feel about being a teacher AND an author?
Nina: I love it! Before I had the good fortune to make writing my primary job, I had trouble balancing my teaching work with my writing. But now that I teach part time, it’s pretty perfect. Teaching is a social job and writing is a solitary one, so they balance one another out. I can’t imagine my life without either one.
Ashlyn: The Disenchantments has to do with music. What kind of music do you like listening to? What are some of your favorite bands?
Nina: Doing research for The Disenchantments was so much fun because I got to listen to tons of music. Each of the characters has a favorite girl band, and, while I won’t give them all away, I will say that one of the characters loves The Supremes, which is a group that I’ve loved all my life. But I also listen to a lot of contemporary music like The National, Camera Obscura, Belle and Sebastian, Bon Iver, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, The Dirty Projectors, etc. I could go on forever.
Ashlyn: What was your inspiration for TD?
Nina: The idea first came to me years ago, but it was just a paragraph I wrote as a writing exercise. I started writing and I came up with Bev, the lead singer of a band called The Disenchantments. I knew that she was hiding something, but I didn’t know what. Then, when I finished writing Hold Still, I found myself thinking of the narrator, an 18-year-old named Colby, who is Bev’s best friend, and slowly the story became his story. As I wrote, many things came to inspire me: music, art, road trips, many people in my life.
Ashlyn: How do you like the cover?
Nina: I like it! I think it captures the feeling of the book really well, and my friend Mia Nolting, who illustrated Hold Still, did the lettering for the title and my name.
Ashlyn: How long did it take you to write the novel?
Nina: That’s such a difficult question to answer because I spend much more time thinking about the book, making notes, waiting for comments from my editor, etc. than I do actually writing it. But, in a way, all of that is a part of the process. So, I’d say it took me about two years to write it, but only a few months of really concentrated writing time.
Ashlyn: WIll there be any of The Disenchantments lyrics in the book? Did you write any of them?
Nina: There aren’t any complete songs in the book, but there are lines scattered here and there. Writing them was fun, but only one of the songs is actually supposed to be good. The Disenchantments is a pretty bad band.
Ashlyn: Describe Colby and Bev!
Nina: They’ve been best friends since they were kids and are into a lot of the same things: music, art, films . . . all kinds of things. They even look alike. But much of the book is about how they are a lot more different than they had thought they were, so you’ll have to read it to find out!
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