RR: Well, I think we all sort of want to be chosen. Because being chosen means having a purpose. Being chosen gives your life meaning and clarity.

KT: And it makes pain so much more bearable, in some ways, whereas a teenager struggling with depression may find it hard to figure out whether their pain and their life has meaning.

I went almost 40 years without seeing anyone presented as beautiful unless they met a really narrow standard. I never saw fat women presented as beautiful. I think Tumblr, specifically, has actually healed my brain. It’s exposed me to so many types of beauty. And I realized that I have widened my own standards to include myself.

Even though when I was a teenager I understood that it was great to be smart and talented and funny and brave, I was the most anxious about being pretty. I felt its importance really early on, and I took it on as a kind of goal. In some ways the word pretty is a little like the word love -- it only has the meaning we assign to it. There isn't a definitive pretty, but we act as if there is. I still feel the echoes of my concern with prettiness, it still feels like a large and important word to me, but in writing this book I hoped to dismantle it a bit -- for myself and for readers. I'd like to strip it of its importance, so that we can focus on all the other great things we can be. But for now, if I'm entirely honest, it's still a word that haunts me. 

For now, I like writing from a teen perspective since I have some distance from that time in my life and the distance frees me up to write honestly and emotionally. But aside from that personal preference, I think the strategies and craft and emotional energy it takes to write a book remains the same. I am writing about teenagers, but mostly I'm writing about people. Teens are all reading adult novels in school, so there's no reason to write differently for them. The benefit of YA is that it is more squarely about things they might be experiencing and is taking their interior lives seriously. But in terms of craft or intent, I don't think there's a difference.

I should have been humiliated by it all—by the drama at my school, by the forced psych evaluation, by the refusal of all these idiot adults to believe I’d written what I’d written, to believe me. Except I wasn’t humiliated, I was furious. And not furious in a self-conscious or inchoate way, not furious just for the sake of it. I was purely, righteously angry. I thought, here I am telling the truth and I’m being punished for it.

But after this happened, it was much harder to be angry at stupid little things, much harder to be humiliated by the need to ask a question. Some of the debilitating self-consciousness began to fall away.

Once, I was whining to my dear friend Anne Ursu about feeling incapable of writing a particular story, feeling like I wasn’t talented enough to do it. And she told me that it was good I felt that way, that you should always be working at the very limits of your abilities. What’s the point, she said, of writing a book you already know how to write?

But I think this advice applies to almost everything. It’s just a more elegant and specific way of saying, “Try. Just try.”

I don’t understand wanting to read a book to like the characters. I’m not reading for someone I want to be friends with. I’m reading for someone who’s interesting and fascinating, and that’s often a difficult character—a “bad character.”

It’s so much more fascinating to me to unpack someone who is not necessarily easy but someone who has many layers and is complex—that feels more authentic to me.

For me it’s so important to tell stories about young women and to write books told from their perspectives—all kinds of girls. I think again to my own experiences as a teenager. It wasn’t about finding true love. When I was in high school, my focus was on my really close relationships with friends. There was terrible drama, breakups, and the loss of friendships and how devastating that was. It was intense. In my writing about young women, so much of it is about our disconnection and connection to one another. Because if I’m writing about authentic lives and teenage girls, so much of their lives is about relationships between sisters, friendships, and frenemies. In that time [teen years], those were the closest relationships I had with other women. It’s hard to have that kind of friendship when you’re older. It’s such a beautiful intensity.

I think the reason that it’s such a difficult thing to hear is that this is an industry made up of women. Librarians, authors, bloggers, editors, we’re all women. How could it exist if we’re all women? We have to take a hard look at ourselves and ask difficult questions. Why do we elevate male authors in YA publishing? Why can a male author write from a female perspective and it can be taken more seriously and not the other way around? Why are there more men winning more awards in such a female-dominated format? Why are there more men on panels?

This is a conversation that has been going on behind closed doors for a long time, and it’s finally coming out. I think it’s so important that we’re having it right now. There are so many smart people being brave and putting themselves out there, but there are people who just don’t want to hear it. Our core audience is teens. What are we saying to young girls about their importance and significance? What are we leaving behind for the next generation?