What a Girl Wants: Letters to Teen-aged Self

Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray had us all thinking hard, again, for her terrific series, What a Girl Wants. This time we authors were challenged to write a letter to our teenaged self, suggesting the novel or novels we should be reading right then/back then.  My response is here, below.  But for really interesting reading—Neesha Meminger, Laurel Snyder, Sara Ryan, Lorie Ann Grover, Zetta Elliott, Tanita Davis—travel over to Chasing Ray.

"Dear Beth, The world doesn't conform to your own ideas about it. It leaks. It scrambles out toward unseen possibilities, and between the cracks, beauty lies. Read Michael Ondaatje. Read Coming Through Slaughter, his pastiche of a book about Buddy Bolden and New Orleans and crimes of the heart. Watch for how Ondaatje himself walks onto the page and stays there. That’s what writers must do. That’s what you must do, when you begin to write for real. Open yourself and leave some of it behind. Let the world know how you loved, let it see how you hurt."