Getting to Know Laurie Halse Anderson
Laurie Halse Anderson supports A Day of Silence
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An excerpt from an interview:
Your latest novel, Wintergirls, takes on anorexia—an issue that many teens face but rarely discuss. What inspired you to write it?
I was beginning to hear from kids who had either been in the throes of an eating disorder or who wrote to me from clinics where they were. A lot of girls—and some boys—started to talk to me about cutting. They didn’t know how else to deal with the pain that was overwhelming them. So that was the first piece. The second piece is I have a dear friend who is a doctor who had been bothering me for years in a very not subtle way to write about eating disorders, because she saw so much of it in her practice. She felt that there really hadn’t been a good novel written about eating disorders, and she thought that might be helpful. I was really reluctant to do this because I have struggled since about 12 with my own body-image issues. I never could be classified as anorexic, but disordered eating is definitely something that has been a piece of my life more than I probably care to admit. I realized that all of these threads were showing me a clear path, and it was time for me to take my own challenge and dive into something that was difficult and see what I could make of it. So that’s what led to the writing of the book.
Where did you begin?
Before I really started to do the writing, I did a lot of research. I talked to my friend who’s a pediatrician and she referred me to some psychiatrists. I did as much reading as I could in medical journals. I went to pro-ana Web sites [which promote anorexia as a lifestyle choice] to see what these girls—mostly girls—were talking about. Even though 10 percent of people in America with eating disorders are male, the public face of eating disorders continues to be female. So it was a process of gathering crumbs of information and stowing them all away and waiting for the voice to come. And then Lia [the main character] showed up in my head and started talking. It wound up being a much darker book than I thought it would be. It was hard to write this one. It really grabbed me by the throat. I was glad when it was done.
Fearless: An Interview with Laurie Halse Anderson
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Before she wrote "Wintergirls"...
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“YA Lit Bitch” is the new Page Turner series about my ever-so-slight (or ever-so-obvious) obsession with young adult literature that’s not only good, but represents a wide-open range of teenagers’ lives with a feminist heroine (or 2, 3) thrown into the mix. The series features interviews with many YA authors about their work as well as feminism, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, or other issues.
This week Page Turner talks with author Laurie Halse Anderson, who’s written five YA novels, including the New York Times best-seller Speak, one of the most compelling depictions of the trauma of the interior space of a teenage sexual assault survivor. Anderson has been getting letters from teen rape and incest survivors ever since she published Speak, which was her first novel, ten years ago. Her latest,Wintergirls, covers the well-worn, adolescent terrain of eating disorders through the story of two 18-year-old girls, Lia and Cassie.
Page Turner talked with Anderson about growing up feminist, what she loves about the teen audience, personal power in a consumer-driven culture, and how Wintergirls brought to light her own issues with disordered eating and body image."
Page Turner "YA Lit Bitch": An Interview with Novelist Laurie Halse Anderson
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