Hey, everyone! I'm one of the participating bloggers in the YA Reads 2015 Debut Authors Bash. It's an annual blog tour that celebrates all of the amazing debut authors and books that come out each year.
For my first ever Debut Authors Bash, I was able to interview Kate Scelsa, who's debut novel, Fans of the Impossible Life, came out in September.
Title: Fans of the Impossible Life
Author: Kate Scelsa
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Publication Date: September 8, 2015
Ten months after her recurring depression landed her in the hospital, Mira is starting over at Saint Francis Prep. She promised her parents she would at least try to pretend that she could act like a functioning human this time, not a girl who can’t get out of bed for days on end, who only feels awake when she’s with Sebby.
Jeremy is the painfully shy art nerd at Saint Francis who’s been in self-imposed isolation after an incident that ruined his last year of school. When he sees Sebby for the first time across the school lawn, it’s as if he’s been expecting him.
Sebby, Mira’s gay best friend, is a boy who seems to carry sunlight around with him like a backlit halo. Even as life in his foster home starts to take its toll, Sebby and Mira together craft a world of magic rituals and impromptu road trips, designed to fix the broken parts of their lives.
As Jeremy finds himself drawn into Sebby and Mira’s world, he begins to understand the secrets that they hide in order to protect themselves, to keep each other safe from those who don’t understand their quest to live for the impossible.
A captivating and profound debut novel, Fans of the Impossible Life is a story about complicated love and the friendships that change you forever.
1. How did
the idea for Fans of the Impossible Life come to you?
“Fans” came to me through a dream, through my love of the
book “Brideshead Revisted” by Evelyn Waugh, and through my desire to see a really
honest depiction of queer teen life and sexuality and friendship and self
exploration and struggles with depression. All of those things, processed over
about four years of writing, went into making “Fans.”
2. Fans of the Impossible
Life was published in September. How has your life changed since then? Do
you have a favorite memory of something that happened during this, your debut
year?
My life hasn’t changed at all. Except that now I get
stressed about different things that don’t matter, as opposed to the stuff I
used to get stressed about that didn’t matter.
For a favorite memory - I just did my very first school
visit for “Fans” at an awesome high school in Brooklyn, and it was so lovely to
get to be around teenagers and talk to them about the book and about the issues
around the book. They really wanted to get into discussing what it meant to
write about often marginalized characters and to tell queer stories.
Even when you write for teens, you’re mostly dealing with
adults when it comes to navigating the world of publishing, and it’s easy for
me to get jaded about a lot of things. So to be around people who are really
wrestling with these concepts and having these conversations for the first time
is so thrilling to me, because they have no preconceived notions about outcomes.
This is not just “the children are our future” optimism, but a personal
excitement about being around people who are taking in the world as something
new and seeing the flaws and figuring out for themselves how they feel about
it.
3. If I
were an author, I’d be stealthy and go to a bookstore and sign all the copies
of my books that are on the shelves. Have you felt the urge to do that since
walking into a bookstore? Have you actually signed books without actually being
in a store for an event?
It turns out that you don’t have to be stealthy about this!
If a store has your book you can just go up to the counter and say, “Hi, I’m
the author of this book! Thank you so much for carrying it and would you like
me to sign it?” And they say yes and hand you a sharpie! It’s very cool, and I
never would have thought to do it if my friend hadn’t forced me to do it on my
pub day. And the best part is that you then have an excuse to talk to the awesome
people who work at bookstores!
4. Your
debut features three main characters, Mira, Jeremy, and Sebby? Why did you
choose to feature three main characters instead of any other number?
5. Jeremy
starts off as an outsider to Mira and Sebby’s friendship. Have you ever felt
this way about some of your friends?
Kate combined both of the above questions into the following answer.
I’ve definitely experienced moments in adolescence, and even
as an adult, where I felt as though I was an outsider within my own group of
friends.
Jeremy starts out this way with Mira and Sebby, and then
they are actually really generous with bringing him into their friendship. So
even though he understands that Mira and Sebby have this primary bond, I think
he’s so grateful to be included that he stops feeling like an outsider, and
starts to feel lucky to just be a part of what they have.
Of course three way friendships are tricky, which is why
they’re interesting to write about, and often when two sides of the triangle
become closer the third feels left out. No spoilers, but a big part of Sebby’s
problem is that he begins to isolate himself from the other two. And that then
becomes a self-perpetuating pattern. The more you feel isolated, the more
resentful you become, the more you isolate yourself.
As far as my own experiences, when I look back now on the
times when I felt like an outsider among my friends, it was because I was
actually beginning to distance myself from them. I was reaching a moment in my
life when I needed some independence. But I had no perspective on that at the
time. And I think Sebby has the same problem. Although the moments that I went
through weren’t as self destructive as his becomes, I had an urge to remove
myself from the dynamic that I had been in. Not even because it was a harmful
dynamic, I just had some growing to do that I needed to do in private, if that
makes sense. Sometimes it’s difficult to be around people who have known you so
well when you feel yourself evolving as a person. They might be resistant to
that.
All of that said, I don’t think that retreating from your
friends is a healthy way to deal with this kind of thing. If people really love
you and you stay truthful with them about what you’re going through, they will
accept your personal evolution, in the same way that they would want you to
accept theirs.
6. Are
Mira, Sebby, and Jeremy based on any of your friends?
They each come from parts of myself, people I know, and bits
of “Brideshead.” There are details about Sebby and Rose that I stole from high
school friends, parts of Jeremy that owe a debt to Charles Ryder in “Brideshead”
(Sebby is an obvious tribute to Sebastian in that book) and Mira has a lot of
me in her. I like to say that the book is fiction but the feelings are real.
7. Let’s
say that Fans of the Impossible Life were to become a movie. Who would
you cast as Mira, Sebby, and Jeremy? What about some of the other characters in
the book, like Peter and Dave?
Coming from a theater background, I know a lot of adult
actors, so I’ve already got a bunch of the adult parts cast in my head. But my
knowledge of teen actors is so limited I wouldn’t even know where to start!
See, I’m dating myself. But I actually would love if it was young unknown
actors, and if “Fans” was how the world came to know them.
9. Do you
read classics? If so, what’s your favorite classic?
“Brideshead Revisited” is my number one classic, of course.
I dip back into that book (or the excellent BBC miniseries) every couple of
years. I read the latest translation of “Anna Karenina” done by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky a few years ago and I was just bowled over by how
readable it was. I couldn’t put it down. And when you finish reading something
like “Anna Karenina” you just feel great about yourself.
10. What’s one piece of advice that you would give
your teenage self?
It’s the same thing I would tell myself now (and still have
a lot of trouble remembering): be patient. Things happen in their own time.
Practicing patience is like practicing mindfulness. You can’t always be living
in an expected future. This helps so much with writing too. There’s no way to
rush writing a book. There’s no shortcut. All you have is the work that you do
on it every day, and you have to honor that.
Kate Scelsa has performed in New York and around the world with experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service in their trilogy of works based on great American literature, including an eight-hour-long performance that uses the entire text of The Great Gatsby. Kate lives in Brooklyn with her wife and two black cats.
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