The Huffington Post | By Maddie Crum
- Posted:
Meg Wolitzer is the author of The Interestings, a novel chronicling the thwarted -- or achieved -- ambitions of a crew of gifted summer campers. Her latest novel, Belzhar, tackles similar themes, but is geared towards the Young Adult audience. Told with an immediacy granted from its teenage, first-person narrator, her newest book sheds light on the genre's unique offerings.
Your previous novel The Interestings mostly concerns itself with young, ambitious characters. How does writing young people in an adult novel differ from writing a young adult novel?
While The Interestings takes place over almost 40 years and is told from a few different third-person points of view, Belzhar takes place over one semester, and is written from a single, first-person point of view. My decision to write Belzhar this way came from my innate sense of how I wanted the narrative to feel. I needed the narrator to be breathless and have her story seem immediate. That struck me as right. She's young, she’s been shaken, she can’t take the long view, and she needs to say things right now.
Why did you decide to write a young adult novel?
Because I often include adolescent characters in my adult novels, it wasn’t a big leap to think of doing this. I like writing about adolescence because it’s a time of firsts, and the experiences are so strong, which all lends itself pretty well to fiction. Also, I had a teenager in the house at the time, and I would pick up some of the YA books he was reading, and I found myself drawn right in to the good ones.
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Your previous novel The Interestings mostly concerns itself with young, ambitious characters. How does writing young people in an adult novel differ from writing a young adult novel?
While The Interestings takes place over almost 40 years and is told from a few different third-person points of view, Belzhar takes place over one semester, and is written from a single, first-person point of view. My decision to write Belzhar this way came from my innate sense of how I wanted the narrative to feel. I needed the narrator to be breathless and have her story seem immediate. That struck me as right. She's young, she’s been shaken, she can’t take the long view, and she needs to say things right now.
Why did you decide to write a young adult novel?
Because I often include adolescent characters in my adult novels, it wasn’t a big leap to think of doing this. I like writing about adolescence because it’s a time of firsts, and the experiences are so strong, which all lends itself pretty well to fiction. Also, I had a teenager in the house at the time, and I would pick up some of the YA books he was reading, and I found myself drawn right in to the good ones.
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