AUTHOR CRUSH FRIDAY: JANDY NELSON
Glitter girls, you have pressing questions for your favorite authors and we have their answers. Welcome to our new weekly segment, Author Crush Fridays.
We love asking questions and we love the answers from some of our favorite authors. Today we’re talking with Jandy Nelson. Her debut novel, The Sky is Everywhere, was on multiple Best Books of the Year lists, was a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick, earned numerous starred reviews, has been translated widely, and continues to enjoy great international success. Her voice is mesmerizing and if you haven’t read I’ll Give You The Sun yet, you really should!
GLITTER: How were you able to give both narrators a different and unique voice even with two different time lines?
JANDY: Even though they’re twins and share a fierce bond, Noah and Jude are incredibly different people and so it was very important to me that their voices be individual. I realized early on the best way for me to insure this was to write their stories first separately, Noah’s start to finish, then Jude’s start to finish. I’d actually lock one twin’s file when I was working on the other’s narrative so I wouldn’t cheat and would stay immersed in the heart/mind/world of whichever twin I was writing. The reader only sees Jude through Noah’s eyes at thirteen and only sees Noah through Jude’s at sixteen and that was also the case when I was writing from each point of view. Only when I had a draft of both twins’ stories did I begin to weave them together, which was like writing a whole new novel. The whole process took three and a half years and was really like writing three novels in one!
GLITTER: What inspired you to write I’ll Give You the Sun?
JANDY: Honestly, in many ways I have no idea! It’s so mysterious how stories come alive. My experience has been that the characters in my novels just kind of show up on my doorstep one day and pretty much move in with all their baggage and furniture and weird knickknacks, basically taking over the place. That happened with I’ll Give You the Sun. Noah and Jude arrived and brought with them their very complicated sibling relationship, their twisting-turning first love stories (both gay and straight) as well as this family tragedy that had come between them. But I guess even before the home invasion, I’d been thinking a lot about visual art and artists and the creative process and was even toying with the idea of going back to school to get a PhD in art history. I really love art, spend days on end in museums and galleries, and I’m with Jude’s mentor Guillermo in I’ll Give You the Sun who believes art can remake the world. So, this passion was definitely part of the inspiration but I mostly see that now in retrospect. I didn’t set out to write a book about rivalrous artist twins; Noah and Jude just showed up, he with charcoal in hand and she with her hands covered in clay. This is the amazing part about writing fiction; without even realizing it, questions, ideas and passions that are consuming you become incarnate, turn into people, into story.
GLITTER: Do you base the relationships in your book on any experiences you had growing up?
JANDY: I absolutely traipse through my own emotional landscape when writing. So since I tended to fall in love in a full-throttle kind of way when I was younger so it seems do many of my characters. Or when I write about siblings I may draw on the jump-in-front-of-a-train-to-protect-them kind of love I felt (and feel) for my brothers, but at the same time the relationships in the novels themselves are specific to the story and characters and setting and not to the relationships I’ve had. I have no experience with the kind of sibling rivalry Noah and Jude experience in Sun for example. That said, I do feel like when you’re writing a book you have a funnel for a head and everything (your past, your emotional life, your passions, your myths and monsters, your favorite flower or most detested kind of pie) just flows into the story you’re writing whether you’re aware of it or not.
GLITTER: Did you always want the book to have a magical realism feel to it?
JANDY: Even though I’m a fan of magic realism and think it’s perhaps the truest way to depict reality, and even though my first novel The Sky is Everywhere has some magical realist elements and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my literary heroes, I honestly didn’t think about it beforehand with I’ll Give You the Sun. Strangely, the magic kept blindsiding me while writing this story. Grandma Sweetwine’s ghost wasn’t a character in the novel until about halfway through the writing process. She just wouldn’t shut up in my head and finally I realized, “Oh! Of course, Jude’s talking to her grandmother’s ghost!” And it was the same kind of revelation when I realized Noah “seemed” to resist the force of gravity when he jumped off cliffs. But this novel is a lot about perception and both Noah and Jude perceive a lot of magic in the world so I think the magic evolved naturally from their points of view.
GLITTER: What kind of research did you do for the book?
JANDY: I did a lot of research for the book because these characters have very individual interests and passions (astronomy, meteorites, baseball, painting, sculpture, superstitions, diseases, etc.). But the most exciting research I did was taking a stone-carving class. What a blast. Actually, literally: a blast. I had expected this very Michelangelo-esque type of scene, all of us tap-tap-taping away at our marble, but it’s nothing like that. We were outside in all types of weather, wearing protective gear that made us look like hazmat workers, using power drills and circular saws. It was badass and so much fun. I learned a ton too about Jude’s and Guillermo’s characters by doing it. Also, watching my teacher Barry Baldwin (an incredible stone carver) I really saw what Michelangelo meant when he said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” It was like Barry could see the form inside the rock and was just liberating it from the stone around it. (I’m a horrible carver by the way! It is unbelievably difficult—I’d come home with bruised and bleeding fingers every time!)
GLITTER: Do you have any writing rituals? How long does it take you to finish a book from start to finish?
JANDY: Well, for this book, the writing process was pretty insane. I’m not sure how it happened but I ended up writing the whole novel in a pitch-black room with the curtains drawn, ear plugs in, and sound machine blasting. The only light in the room was from the computer screen, which, in my mind, became like a portal into the story. It was a fantastic way to work, totally nuts, but fantastic. With my whole life blocked out like this, it allowed me an intimacy with the characters I’d never felt before and enabled me to live inside the story so very completely. But now I have this Pavlovian reaction so that every time I’m in dark room, I think, “Okay, time to write!”
The Sky Is Everywhere took me about two years to write and I’ll Give You the Sun about three and a half years.
GLITTER: What book are you working on next?
JANDY: It’s called The Fall Boys & Dizzy in Paradise and it’s a YA novel about two brothers and a sister living in a hot, dusty Northern California vineyard town called Paradise. Their father mysteriously disappeared sixteen years earlier and the story begins when this strange, enigmatic girl shows up and sends all their lives into tumult. It’s kind of a relay race of a love(s) story, with some serious trumpet playing, food making, grape crushing, break ins and outs, dreams shattered and pieced back together, time lost, love lost and found, and a band called “Hell Hyena and the Furniture.” I’m really excited about it!
Jandy has an MFA in poetry from Brown, and another MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Jandy’s a literary agent, a published poet and a devout romantic. The Sky Is Everywhere is her first novel. The Los Angeles Times calls it: “unusually rich with both insight and breathless romance,” The Denver Post: “a brilliant piercing story,” and The Daily Beast says: “Those who think young-adult books can’t be as literary, rich and mature as their adult counterparts will be disabused of that notion after reading The Sky Is Everywhere.” It has been translated into over twenty languages.
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Editorial Director | Writer | Tweet me @heatherriccio
