Gayle Forman's Blog, page 10

let us into the sandbox

On Sunday, the New York Times Book Review ran a back-page essay called The Kids' Books Are Alright and it announced  that ADULTS  ARE READING YOUNG-ADULT LITERATURE!!!  I should stop here and say that the essay by Pamela Paul was well written and had a lot of very interesting reporting and statistics and also shed light onto a little secret community that I've known about for some time: highbrow NYC literati who attend kidlit book groups.  I am not taking issue with Paul's excellent...

let us out of the ghetto

On Sunday, the New York Times Book Review ran a back-page essay called The Kids' Books Are Alright and it announced  that ADULTS  ARE READING YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE!!!  I should stop here and say that the essay by Pamela Paul was well-written and had a lot of very interesting reporting and statistics and also shed light onto a little secret community that I've known about for some time: highbrow NYC literati who attend kidlit book groups.  I am not taking issue with Paul's excellent...

me, my kid, and that wussy tree

My daughter loves Shel Silverstein's classic The Giving Tree.

I believe this is a requirement of childhood. You read this book. You love it. End of story.

Then many years go by and you don't read it. And then you read it again as an adult. Perhaps to your kid. And only then do you realize: HOLY SHIT, THE TREE AND THE BOY DO NOT HAVE A BEAUTIFUL GIVING RELATIONSHIP BUT A PROFOUNDLY DYSFUNCTIONAL ONE. Seriously, the boy takes and takes and takes of the tree and is never ever happy or grateful...

how books are born

Sometimes new books are like a case of food poisoning. You have no idea they're coming. Then, bam! They're just there, upon you, and you have to get them out of your system as soon as possible. Luckily, unlike food poisoning, the so-called "purging" process is pretty pleasant.

Other times, new books are like vultures circling a wildebeest being lazily taken apart by a pride of lions, waiting for the lions to tire of their kill and decamp so the vultures can descend (and having been on a...

let me tell you about eliza

In high school, friendships tend to be complicated. Or, if not complicated, fleeting. You form a tight bond with someone, and then, just as quickly, something tears it apart or life takes you down different paths and suddenly, the girl who was your BFF is your mortal enemy, or, less dramatic, someone you half-wave to from across the cafeteria.

In adult friendships, as much as things change,  things stay the same. You form friendships. Sometimes you stay tight. More often than not, they don't s...

what happened to gayle's blog?

Wow, June and early July have been some sad, sad months for posts. Paltry.

But kids out of school. No camp until next week. Me=full-time Mom until then. Camp Mom with daily trips. Beach! Pool! Ice Skating! I feel like Julie McCoy Cruise Director for the under-six set (a cultural reference that is lost on most of you, I'm sure. Go look up The Love Boat). And the older child Does Not Nap, so there's no time to dash off a post during afternoon siesta.

I suppose I could write a post after the...

what is ya, exactly?

What makes a book a young-adult novel, versus say an adult novel about young people?

I've been thinking about this question a lot lately for several reasons. For one, one of my readers asked me if his book would qualify as YA because its narrator is 18 even though the narrator does some very un-18-year-old things. Another reason for this is my own books, which seem to constantly skirt the line between YA and adult literature even though I always set out to write YA. As I was writing If I...

fresh, free short story!

So, I blogged about the difficulty of writing a short story a few months back. And then I just wrote one. Now it's being published in two separate Dutch magazines. So I thought, hey, why not post it here:

This is what I look like, unedited—except by me. With no further ado, here's some early summer weekend reading. Enjoy!

THE DEADLINE

I'm so tired of obsessing about Grant Scott. I'm sick of this game we've been playing all year now—of getting his wacked-out, dystopic folded-up poems in my...

40 is the new…

So I'm 40 now. Do I sound different?

People sometimes ask me about upcoming books, if they're still YA, like I'm going to age out of doing YA. That is funny. David Levithan recently had something insightful to say about the term young-adult, which he'd never liked but had found a way to embrace by distinguishing between young-adult (writing about love and change and exciting stuff) and old-adult (writing about being stuck in a loveless marriage for 40 years). So, yeah, given that, I can't...

get matched

I read—and loved—Ally Condie's splenderrific upcoming novel, Matched. And I will have more to say (gush) about it when its release date approaches this fall. Here's the cover. Isn't it pretty?

In the mean time, I picked up a spiffy ARC of it at BEA and seeing as I already read it, I thought I'd give it away. And because this blog doesn't always have to be like a reality TV show, there are no hoops to jump through. You don't have to post anything personal or tell the blogosphere how you...