Author Jandy Nelson is a crossover artist. Much like a musician who appeals to more than one audience, she started writing books for the Young Adult (YA) crowd – only to discover a huge adult fan base. Both her debut, “The Sky Is Everywhere,” and her second best-seller, “I’ll Give You the Sun,” landed this San Francisco writer on numerous prestigious “best books of the year” lists.
You spent several years as a literary agent. Did you feel like you always had a book in you?
Strangely, not fiction. At 40 years old, I’d never written a word of fiction, only ever poetry, and I pretty much got tricked into writing my first novel “The Sky Is Everywhere” because I thought I was writing a YA verse novel. I just didn’t see myself as a fiction writer. But I fell head over heels in love with having this fictional world perpetually occurring alongside the real world. Suddenly, there were all these extra lives squeezed into my one life. It felt like magic.
As a child or teen, which book had the strongest impact on you?
I was a voracious reader as a kid, but kind of an equal opportunity one. There really wasn’t young adult literature back then in the Stone Age, except for the work of Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and J.D. Salinger, all of whom I loved, but I was also obsessed with D.H. Lawrence’s novels for some reason, no idea why, maybe all the smoldering passions. I remember stealing pulpy, forbidden books off my mother’s shelves like Sydney Sheldon’s “The Other Side of Midnight” as well as reading and rereading “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” by Tom Robbins and Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” which I kept under my pillow for a while. I think reading itself had the strongest impact, the escape of it, but also the treasure hunting for bits and pieces of myself in the words.
Your novels have found crossover appeal with adult readers. Your thoughts on why?
It’s glorious and terrifying and maddening and mortifying and exhilarating living in the head of a teenager. Life feels so calamitous/joyful/crazy/tragic/alive at that age when you’re experiencing everything – love, loss, sex, death, friendship, betrayal – for the first time. Makes for a kinetic, urgent and wildly emotional reading (and writing) experience.
How do readers react to your characters?
I get some really incredible letters from both teens and adults about the characters. The funniest ones are from kids, usually on the younger side, who want to know in detail what the characters have been doing since the book ended, as if this were knowable, like they’re asking after my relatives, not imaginary beings.
How can parents get their teenagers to put down the cellphones and other gadgets and READ?
Me! Please take my phone away! For starters, I suspect it’s on us YA authors to write amazing, un-put-downable stories. And perhaps parents can lead by example? Get away from their own screens and have family reading hours or family book clubs or go to the library or bookstore or to see favorite authors with their kids.
We hear you grew up in a superstitious family. Do you have any superstitions regarding your writing routine?
Well, I wrote “I’ll Give You the Sun” in a pitch-black room with earplugs in and a sound machine blasting. Years in the dark, like a loon. But maybe that was more weird ritual than superstition. My mother does send me a lot of ribbons for luck that I must (according to her) tape to my computer, which makes it embarrassing to work in a café. Oh, and I have a writing blanket, which is also quite embarrassing now that I’ve put it in writing. It’s very fluffy, more like a pet.
How does the Bay Area inform your work, your ideas?
It informs my work possibly more than anything. The imagined town of Clover, where “The Sky Is Everywhere” takes place, has dramatic Northern California elements: roaring rivers, skyscraping redwoods, thick old-growth forests. That landscape is in the DNA of the Walker family. And it’s the same in “I’ll Give You the Sun” with the cliffs and surf and redwoods in the imagined town of Lost Cove, where it rains biblically and the fog’s so thick at times, everything disappears. In both books, the Northern California landscape is almost a spiritual force in the lives of the characters.
What’s next?
I’ve been working on a multigenerational novel about a Northern California family living in the same hot, dusty, half-magical vineyard town for more than a hundred years.
HER FIVE BOOK PICKS
“There There” by Tommy Orange: (It) blew me away with its prismatic, lyrical storytelling and extraordinary characterization. Just a stunner. So alive.
“We Are Okay” by Nina LaCour: A gorgeous, heart-stirring reverie of a YA novel. There’s an intimacy to Nina LaCour’s writing that I adore, like she’s telling you a novel-length secret.
“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer: I listened to the audio and laughed so hard at times in my car I forgot to go at green lights and ended up finishing it at the supermarket, sobbing down the aisle. It’s joyful, poignant and just hilarious.
“I Have Lost My Way” by Gayle Forman: My favorite of Forman’s YA novels. A song sung in a round by three distinct characters, who save themselves by saving each other.
“The Friend” by Sigrid Nunez: A brilliant moving rumination on writing, grief and love that pushes the boundaries of what a novel is and surprisingly, centers around an utterly charming, enormous Great Dane.
