- Alice, I Think
- Harper Tempest (2003)
- Buy this Book
Nanaimo-based writer Susan Juby is the author of a trio of novels (Alice, I Think; Miss Smithers; and Realist at Last) set in Smithers, B.C., where she was raised. The books, which have gained an international following and been adapted for a successful CTV television series, are charming, dryly witty, and ever so gently subversive -- much like their author. In the following conversation, Juby talks about reading habits, how she wrote a classic young adult novel without knowing it, transcendence through dressage, and the process of seeing her Alice books turn into a TV series. When we spoke, Juby had just handed in her latest and first non-Alice project, a "sincere horse book" about the disciplined world of dressage training. She was admittedly "a little nerve-wracked" about how the manuscript would play with her editors.
Matthew Mallon: What were your favourite books growing up?
Susan Juby: Well, all the Black Beauty books, by Anna Sewell. All the Black Beauty books -- it took her, I don't know, most of her life to write that story. She died early, and I think she stayed alive just to complete Black Beauty, which I didn't realize until much later, until my adult reading of it. The horrific story of animal abuse in the Victorian era? Didn't catch that [as a child]. It was just the story of this beautiful black horse, with lots of drama. And then all the Black Stallion books, Man O' War, all those books. All the horse books.
And then Catcher in the Rye, and those books: male teen angst, coming-of-age stories, preferably with a little bit of sexual obsession thrown in. So, those were the early years. That's what's wrong with me now.
Aside from the horse books, girls' books weren't for you?
As a kid I read everything. But when I think about the books that mattered to me? I read all of Judy Blume, but I don't remember any of Judy Blume. Wifey, actually, is the only one that made a lasting impression, because we passed it around in a brown paper bag and we got off on it. But my mother had a sewing room that I used to spend time breaking into. A sewing room, locked. God knows what she used to do in there. But I used to get in there and find the "adult-content" books. So I would read Henry Miller, all that kind of stuff. They made more of an impression on me than anything else. I mean, obviously, they messed me up. I was young and I was like "God! Is this how people operate?" Sexus was not the right book to read when you're a child.
A lot of us of a certain age had that experience growing up, because that was the sort of acceptable face of pornography that our parents, or older sisters in my case, had access to. And it was disturbing because Henry Miller made sex seem, if you were 12 years old and curious, utterly seamy and horrible.
Pretty negative! And in Catcher you've got Holden getting ripped off by the prostitute and the pimp, and all of the idiotic girls that he hangs out with. Very misogynist stuff. That got into my brain. Oh well.
I was influenced by whatever my mother was reading, D.H. Lawrence or whatever. And also, I was very into being precocious. Aiming for precocious all the time. So anything that was a big deal I would try. And of course I don't remember any of them.
Do you have one of those precocious child's lists of great books you read when you were 12?
And so they contributed absolutely nothing to me? Yeah. Though I have a degree in English literature, so I did end up rereading a lot of them. And I was always into reading the same book over and over and over and over and over and over. I still do that today.
What's one you're rereading now?
[Richard Price's] Clockers. I'm mental about it. I love the social realism. Do you watch The Wire?
I am a member of the church of The Wire, yes.
The Wire is what the movie of Clockers should have been. But Clockers to me is one of the great novels of the last...while.
Price is very uneven.
Yes, which gives me hope. Everybody's going to be mediocre sometime. [Author] Robert Wiersema wrote me an e-mail once and at the bottom of it there was a quote from William Gibson that said "the number one task of the writer" -- I'm paraphrasing -- "is to get over their very natural and correct aversion to their own work." And isn't that the truth? That there's a lot of hatred that goes on between a writer and their work?
So how do you deal with that? How did you get started despite your inner critic?
Well, for the first book I was extremely uncritical, because I never thought it would get finished or published or any of those things, and I was writing to entertain myself. There were no standards in place. I was working as an editor, a book editor at a non-fiction how-to book-publishing company. We did a lot of books about things like twig furniture and irritable bowel syndrome. So I started my first book on the bus on the way into work.
You weren't thinking of it being any particular genre or being a young adult book or anything like that?
No. And I was a little bit horrified when I discovered it was considered a young adult book. Since then I've read so many YAs that I realize that there are really some amazing people working in the YA world. But at first it was alarming to find out that that's what it was.
And how did you get that news?
When somebody finally sent me a rejection letter with a personal element. They said I should try sending it to a teen publisher. And at first I thought, "Well, screw you!" And then I thought, "Well, okay, if that's what you think, if you think I might have a better chance," because I'd tried a lot of the smaller presses around here. People who published very contemporary stuff, that's who I tried first and they were uniformly uninterested. Until I tried the teen fiction route.
I'm fascinated with YA, partly because I'm interested in genre and how that works but also because I seem to know more and more adults, or perhaps "people my age" is a more accurate term, who are reading them. Some almost exclusively. Obviously the most prominent example in the last decade has been the Harry Potter books, but it's been spreading. Maybe in part because there's so much mediocre "literary fiction."
Well, there's so much frickin' boring literary fiction. Absolutely beautifully written, going nowhere. I think people are tired of that. Maybe YA has become an option because people have to go somewhere. Most of YA really does have the basics -- the stuff that my editor made me do, because I was very much "plot is passé" when I first got published. "I need a plot? I don't care if it's episodic! I like it like that!" And he said no, it needs a beginning, a middle and an end. So that's something I had to work on. It was because I had my undergraduate degree, you know.
So now you're a YA author. Do you feel that you're in a genre ghetto?
A little bit, in that if you go to a literary festival you're either not on the program at all or they'll just hive off the children and YA people. And you're still at the children's table. Actually the children's table is a fascinating place to be, but in terms of respect accorded? There are people who are wild about YA and children's fiction, but there are also people who think that if you can't cut it in adult fiction that's where you go.
And what do you think of that?
I think in some cases it's probably true. In other cases it's just wrong.
Such as? I can't spend a lot of time browsing in the YA section because I end up looking...
Creepy.
Yes. Creepy.
M.T. Anderson is incredible. Feed's amazing. Feed is really good. There's a whole group of them. Melvin Burgess is not always perfect, but he pushes the thing. He's interesting. He wrote a book called Lady: My Life as a Bitch, about a girl who gets turned into a dog, and she discovers the joys of just running around being wanton. It's kind of subversive. It's great.
Some of the best YA books are the ones that are subversive.
And they're the ones that are getting banned and all those cool things. I admire them.
There are also all those very edgy, sexual-content YA books like The Lipstick Party, which got a lot of shocked-and-appalled attention.
And which apparently didn't actually sell anything.
And was based on what's increasingly being exploded as a cultural myth.
Right. That kids are supposedly having oral sex just like they're applying lipstick. There's that kind of YA book and then there's that whole A-List, Gossip Girls type. I did an interview on CBC's Sunday Edition about those books, and my job was to be on the side of them, so I talked to all these young women who like those books -- smart, interesting, nobody's-doormat kind of girls -- and they said. "You have to vigorously defend those books because we like them. Our lives are incredibly stressful and these books are like candy. We love them, we're fine, we can handle it."
And these books sell millions of copies and they're connected to that whole book packaging thing that goes on in YA. Alloy Entertainment and things like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, where they hire writers to do these books, which are some of the biggest sellers in the YA world.
Wasn't Alloy implicated in the case of Kaavya Viswanathan [the 19-year-old Harvard woman who was busted for plagiarizing her YA novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, from different sources]?
Right. They don't know how much of that was added through the editorial process, because it's a packaged book. I've talked with other writers who work in New York who have had interaction with Alloy and apparently they're all told to read Sloppy Firsts, which is the main Megan McCafferty book [that Viswanathan was accused of plagiarizing from]. And Princess Diaries. Megan was completely -- I've met her several times -- and she was horrified by that whole thing.
But to me if all those books were saturated with sex, that's not a problem. What they're saturated with, though, is branding. Alloy has a subsidiary called 360 [Youth] that is in charge of brand placement. So you go to the publishing company and say "I want my Juicy whatever featured at this level" and they put them in.
So the paranoia about sexuality is wildly misplaced. We should be paranoid about the consumerism.
Well, there's hardly any sexuality in these books. What they do is they shop. They talk, sort of, about sex. But they don't actually have any. Or any that could be described as real. And there's no real danger.
Tell me about the dressage novel.
Well, it's in alternating first- and third-person. The first person is a teenage girl who's been banished from her wealthy family's home in Los Angeles because she uses some unfortunate decision-making with the family driver. She gets herself sent to equestrian school to learn to ride. She's there, and there's a 16-year-old boy who comes from a messed-up Canadian family that has some money -- the father runs a used RV dealership and the mother does her nails and runs away to Florida with another man. And he's in the closet, basically. He's a young gay man who's decided he's not having anything to do with that side of himself until he's out of high school. He rides western and he has a secret lifelong passion for dressage and the two of them end up riding dressage together and it's their story. It's kind of a comedy, but the horse factor is of course achingly sincere. Horses are all about heart.
Oh, God. That just sounds dreadful, doesn't it?
Not at all. I'm a big fan of sincerity.
The book is about...partly it's just about these kids and where they're coming from and how they're looking for some sort of family. Horses can provide a lot of things for people, and do. But they're often a substitute for living life. And dressage in particular is about control, making this great big animal do what you want it to do. Ideally what you achieve after years and years and years of practice is a feeling, that's really fleeting usually, of freedom. So they give you freedom and they give you control.
And they fill up a lot of time, like any good hobby.
Well, for me I ride and I do dressage and I've always had something like that going on. But I never do it to the degree that other people do it. I have this total admiration of them, because I'm a quitter. I quit a lot. I'm always being a dilettante about things. I just admire very much anyone who just really plunges into things. Did you ever see [the Canadian documentary] Project Grizzly? That guy is a hero of mine, just because of his ability to disappear into an insane project. I always admire an insane project. And I like to write about people who have these grand passions that drive them. I have passions, but they can't get in the way of my TV-watching. Which is nothing to brag about.
I think what I like about it is it does offer some form of transcendence. I stopped drinking and all that stuff when I was 20, because I was very, very much fond of it, so anything that offers that sort of transcendence without being totally self-destructive is fascinating to me and probably always will be.
What's the next project?
I'm just starting on a book about a 14-year-old boy, who takes it upon himself to become a private investigator. With predictably poor results. And he's a great fan of all those Michael Connelly/Elmore Leonard/Dennis Lehane books. The noir books, manly noir books. Which I read a great deal of in preparation for this. And I just adore those books. I find them completely satisfying, in their way. All the hardboiled American macho guys. That Fletch kind of feeling. Doing the reading for it has been a lot of fun. And my guy is very neurotic and has all sorts of issues and relationship problems with his mother, and saving women versus ravishing them. It's been really fun to think in those terms, like, how does a 14-year-old boy operate in the world? With difficulty.
And what's the status of the Alice books these days?
Well, there are three of them. And at this stage I don't know if there's going to be another one. I have these other two books and then I have another idea for another project. So I'll do that. And then I'll see. I get these letters every day: "Are you going to write another one?" And, I don't know yet. Alice can't get too old or she'll get pathetic. If she has something else still to do or say, then great. If she doesn't, then it would be good to stop while she's still interesting to me. To write her to the end would be really depressing.
Like Sue Townsend's doing with Adrian Mole. Those books are just so sad now.
And that first book [The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4s] was one of the funniest books ever written I think. It was absolutely brilliant. I screamed with laughter, it was so good. And I wish there were only two of them.
So what's it like watching your creation move over to TV and get a whole new life and subsidiary set of creators?
It's been fascinating. I spent a lot of time with Susin Neilsen, who heads everything on the show, and I am a huge fan of her. And what she does. I think she's brilliant. I love [Neilsen's other show] Robson Arms. So that made the whole process exciting and thrilling as opposed to upsetting and alienating.
As they started to roll, they sent me the scripts and they kept me posted on how things were going. I didn't have any pull, but I knew enough from my reading to tell that that whole hall of heartbreak there -- to try and get power, which you're never going to get unless you're J.K. Rowling -- was a waste of time.
I went and visited the set a number of times. I watched some of the editing process. I felt like I was included as much as I was ever going to be included. And it's not my thing. I might be interested some day in trying to write for television, but I don't do it now.
They've taken it and they've created something different. In my world, everything was a little bit grey and everybody's pretty snaggly-toothed and everybody has mild bad breath. In a TV show, people are quite a bit better looking, and it's just got a different feeling. At the same time, it's there. The basic characters come across. And it's almost a relief to see something different. You get tired of the same thing. So I thought, "I like this other Alice world. I think it's quite charming and I would like to live there."
Alice, I Think currently airs Fridays and Saturdays on the Comedy Network. ![[Tyee]](/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
