Sarah Grace McCandless
The author of Grosse Pointe Girl discusses her latest, Girl I Wanted to Be, and life after growing up in the Midwest
By Dina Zwiebel
Published: June 19th, 2006 | 12:24pm
Blending pop culture appreciation with the voice of adolescent confusion and maturation, Sarah Grace McCandless’ books are sophisticated indulgences that explore life in the suburban teen wasteland. Published in 2004, her novel Grosse Pointe Girl: Tales from a Suburban Adolescence
McCandless’ second work, the novel The Girl I Wanted to Be
Both of your books address the lives of young women in high school, but you don’t seem to necessarily be writing for a young adult audience. How do you navigate the demographic of your readers?
I guess I never thought that I set out to write for a teen audience. I just felt like I was writing a story and that hopefully it would find an audience. And it ended up being a lot of women in their 20s and 30s, then a lot of teen college students. I think it’s because the narrators of both the books I have out are younger. When I was that age, I always thought the books that were specifically geared toward my age group were a little behind where I wanted to be — except for maybe Lois Lowry, Judy Blume, or Beverly Cleary when I was much younger. I would always look to the adult area to see if there was anything of interest. The feedback that I’ve primarily received [from] the teen readers that I’ve worked with has been: “This is much more true and honest to how things really shake out.”
Your books certainly seem rooted in a more somber reality. Death is addressed in both Grosse Pointe Girl and Girl I Wanted to Be.
I write about suicide in both the books because it was just something that was prevalent in my childhood. It was ridiculous. Throughout high school and college and then shortly after, I think there’s been at least eight or 10 from the kids I grew up with.
Just in your high school?
Just in Grosse Pointe, yeah, in my class or in the class above or below. It was almost like a rite of passage or some sort of epidemic. I don’t know if it was Grosse Pointe specific. Maybe this just comes in these flurries, I don’t know, but it was certainly something that touched my life. As early as age 14 and then before Grosse Pointe Girl came out I lost a really good friend of mine. He was like the JFK, Jr. of our class. He was the prince charming and a good guy that everybody liked whether they were popular or not or in his circle or outside of it.
It gets the point across that no matter who you are you can be struggling.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I wanted to get to, and I think that’s much more commonly played out with women characters. You see on TV or film: “Oh look the skinny girl has problems too!” That’s a little predictable. I like getting inside the head of guys. And especially with the first book, I had a lot of male readers. They were like, “Oh my God! So this is what was going on?”
And all of a sudden they care. They didn’t necessarily care back then how we felt!
I’ve had a lot of male friends or colleagues of mine read The Girl I Wanted to Be. They’re like, “I feel a little weird being on the train reading The Girl I Wanted to Be. But it’s not just about “the girl I wanted to be,” it’s the person you wanted to be. It’s that person that you looked up to when you were younger and you knew there were flaws there but you didn’t really want to recognize them. What I wanted to try to capture was that moment when you stop seeing things as a kid and you realize the very adult situations going on around you; that the people that you love and admire do have flaws and are not perfect. And how do you move past that and redefine your relationship with somebody who’s let you down?
There are some really complicated relationships between the kids and their family members in your books. I thought it was interesting that Presley’s role models in Girl I Wanted to Be were family members. And not in a “my Mom is my hero” kind of way.
There was this real turning point in my family when I was nine. In my head that is the last time that everything was okay. Things were not okay for a long time before that. I just wasn’t aware of it. After that my uncle died, my parents got divorced, and then it was a domino effect from there. My aunt that I loved was going through her second divorce and I was just realizing that she had all these problems; and she used to kind of talk to me like a friend, not like her niece, which I loved at the time, but it does force you to grow up a little bit sooner. My mom, same thing: once my parents got divorced she talked to me more like an adult. And this was sixth grade. I don’t know, in hindsight, do you wish you would have been more sheltered or do you appreciate the upfront, direct honest approach? I think about family dynamics and if you’ve got your family in a room what is being said and what is really meant? It’s all about peeling back that layer and saying, “Okay, here’s a closer look at a darker side.”
I remember when I was 12 and 13, all I wanted to do was work for Sassy magazine and meet Jane Pratt and Christina Kelly. There’s that which is a little more removed and then there’s the more personal family side. I think you get to the point where if you’re in a tough situation with your family you have to make a decision about if you’re going to continue down that path or make some hard decisions about making different choices in your own life.
Why did you leave the Midwest?
I left after college. I had a really good childhood friend who moved out West, so I spent a lot of time in my teens and in college in Oregon. I was supposed to go to grad school in Kansas for my MFA and three weeks before I was supposed to leave I realize I don’t want to go. I have no interest in going to Kansas for school. I really want to go to Portland. And that’s what brought me out west.
Do you think all of your books will take place in the Midwest?
My roots are primarily Midwest. I spent 22 years of my life in the Midwest. I don’t know if all my books will take place there. I do like to write what’s familiar, what I know about. I can definitely see maybe Portland as a backdrop. I think it’s kinda similar no matter where you grow up. I grew up with the same kids almost my whole life. And I’m still friends with a lot of those people and there’s a real sensibility about people in the Midwest that I admire—really down to earth and laid back, real shirt off your back type of thing. I think there’s something really special about that. I’m very enchanted with exploring, you know—it’s so funny: growing up there I’m like “I want to move, I can’t wait to get out of Michigan. And now I’m going back tomorrow [for a book festival] and I can’t wait.
What made you decide to include illustrations in Grosse Pointe Girl?
Well I was marketing director at Dark Horse Comics for five years. When we first sold Grosse Pointe Girl I was still in the industry and I think it just kind of spiraled as an idea from my agent to potential editors I was gonna work with. They thought, why don’t we do something a little different? This was sort of on the heels of [Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel] Ghost World. Now what they didn’t understand was that Ghost World had taken five years to get to the sales numbers that it had and also there was a movie behind it. But it also dealt with that grudgery from high school — it’s kinda that time period.
I certainly had a lot of connections in the comics industry. And so what we came up with for Grosse Pointe Girl was doing this sort of hybrid of a novel with occasional spot illustrations, to give the sense that you were reading a diary or a scrapbook or what could have been if I had been drawing on my notebook in class.
I worked with Christine Norrie who is in the comics industry. I would send her chapters and we would both mark sections that we thought might make a good image and we were almost always on the same page. I think Grosse Pointe Girl is a lot lighter and funnier. Girl I Wanted to Be— it’s not that kind of story. So we didn’t do it for the second book but we thought it would be nice to continue with the same cover illustrator and have Christine come back and do something a little different.
Moving forward, I don’t know if Christine will continue to do my covers, but it was a really fun experiment. People seem to really like it. I mean you don’t expect those illustrations. I think I remember them from Nancy Drew books and Encyclopedia Brown or something and you don’t necessarily expect them in a novel that’s marketed towards adults and teens. It was a great way for me to continue working with comics. I actually did my first comic story as part of an anthology.
The Sexy Chicks anthology?
Yeah—and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was only six pages. I know a lot of artists and writers in the industry—good friends of mine, but good lord, six pages of writing comics sent me into panic attacks. It’s because I have such respect for that form of storytelling and I wanted to get it right. The editor I was working with is kind of a legend in the comics industry: Diana Schutz, so I really wanted to impress her. I mean I’d worked with her for five years but trying to impress her in a different sense. So that was really fun. I’d like to do something else down the road again. I would love to contribute to another anthology.
Tell me about the workshops that you’ve done. How have they worked? Have you worked mostly with teens?
A little bit of both. Most recently I did a program called the Second Tuesday Writers Series. It’s through an organization called the Neutral Zone, and it’s a community center for teens in Ann Arbor. They get them off of the street and into a place where they can express their creativity, explore it, be it in performance poetry or writing, just kind of building a community of artists among themselves. It’s an incredible program. And I got to go to different high schools throughout the day and then did a reading that night for the actual community center. I really do like working with that group.
I know you have a day job as a marketing consultant. Did you start as a writer or did that come later?
Well I majored in English in college and I minored in communications and theatre. I went to Michigan State. And what do you do when you graduate? You can’t go knock on Simon and Schuster’s door and say, sign me up!
I do come from a marketing and public relations background in my family — my dad’s been in automotive PR for a long time. And I like that it’s fun and challenging and still has some creativity. So that’s kind of how I landed at Dark Horse, from the marketing side of things. But at the same time I was very active in Portland in the theatre community and in the small press writing community, but I just got really sick of telling people, “I’m a writer. Come over and read what’s on my computer.”
So how did Simon and Schuster finally end up publishing your book?
Grosse Pointe Girl actually started as a small press project with Future Tense Books and the people who ran it at the time helped me with some distribution, but I basically did everything myself. It was a 78-80 page collection of short pieces and two poems. Much more memoir-based. I thought if I can sell a hundred copies this’ll be great. Primarily I made it as a demo tape so I could have something to send to agents to send to publishers and say, this is an example of what I can do. And then it just ended up taking on a life of its own. I mean I think it went through three printings and it was used in a history class at University of Michigan called something like Society and Culture in Suburban America.
I just thought, Well it’s just gonna get my foot in the door. And then when my agent came to me she’s like, let’s try to make this longer, like a novel and let’s spin it fiction so you can have more fun and not be so concerned about being accurate and see if we can resell this. I mean, it all worked out.
You also freelance for different websites and publications. Would you like to continue freelancing or do you want to focus on your novels?
I always see the novels as my core, my base. But I do like doing features and interviews. I mean I’m very saturated in pop culture world: I love music, I love film, I love books, I love theater, I love to travel. So I feel like there’s a lot of areas that interest me that I can write about. And I’m fortunate enough to freelance for places that speak to those interests. I mean I was playing around with trying my hand at doing some sort of screenplay. I’ve done plays before that have been produced, but not screenplays. But I always see the fiction side — be that in book format or screenplay format — being the base and then I like to accentuate that with freelancing and I love, love doing workshops and festivals and fairs. I love it.
I’m excited for the festivals that are coming up because I’ll be part of a larger consortium of authors and that always motivates and inspires me. There’s a lot of really great people who are going to be both in Ann Arbor and in Chicago. I’m excited to be around people that I admire very much. I feel like a big dork most of the time — it sounds a little cheesy to say this — but I do feel very blessed.
Issue #27
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