The spring semester is back in full swing! To kick it off, I’m happy to announce my next Author Spotlight features Tess Sharpe, author of the smash hit The Girls I’ve Been-a most anticipated book of 2021. It will soon be adapted into a movie for Netflix, starring and produced by Millie Bobby Brown.
Born in a mountain cabin to a punk-rocker mother, Tess Sharpe grew up in rural northern California. She lives deep in the backwoods with a pack of dogs and a growing colony of formerly feral cats. She is the author of Barbed Wire Heart, the critically acclaimed YA novel Far From You and the upcoming Jurassic World prequel, The Evolution of Claire.
She is also the co-editor of Toil & Trouble, a feminist anthology about witches. Her short fiction has been featured in All Out, an anthology edited by Saundra Mitchell.
Her latest work, 6 Times We Almost Kissed (And One Time We Didn’t) features strong, queer, and three-dimensional female protagonists. The dynamic sapphic love story is told through two girls’ present and six moments from their past. Tess’s writing is beautiful and evocative, and weightily themes such as medical debt, grief, and complex parental relationships are handled with care and relatability. It’s perfect for fans of Jenny Han and Nina LaCour.
What were some of your favorite scenes to write that may entice readers to pick up your novel?
I loved writing the scene where the girls chainsaw and chop up the tree. It felt like such a rural girl thing to do—something I do after most snow storms where I live. But it also felt like a great way for them to bond and shy away from each other—with literal sharp objects between them as they take apart something once living to turn it into something new. Sometimes I am not subtle with my metaphors!
Also: there are not one but two times there’s only one bed.
Lately books have been including more modern aspects such as text conversations and emojis; both of which your novel contains. How would you say this aspect influences the new generation of readers’ relationship with literacy?
I really love creative narrative structures like this as a reader and as a writer. They also can be a huge gift, craft-wise as a writer. In 6 Times, both Penny and Tate are in denial about their feelings for each other but everyone else thinks it’s very obvious they’re in love. But because Penny and Tate narrate a bulk of the book, I had to figure out a way to convey the “everyone knows we’re in love but us” trope. And the text message exchanges between the girls’ best friends, Remi and Meghan were a huge gift to me as a writer in that aspect, because I could provide insight and an outside look at the girls and their actions that my in-denial girls could not.
Most of your novels include thriller aspects like your other work: Girls I’ve Been. 6 Times We Almost Kissed, however, tackles the warm and fuzzy characteristic found within romance. What were some of the challenges you faced writing the opposite of what you typically write? Why did you choose this path?
I’m a Romance novelist under other pen names, but 6 TIMES is my first—and likely only—YA Romance as Tess Sharpe.
I love writing Romance because I feel like as a genre, it hones you as a writer like nothing else. I always come back to Romance between thrillers in part because it’s really fun to write but also because of the inherent challenge writing Romance poses to the writer. And the challenge is that the contract between the reader and the writer in Romance is that the couple ends up happily ever after or happy-for-now. So the reader knows going into a Romance what the end result is: but the unique journey the writer takes you on is the reward. And that’s a huge challenge, to both hit all the satisfying, needed and expected beats of a Romance, explore certain tropes everyone loves and take everyone on a unique journey.
Penny and Tate have such emotionally beautiful relationships with their mothers that add to the rawness of your coming-of-age story. How do you think the mother daughter relationships within your novel reflect your own relationship with your punk-rocker mother? How did your own mother influence how you write relationships?
It’s really funny, I spent my 20’s writing about fathers and daughters and then my 30’s writing about mothers and daughters and never set out to do this on purpose. Brains are weird like that. I did really want to craft two unique and very different mother/daughter relationships in the book, but I think it would be hard to emulate my own in a book.
I think I have a lot of duality in my relationship with my mom. We’re of course mother and daughter, but we’re also writer and editor and we work together in those roles in the indie side of my writing life. I started writing novels really young and I was homeschooled so my mom was my teacher. And she happened to be a magazine editor, but she’s always had a real knack for editing fiction. Kid lit—especially in the middle grade category—has always been a big passion of hers and she passed that down to me.
When I started writing books as a pre-teen, she decided to edit me like I was a freelance client. She treated my desire to write seriously from the very start. And I think that allowed me to take it seriously from the start.So since I was young, I’ve had this entirely different side of my relationship with her and a totally different appreciation for her and her mind. And I’m grateful for that. She has a really unique and brilliant mind.
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Thank you Tess for answering my questions so candidly. I loved reading the character dynamics within the novel and seeing how sensitive themes were handled with care and beauty.
I’d also like to extend a thank you to Cheryl Lew from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers who offered me the chance to interview Tess and gave me a DRC of 6 Times We Almost Kissed (and One Time We Didn’t).
You can follow Tess on Instagram and Twitter for more author content!