Jaclyn Moriarty

BIO

After spending four years working as an entertainment lawyer, Jaclyn Moriarty decided to write full time instead. Her first novel, FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA, was published to critical acclaim and won the Ethel Turner Prize in Sydney and was a Book Sense 76 selection in the United States. Her following novels, THE YEAR OF SECRET ASSIGNMENTS and THE MURDER OF BINDY MACKENZIE, also received rave reviews. Her most recent book, THE SPELL BOOK OF LISTEN TAYLOR, has all the charm, humor, and quirky characters readers have come to expect from her.

Jaclyn grew up in a large family in Sydney, Australia. She studied English at the University of Sydney, and law at Yale and Cambridge.

She spent the last few years living in Montreal, Canada but recently moved home to Sydney so she could share her new baby Charlie with her family (and get some sun)."

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INTERVIEW

Dilemmas about life, love, boys, crazy mothers, crazier friends, and self doubt plague 15-year-old Elizabeth Clarry in FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA. Debut author Jaclyn Moriarty deftly paints a portrait in letter form of a very modern and very real teenage girl. Jaclyn herself grew up in Sydney, Australia, with four sisters, one brother, two dogs, and twelve chickens. She is no stranger to weird occurrences like the ones in her novel. While overseas working on her Master's degree at Yale and her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, Jaclyn's twelve chickens (and the shed in which they lived) were picked up in a thunderstorm and carried off, never to be seen again! Jaclyn now lives in Sydney with her husband, where she works as a Media and Entertainment Lawyer. Teenreads.com writer Lucy Burns recently got the chance to chat with her about writing for teens and not listening to the voices in your head.

Teenreads.com: The most obvious first question is: Why did you decide to write FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA as a series of letters? Do you have an affinity with old-fashioned correspondence?

JM: I was living in England when I wrote FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA, which meant that I was a 26-hour plane ride away from my family and friends in Australia. Checking the mail was the highlight of my day --- envelopes seemed like the most wonderful invention of all time. E-mail is great, of course, but there's nothing like seeing your sister's handwriting on the outside of an envelope, with a row of colourful stamps in the top right-hand corner. Also, you can't send chocolate frogs by e-mail. I started off writing FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA as a straight narrative, which included occasional letters between the two main characters along with letters from the Association of Teenagers. Then I realised that there were letters flying all over the place --- Celia was sending postcards, Elizabeth's mother was leaving post-it notes, and imaginary associations like The Cold Hard Truth Association were being as mean and bossy as the Association of Teenagers. The straight narrative got smaller and smaller until one night --- it was the middle of the night and I was working on the book --- I had this revelation. Why does there need to be a third person narrative at all? Why can't I write all of it in letters? After that I felt like the book took off on its own. It was great fun to write.

Teenreads: You paint an evocative portrait of the dreamy, creative yet dangerously naive Celia. Did you have a best friend like Celia or were you the Celia of your crowd?

JM: I think Celia might be a combination of a few different friends I have had --- people who are exciting yet dangerous, generous yet selfish, and close yet somehow always slipping away. I always wanted to be like Celia, or at least to be best friends with a Celia, but I knew I would never be brave enough to run away and join the circus. In fact, I do have a close friend called Celia, who is intriguing, imaginative and adventurous. But she has none of the flaws of the Celia in the book. And one day she will forgive me for using her name in FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA.

Teenreads: Elizabeth thinks her English teacher is mad when he gives them the pen pal assignment. Did you have an assignment similar to "The Joy of The Envelope" in high school that you dreaded? Was there a teacher who inspired you to write?

JM: The idea for the assignment comes from a letter-writing exchange I had when I was a teenager. A friend at my school changed to a different school, and we decided to stay in touch by writing to each other (even though we still only lived 10 minutes apart and our schools were in the same town). We wrote at least once a week and told each other all our secrets and dreams. Her letters were hilarious. Part of what was lovely was that my friend was planning to be a famous artist, and she often decorated the outside of the envelope with patterns and pictures. So I guess that was really where my love for "envelopes" began. (She is still a great friend now and is almost a full-time artist --- she's had exhibitions of her art all over the world!)

I did have one high school teacher who inspired me to write. I always dreamed of being a writer all through school and wrote hundreds of half-finished stories. But then when I started studying law, I got too busy and thought that the grown-up thing to do was to concentrate on being a lawyer instead of a writer. After I got my law degree, an old English teacher from high school sent me a "congratulations" card, on which she wrote: "P. S. But remember you are really a writer." I sat down and wrote a short story the same day. And that's why I started writing again.

Teenreads: At the beginning of FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA, Elizabeth is pleased because her new teacher seems unaware of a paper the class had to do on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Yours is the second book I have read recently to mention the Harper Lee classic. Yours also is a book written in a teen-ager's voice that is true and real, as is Scout's voice in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Did you read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in high school or as an adult? Do you have an affection for the book? Do you think Harper Lee's style affected your own?

JM: I read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD as a class book in high school and absolutely loved it. Although I remember thinking that it was a terrible thing that we had to spoil the book by writing an essay on it! I still have great affection for it although I haven't read it since high school --- in fact, it inspired me to study law. (Half of the lawyers I meet say exactly the same thing --- the other half say that "L. A. Law" inspired them. I still haven't met anyone who says they became a lawyer because of "Ally McBeal.") I don't know if Harper Lee's style affected my own, although I'm sure it must have, like all the books that you love while you're growing up. I should reread it and find out --- I'd be very happy to think that it had.

Teenreads: Who are some of your writing influences? What were some inspirational books you read as a teen?

JM: Some of my favourite writers and writing-influences are: Elizabeth Jolley, John Marsden, Carol Shields, Arthur Ransome, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ellen Raskin. As a teenager, I think Robert Cormier was inspirational because his writing was so powerful, but I especially loved books that made me cry and cry, like BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA. I read John Marsden when I was grown-up already and found him amazing. I thought: "How can he know exactly what was inside my head when I was a teenager?" Then I thought: "Well, why don't I try to write exactly what was inside my head as a teenager?" I feel like he changed my writing by showing me that I should try to do that.

Teenreads: FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA vividly and unsentimentally deals with girls' budding interest in love/sex matters. You run the gamut of maturity in your characters --- from Elizabeth who has never had a boyfriend to Christina who is pondering losing her virginity to Maddie who is completely boy crazy. How and why did you decide to paint crushes and high school romance from so many different angles?

JM: I wanted to write FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA for teenagers like Elizabeth who are worried that they are not doing a good job of being a teenager. I wanted to remind them that some girls haven't even kissed a boy when they're 16 and some girls have had sex –-- there is nothing wrong with either approach as long as you are doing exactly what you think is right for yourself. (Which is not always that easy, of course...) Also, I remember in high school that your friends always seem to be at a different phase to you --- either way ahead and showing you the way, or way behind so you could be the wise and cynical one. I wanted to try to show that in the book by giving everybody a friend who approached relationships in a different way to them.

Teenreads: You also non-judgementally present many different boy characters. Did you have help from some teens in making the characters so real?

JM: My main teen consultant was my youngest sister, Nicola (who also happens to be photographed on the cover of the Australian edition). She read the first draft and made some suggestions. I spent about a year changing it --- then Nicola reread it and changed every single one of her suggestions because the whole teenage world had changed! I'm lucky because I have four sisters and a brother so I've been able to see and hear lots of different ways of being a teenager. I tried to remember conversations at the dinner table or watching TV with my sisters and brother when we were all teenagers, to remind myself. I also like to listen in to conversations of kids on buses!

Teenreads: Most of the problems Elizabeth faces in FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA come from made up organizations --- in essence from her own inner critique. What do you do to dispel your own doubts about writing or anything else?

JM: I remember finishing FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA and feeling proud of myself because I thought I had learned not to doubt myself any more. But then as soon as I started working on my next book voices crowded into my head, saying things like "You must be joking --- this is going to put your readers into a coma!" I have to just keep writing until the voices go away and I start listening to the characters instead. My husband would say I have absolutely no ability to dispel my own doubts about writing --- he's the one who has to put up with hearing them. He is usually very lovely and patient but sometimes gets cross with me and tells me to cut it out. Which is often exactly what you need.

Teenreads: FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA is your debut novel. How long did it take you to write the book? Did you go through rejection in trying to get it published? Do you have any advice for young writers?

JM: It took me about three years to write FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA, although sometimes I stopped working on it for weeks or even months at a time. I sent the first few chapters and a synopsis to about 10 literary agents in London. They all wrote back with exactly the same sentence: "We are not sufficiently enthusiastic about your novel to represent you."

Then I got back to Australia, and sent it to a literary agent in Sydney. He phoned me a week later --- and a week after that he had found a Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. This seemed so unlikely to me that I thought it was a trick. I was sure that someone had intercepted my manuscript in the mail and had arranged for these actors to play the roles of editors and Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastics to fool me. I really seriously wondered why they were going to so much effort to set me up. I think young writers should try not to worry about getting published for now. They should just write what they most enjoy to write, and move on if they get bored. My mother used to cut out newspaper stories about teen writers with million dollar book contracts --- she thought I would find it inspiring. But it was the last thing I wanted to see. I was always depressed when I was 16 because there were these 14-year-olds out there who were already famous writers. I thought I had missed out and it was too late for me. Now I realise it was the right thing to keep trying out different types of stories and poems until I found what I loved writing most. Besides, my teenage writing was awful. I just didn't realise it at the time...

Teenreads: Tell us the last book you read and loved.

JM: The last book I read and loved was a book called OWL IN LOVE. I thought it was absolutely hilarious and I stayed up half the night to finish it. Before that, I read LIRAEL by Garth Nix, and I also stayed up half the night to finish that. Garth Nix happens to be my agent, but now that I have read his latest book I realise he is also a genius. And before that, I read HAPPENSTANCE by Carol Shields. I think she is magnificent.

   --- Interviewed by Lucy Burns


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