Annie Barrows took her teen daughter’s dare to write a YA book that wasn’t depressing,
It’s not often inspiration strikes after literally getting hit with a book, but that’s what happened to author Annie Barrows with her latest novel, “Nothing” (HarperCollins, 224 pages, $17.99).
The book-hurler was Barrows’ then 15-yearold daughter, Esme, who had a very good reason to throw the book at her mother, who became a household name with the 2008 best-seller “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.”
“Esme didn’t read. It made me nuts,” Barrows explains from the dining room of her Berkeley home. “I’d be handing her book after book after book. It’s the peril of having a mom who is a writer. So when she threw the book and it hit me was when I said, ‘Sweetheart? We’ve got to have a talk about this.’ ”
Esme was frustrated because the young adult books she’d been trying to read were “not at all like life.” Barrows told her that was a good thing. “You get to see other people’s lives!”
“Esme said, ‘Noooooooo! That’s not good! It’s incredibly depressing!’ ” Barrows recalls. Esme went on to spell out the whole misery sweepstakes: abusive parents, fatal diseases, drug addiction, racism, homophobia — standard YA fare.
“And you can’t open a book without there being a dead mother,” Barrows added. “So, I said to Esme, you’ve got a point there. And she goes, ‘Oh, and by the way, dystopia. After the whole planet is cooked and everything nice is gone? — I don’t want to read those, either.’ ”
The rant concluded with Esme proclaiming that “nobody in their right mind would write a book in the way teenagers really live, and if they did, nobody would read it.” Gauntlet thrown.
Barrows grins. “I said, oh yeah? Are you challenging me? I can write a book about your real life, and I can make it fun.”
“Nothing” is dedicated to Esme, now 17, and with good reason. Barrows, in full view of Esme and her girlfriends, took notes on all their conversations. She’d be puttering in the kitchen, with her daughter and friends on a couch 10 feet away. Every time Barrows overheard something interesting, she’d write it down.
“That’s the great thing about being a middle-aged lady,” she says. “I was invisible.”
The result is a book about nothing. Her 15-year-old main characters, Frankie and Charlotte, are normal girls. They live in El Cerrito, go to high school, obey their parents (who, shockingly, are also normal). To prove how boring they really are, Charlotte decides to write down everything that happens to them during their sophomore year. And, as it turns out, they realize in the end that life is pretty great — and not boring at all.
“Nothing” is also authentic, which means the conversations tend toward the salty side. Writing “bad” words was difficult at first, Barrows admits.
“I was thinking, ‘I can’t! My mom is going to read this!’ But once I got into it, it was like writing any other dialect.” The sex parts — Frankie and Charlotte talk about it and think about it, but don’t do it — were fun. For one thing, Barrows had to figure out just what, exactly, “hooking up” means. “It’s beyond just making out,” she says. “But it’s not necessarily shtupping.”
And for Barrows’ mom: “My poor mother. She said, ‘Do they really talk like that? I think it’s just terrible.’ I told her I thought a lot of it was really funny, and the important thing is, they can switch — they won’t talk that way in front of you.”
Aside from the bad words and the sexy bits, Barrows also had to learn the lingo. FOMO, for instance, figures heavily in the life of a 15-year-old: Fear Of Missing Out. A “tap” is a loser, or dweeb, she explains. “A tap is like a loaf, but a loaf is a little bit old now. When I sold the book, I told the editor I could only guarantee this stuff for six months, so publish it quick!”
Barrows emphasizes that the group of kids portrayed in “Nothing” are not supposed to be representative of all teenagers. “These kids are the kinds of kids I know; this is what they’re doing. Their language is horrifying, and what they talk about is shocking, but they are following the rules. They have a moral code, and they are working within the perimeters their parents have set for them. And I think they’re great. They’re fun and funny.”
Esme would read the pages of “Nothing” Barrows wrote each day and suggest changes. “She constantly changed conversations. She’d say, ‘That’s not the kind of arguing people would have.’ One problem Esme had was with the plot. There was too much of one! I’d tell her I had to hang the book on something.”
And Esme was a help while she was at school, even, if Barrows got stuck on a detail.
“I’m such a terrible mother that I would text her while she was in class, ‘Give me the names of three drugs people take at parties,’ and she’d write them back to me. And I’d think, ‘God, I hope her teacher isn’t looking over her shoulder.’ ”