Q&A: Sarah Moon & Arthur Levine

Author Sarah Moon traded emails with her editor and LQ President Arthur Levine to share insights behind her latest novel for young adults, Middletown—a book she calls her most personal novel to date.

left: Arthur Levine; right: Sarah Moon

ARTHUR A. LEVINE: I looked it up and found, like, dozens of “Middletowns,” from Ohio to Connecticut. How or why did you settle on the town of Middletown as the setting for your story?

SARAH MOON: There are, indeed! I am from a tiny town near the Connecticut version, so that’s the easy answer. The embarrassing answer is that I was a Simpsons fan growing up, and they chose Springfield because there were so many of them, and I always noticed that about my Middletown, too. The writerly answer is that I like the way it suggests being in process, in the middle, as both Eli and Anna (and their mom, too) are.

AAL: Some folks may not know that you are an educator in Brooklyn. What do the students you work with teach you about writing for young adults?

SM: I’ve had a lot of different jobs with young people (camp counselor, Latin teacher, Spanish teacher, health teacher, translator at a school in a jail, grade dean, now, college counselor) and no matter how we’ve spent our time together, their voices are very much in the room when I’m writing. I hear them laugh at me when
I hit a false note; they poke and poke and poke (as only the teen and tween can do) when I’m hiding from some truth in a story. Sometimes, my students clue me in to what’s changed since I was a kid, but more often than not, they remind me that not much has. That it’s just as hard as it ever was to protect your heart and open it at the same time, that getting to know yourself is both excruciating and essential, and that a sense of humor and a good song will save you almost every time.

AAL: There’s a powerful line in Middletown where Anna looks back and thinks how much she had tried to protect Eli, “but even nine­-year-­old Eli knew more than nine-­year­-olds should.” Why was it so important to explore sibling relationships in this book?

SM: Middletown is dedicated to my sister. Very little of what happens to Eli and Anna resembles anything like what our lives were like, but the feelings they have for each other are the same as how I feel about my sister and how I know she feels about me. How hard she tried to always protect and take care of me, even when it made me mad, how much I thought she was basically magic. The novel is based off of one specific memory: soon after my parents’ divorce, my sister and I had an enormous fight and I threw a dish near her ( fine, at her). And we both looked around this empty kitchen with shards of porcelain all over the floor and we finally just started to laugh, because no one was going to come clean it up but us. I wanted to write about the feeling of laughing with someone right after you threw a dish at her head, which I think while not exclusive to sisters, is a special quality of that relationship.

AAL: Let’s talk about Eli. She is not a tomboy. She’s an openly gay kid in middle school, and you describe that she’s often mistaken for a boy by strangers. You also describe her as being “her own kind of girl.” How did this character come to life?

SM: Eli is as close to writing about myself as I will ever come, is the truth. I grew up at a time when we didn’t have the same kind of language or understanding of gender as we do now, but I had a mother who understood me. What she always said was there were as many ways to be a girl as there were girls in the world, and whatever kind of girl I was was just fine. I was definitely not a tomboy (in fact, I was a figure skater, but I did it in a suit, not a skirt), but the first time I was mistaken for a boy, I was 6 years old, and (for some reason, because this rarely happened), wearing a dress. There was something just “not girl” about me, there still is, and Eli has it, too.

AAL: It’s exciting to read more and more YA and Middle Grade books by queer voices. Do you have any literary pet peeves about the way LGBTQ+ characters are written or marketed?

“I grew up at a time when we didn’t have the same kind of language or understanding of gender as we do now, but I had a mother who understood me.”

SM: I should. I know I should. Mostly, I am still just thrilled by how much is out there! I guess it’s not so much a pet peeve as a preference, but for me, there’s a reason Eli is already out when Middletown starts. Coming out stories aren’t the only stories that queer kids live, and coming out isn’t a destination as much as it is a process, and a repetitive one at that. But there’s so much good stuff out there, from Felix Ever After to On a Sunbeam.

AAL : As we write this, it’s July 2020, and we’re going into the 5th month of a nation­ wide shut down. Has this new reality changed your writing/revision process at all?

SM: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I have a toddler. I am a teacher. Again, gratitude for my mother both because we moved in with her for four months to have childcare, and because she showed me by example that if you need to write and you have a small child, you find a way. She wrote on the inside of my happy meal boxes while waiting to pick me up from piano. I wrote at 4am, the only time I could be alone. I feel extremely lucky that I had that time, and the support of my wife and my mom to be able to get the work done.