It’s funny, the moments that shape you as a writer. One of mine was as simple as pulling a book off a shelf in Barnes and Noble 10 years ago. I had never heard of the book or the author, but I liked the sound of it enough to buy it.
The book was The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty (known in the UK as Finding Cassie Crazy). Here’s something I believe with all my heart: there wouldn’t be a Simon without it.
I’ve never entirely been able to predict which books I’ll fall in love with, and this one swept me off my feet completely. Here was this quirky little epistolary book about Australian teenagers, and it just got me. You know that feeling when you read a book and it feels like it’s written specifically for you? It’s that. It’s mine.
I actually don’t know much about Jaclyn Moriarty’s process, or where her stories come from, or who inspired her characters. I just know that reading her books feels like sitting with friends. Her characters feel alive. The Year of Secret Assignments is a book about friendship and first love and grief and secrets, but that’s almost beside the point.
The point is that there are three girls named Lydia, Cassie, and Emily. And they are real.
That’s the part that matters to me. When I read, I don’t need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don’t need to have my heart broken. I don’t need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don’t need to swoon. Though, for what it’s worth, Jaclyn Moriarty has surprised and amused and challenged me, broken my heart, and made me swoon, sometimes all within the span of a chapter.
And I love that. But I don’t need it.
What I need, as a reader, is a character with a heart and a voice and a pulse. I need a character so vivid and so specific that she doesn’t feel like fiction. And here’s the thing about Jaclyn Moriarty: she gives you an entire world of characters like that.
You get the impression, reading her books, that every single character has a story. Even the parents. Even the annoying type-A overachiever (she gets a whole book, actually). Every single person has a distinct voice, and every single person is drawn with humour, sharp observation, empathy, and heart.
I think the richness of Moriarty’s work sneaks up on you. When I try to describe her stories, there isn’t an epic, tragic hook I can use to summarise them. The characters aren’t heroes or villains, and they’re not particularly larger-than-life. But there’s something so thrillingly alive about them. They’re messy and clever and funny and strange, and their stories contain light and depth and heartache, and everything in between. They are as chaotic and mundane and beautiful as life. I get that these characters are fictional. I understand they live in books. But they are beautifully, hilariously, achingly real. They are human, in every way.
That’s how I’ve always wanted to write. I write to create life. I want my characters to jump off the page like Emily Thompson. I want them to burrow into your brain like Lydia Jaackson-Oberman. I want them to sync their breathing with yours, the way Cassie Aganovic does.
My book Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is about a million things: growing up, changing, coming out, renegotiating friendships, recognising privilege, falling in love. But it didn’t start with any of that. It started with Simon. I had this hazy vision of a messy-haired blond kid who loves Harry Potter and Oreos.
The heart of the process, for me, was making him come alive.
Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is out now.