Gayle Forman

Gayle Forman: Those moments of connection, when you can have them with people who seem so different from you on the outside, I really do think that it it breeds a level of connectiveness and empathy, and it is much harder to harden your heart.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Life and writing are all about connection, true connection between people, the kind that bridges across differences, across borders, across years, and even across our own flaws and worst mistakes. That kind of relationship can inspire us to become our best self, though progress in that direction often involves showing up, getting it wrong, and trying over and over.

Gayle Forman: In some years, I've done better than others. And on the years that I've done really well, I know that, like, I'm gonna atone and start over and screw up all over again, and that's just the work of life. It's just inching closer to the person that I wanna be.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Gail Foreman is the best selling author of If I Stay, Frankie and Bug, Not Nothing, Afterlife, and many more. Before becoming a novelist, she was a journalist for 17 magazine. Her work explores grief, memory, identity, and this slow imperfect process of growing into the person we hope to become. In this episode, Gail talks about growing up as a self described odd duck, the Ramona books that shaped both her life and her parenting, and the formative years she spent traveling solo. She opens up about the loss that inspired If I Stay, why she's drawn to flawed characters, and how fiction became a way to survive grief and stay connected to the people she's lost.

My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and this is the reading culture, a show where we speak with diverse authors about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our community. We dive deep into their personal experiences and inspirations. Our show is made possible by Beanstack, the leading solution for motivating people to read more. Learn more at beanstack.com, and make sure to check us out on Instagram at the readingculturepod and subscribe to our newsletter for bonus content at the readingculturepod.com forward slash newsletter alright on to the show Hey, listeners. Are you looking for a fun, easy way to track your reading and earn cool rewards?

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And if you are an educator searching for a fresh alternative to accelerated reader, Beanstack is the perfect tool to cultivate a thriving reading culture. Ready to turn the page? Visit beanstack.com to learn more. Before she became a best selling author, before If I Stay was turned into a film that topped the charts, Gail experienced a real life brutal tragedy.

Gayle Forman: The big loss that I think informs a lot of my work and definitely is the DNA of this book and was the reason I wrote If I Stay in the First Place was in 02/2001, my husband and I are two best friends and their two kids died in a car crash. And it was just sort of a life altering event because it was this huge loss, but also just that an entire family ceased to exist in an instant was sort of horrible and mind blowing. And, you know, I assumed that I would either never see my friends again or if there was some afterlife, which I kind of doubted there was at that point, I would see them when I died. Neither of which sort of felt very comforting in the moment. But then these really strange things started to happen, which is I had a dream that felt so distinctly like a visitation.

I've never had a dream like that since where my friend was bringing me the little boy who's very much like the Teddy in If I Stay to say goodbye to. And it just shook me to the core. And then a couple months later, my husband and I were traveling in New Zealand, we were in this camper van on a remote road. We just turned to each other. And at the same time, we said, Robert's with us right now, isn't he?

And we both felt this presence. And I started doing some more reading and understanding of how other traditions do not have this big giant wall between life and death. And I started to see that they were still with me in a way that I couldn't really comprehend. And then seven years later, I sat down one morning to write a book that was very much informed by the loss of those friends. And I had no idea it was coming.

Just one day I woke up and it was there. And when I wrote that book, this is If I Stay, the family in If I Stay, the mom and the dad and Teddy are basically replicas of the friends that I lost. And Mia is the fictional character that I created and everybody else. But when I wrote that book and particularly the family scenes, they were in the room with me. It was an ecstatic experience.

I could not believe how present they were. And I understood how profoundly writing about them had brought them back. And it was a real lesson in how memory and love, and when you keep it alive like that, it makes you immortal.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Those words reminded me of something from the afterword of Gale's most recent novel called Afterlife and it goes like this. Quote, recollection is how we hold close the people we love but who are no longer with us. It is how, in my experience, we survive loss, end quote. I read those words back to Gail, and here is how she responded.

Gayle Forman: Now whenever anybody tells me about having lost somebody, whether it was a parent when they were younger or somebody recently, the first thing I do is I ask for a specific story. I ask, like, oh, tell me, like, what were they like? Tell me, like, a funny thing that happened. And it's amazing because without exception, people are so comforted by that. And I've heard from people how grateful they are because there's a reluctance in our culture to engage with death and the dying and and the dead like that.

People wanna steer clear. They they don't wanna pry they wanna give you space and privacy. And it doesn't invite opportunity to sort of reignite the memory of that person and reignite the love. So it was a real learning experience for me. It sort of changed how I go about dealing with other people's loss.

And then when it came to afterlife, it was a very specific that was really the core of the book, which is how some people estrange themselves from the dead because it's too painful and what that does to them and how other people weave them into their lives just in a different way. Like, they still exist, and they still have a relationship. It's a different kind of relationship, but it's still a relationship.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: We really started off very deep, but let's go back to the beginning a little bit. And if you could paint some broad strokes of what your early childhood was like.

Gayle Forman: I feel like it was a pretty typical Jenex childhood of that benign neglect Yeah. And a lot of boredom. Whenever kids ask me, when did you become a writer? I talk about these hikes that my parents who were, like, not quite hippies. They're too old to be hippies.

They're so they were hippie adjacent, and they they used to drag us on these hikes every weekend in, like, the Santa Monica Mountains. Now I love those areas, but back then, they were just the most atrociously boring things. Because I was the baby, my older sibling kind of aged out. So it would just be me and my parents and my mom stopping to look at every single flower, which of course is now something that I do. And I have my little picture of this app so I could be like, what is that?

And take a picture and it tells me. Yeah. But it was born out of my skull, so I just started making up these stories. I would walk behind them and I would be some mixture of Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman, and they were Nazis or Jewish, but it's my imagination. I could do what I want.

And I think that's where I started, like, concocting this story. So that was very much my childhood, like, suburban childhood, riding my bike around the neighborhood, pretending it was a horse. But I was also I was on a panel recently and somebody was talking about how seventh grade is the year that you get to test how awful a person you can be and live with yourself. And I guess my face blanked out. She's like, Gail thinks something different.

I'm like, yo. Because I was bullied. I was so such a weird girl. I look back and I'm like, was I really? I I liked thrift shopping clothes and I lived in my imagination and I like weird music, which sort of feels just very of a type.

But I guess for the San Fernando Valley, the suburbs where I grew up, it it felt weird. So I didn't really have super close friends. I would say until my thirties, started making, like, really, really close friends. So I think I spent a lot of time in my imagination.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: And did you feel like the odd duck of your family, or were you, like, in line with your family? You know?

Gayle Forman: I mean, my family is all odd ducks.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. That's what I mean.

Gayle Forman: So I mean, with the exception of my sister, my sister growing up was, like, the pretty social one. But it turns out in adulthood, in retrospect, you know, she felt alienated because everybody I don't think anybody doesn't feel like an odd duck.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I know. Ain't that the truth? Were you into reading as a kid? Oh, totally. Yeah.

Gayle Forman: I was a little bit of a late reader, I think. And for whatever reason, didn't think I was a strong reader. And then I remember one day I stayed after school because I was going to my friend Alison Rod's house after school and she was in the advanced reading group and I stayed with her and then they saw me read like, Oh, wait, you should be in this group too. So I loved reading. I started out reading, I think, like the Ramona books, which I think we will get back to and the Beverly Cleary and all the early You, like the Cat Ate My Gymsuit, the Pauls and Dell, all those great books.

And then I my dad would take me once a week to the Crown Bookstore, and I would buy Sweet Dreams Romance. And from there, I graduated to, like, Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, like It's a quick joke. Total smut when I was, like, 12 and 13. The things I knew about things back then were wild. And I always tell parents this when they're worried about what their kids are reading.

It's like, as long as they're getting lost in a book, who cares?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. So was school then like an unhappy place for you if you're being bullied? Were you,

Gayle Forman: like, aware of it? Shockingly, no. Even though I went to for part of my I went to a really good school, but I was a terrible student.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, how so?

Gayle Forman: I was really bad about doing my homework. And I was lucky because I was, like, a smart enough kid that I could get by just with the tests and in class, but I was so bad about ever making a deadline. I don't know what it was. It was like this real block. And then when I was a junior in high school, I went to England for the year to be an exchange student.

And I found out that I would just be turning in a dossier of work at the end of the year or taking an exam at the end of the year and that would account for my entire grade. And I flipped out like, are you talking about? And strangely, once the sort of daily deadline was taken away, I I learned to budget my time actually did fine. And then I came back and never turned in an assignment sort of late in my life and that counts like all twelve years of a journalist. But because I was constantly missing homework and like forging notes and hiding from teachers and hijacking the report cards that would come in the mail from my parents.

Like, school was more fraught than it needed to be. And so I loved the learning part of it. I loved just the making of connections and connecting ideas. I just was really bad about writing the paper about that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Aren't we all? But you said you weren't unhappy socially. But was there, like, an age when you really came into your own truly?

Gayle Forman: This summer program at Cal State Northridge called teenage drama workshop. And I went from being a kind of quiet kid at my one school because I had sort of learned just to sort of keep my head down over the course of the summer, like, my inner drama girl just came out. And I was just like this total Gemini transformation. So I think that was really, really formative, and that was just like my happy, happy place. So that was really, I think, instrumental.

Ramona wished she had a million dollars so her father would be fun again. There have been many changes in the Quimby household since mister Quimby had lost his job, but the biggest change was in mister Quimby himself. First of all, missus Quimby found a full time job working for another doctor, which was good news. However, even a second grader could understand that one paycheck would not stretch as far as two paychecks, especially when there was so much talk of taxes, whatever they were. Missus Quimby's new job meant that mister Quimby had to be home when Ramona returned from school.

Ramona and her father saw a lot of one another. At first, she thought having her father to herself for an hour or two every day would be fun. But when she came home, she found him running the vacuum cleaner, filling out job applications, or sitting on the couch smoking and staring into space. He could not take her to the park because he had to stay near the telephone. Someone might call to offer him a job.

Ramona grew uneasy. Maybe he was too worried to love her anymore.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Gail read from Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary, and we could probably record an entire episode on the influence of Ramona. I'm looking at you, Renee Watson, Victoria Jamieson, many others. But Ramona is a beloved, relatable character and has been a constant through the lives of so many readers. The Ramona book's humor and honesty feel just as relevant adulthood as they do in childhood. As a kid, Gail saw herself as Ramona.

And as a parent, rereading them was eye opening.

Gayle Forman: I remember feeling the anxiety and the discomfort of Ramona going through this. I was always aware neither of my parents I mean, my mother had her family had come for money, then they lost it all. And my father was one of seven and grew up poor, depression baby. So that that sort of sense of scarcity was always in in my childhood. So I related to that.

But also just to sort of the feeling like that she was part of the family and she was not shielded from what was going on in the family. And and I grapple with that a lot because, you know, intellectually, I think that that's probably a good thing for children. It builds resilience, and it makes them understand that they are not the center of the universe. And then once you're a parent, you kind of do wanna protect your kids from everything and make them think that they're the center of the universe. Even though I know intellectually, that's not the way to build the kind of person that I hope my kids will be.

So those books really inform me for lots of reasons. I think I saw myself in just how flawed Ramona was, that she was there was this chasm between the person she wanted to be and the person that she was. And every time, like, she stumbled, she was aware of it. And she wanted to be better. But still she was seven or eight or nine or 10.

Like, she was developing as a human in a way that her parents both recognized that her mistakes were those of kids and she's allowed to be flawed, but also had this moral expectation that, like, you know, you need to try and be your best self here, your better self.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: In the hunt to discover her true and better self, teenage Gail made a whimsical decision that would wind up becoming a major turning point.

Gayle Forman: I was an exchange student for my junior year of high school, which was also just such a randomly weird thing. I had not gone away. I wouldn't call myself particularly adventurous. I've been to summer sleepaway camp for, like, two weeks, and I was miserably homesick for one of them. But I'm like, no.

I wanna go to England because I liked English bands. So I was like, that's why I'm gonna go to I'm gonna go to live in London. Right? And so I wound up living in this Like, go

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: to Kings Road or whatever that was called.

Gayle Forman: Exactly. Exactly. Hang out with Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and head over to Ireland to hang out with you too. Obviously, Bono and I were gonna be tight.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: She ended up in a tiny village college outside Leicester, England. There were no mandatory classes, no required attendance, and the students called teachers by their first names. For Gail, it was a revelation. It was the first time school felt freeing, and she loved it.

Gayle Forman: That's where I learned to be an okay student. But also, there was this huge group of weirdos and wonderful people and we glom together and that was like the first time I really experienced being part of a community. So that was really the year that I think I changed from the person I might have become to the person that I did become because I came back from that year with an English accent that that was really real because nobody would understand me if I use my own accent and I'm very suggest ible to accents like that. So I told my parents my senior year of high school, I shall not be going to college. I am attending the University of Life.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Uh-huh. Did you attend the University of Life?

Gayle Forman: I did attend the University of Life. Where did it take you? Where was it? It took me to a health food store where I got a job and I worked all of senior year because you used be able to do something called work experience and leave school at noon to work. And then I bought a one way ticket.

When I graduated, my parents bought me a backpack and a Eurail pass, and I traveled for three months with one of my friends from the year in England and wound up staying in Amsterdam. And I I lived in Amsterdam on off for year and a half. I worked as a maid in a backpacker hotel in the middle of the Red Light District. Amazing. It sort of ignited my love of travel, which has sort of continued.

And then when I was 21, I was like, well, I should probably maybe go to college. And randomly decided to go to University of Oregon because it had rolling admissions. It was too late to apply to the UC schools. And I went there to be a doctor, and that didn't pan out. But I wound up studying journalism, and they had this incredible journalism program.

And there was also this wonderful thriving music scene when I was there. It was like when the Pacific Northwest and grunge was ascendant, and that's where I met my husband. Life delivers. Life delivered again. Yeah.

That'll be the title of your memoir. My memoir.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Gail's love of travel has a lot to do with the intense personal connections she's made on the road. And maybe that's because without a common cultural background, travelers have to discover something kindred in each other from scratch. She finds those relationships particularly powerful.

Gayle Forman: Those moments of connection, when you can have them with people who seem so different from you on the outside, I really do think that it breeds a level of connectiveness and empathy, and it is much harder to harden your heart, which is a, you know, maybe today was is not necessarily the best thing, but I think it is. And when I think about fiction writing, you are literally inhabiting somebody else's experience. It is it is an act of empathy when you write fiction and it is active empathy when you read fiction. So I believe that all that traveling was really as much of the training for becoming a novelist as the actual sort of writing that I did as a journalist.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I love that idea. And I like the idea of expanding your comfort zone, which is a really true and good way of thinking about that and, like, being open to that feeling. Because you're right, especially if you were traveling and you're younger, it's like no you have a big phone to, like, fall into and, like, you really couldn't be connected. Yeah. For Gail, valuing those connections to strangers made journalism an easy career choice.

Gayle Forman: I love to travel, and I love to write, and I love to ask people about things that are maybe none of my business, and it was just the perfect collision of all three of those things.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: So, basically, you knew coming out of college, like, this is something that I know I wanna do.

Gayle Forman: I had my eyes, like, set on coming to New York and working for Sassy magazine. Sassy. Blessed be her memory.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yes. May her memory be a blessing.

Gayle Forman: By the time I got here, Sassy had gone kaput. Sassy's living in all women who read that at that age. Yes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Gil missed out on Sassy, but spent years writing for 17, Elle, Cosmo, and The Nation among others. She seemed to love that work, so I asked her if she misses being a journalist or could see herself even being a journalist now.

Gayle Forman: I would be such a good journalist now because I'm older and I I don't feel awkward at all, and I also learned how to listen more to see what people are open to talking about and not talking about. But I actually did have a discomfort with journalism in the end. And it wasn't just the asking of questions. It was more the parachuting in to report on something that you just could not possibly have proper context for in such a short period of time and then parachuting out. And, you know, mostly it was fine.

Like, I worked at 17. I I did, you know, great articles that I think brought important stories with some significant nuance to young readers. But I remember I did this one piece and it was this guy who had been arrested as sort of part of the earth liberation front. And he had like just barely done anything, but they had been so unable to capture any of these guys that they sort of threw the book at him. And so I did an article about him and then it came out right after 09:11 and the sort of feeling changed.

The article didn't change, but so much of the way that they framed him both in the headlines and the

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Gayle Forman: In the captions, I just was like, this is somebody's life. And, like, this could determine how long they stay in prison. And I just I started to feel really just uncomfortable with it because it was like early clickbaity. Right? It was this idea that you have to just like hype things up to grab people's attention.

And I've always preferred the nuance of it all. And that's why novels are just such a happy place to be because there really is no clickbait in a novel, and you can be as nuanced and, you know, gray as the story needs to be even in children's literature, which I think is just such a exciting world to be in.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I am thinking about this structure. I've thought a lot about you know, not a lot of authors for young people take the approach of this, like, complex weaving. And that's for me, that's, like, my favorite fiction to read. You know? It's just when I'm all of a sudden, it's like you have that moment of you're like, ah.

You know? And, yeah, I wonder if that's just what comes out of you or if there's sort of, like, deeper feeling behind why you want those structures to kind of have this build.

Gayle Forman: With not nothing, I knew it was gonna be a story within a story. And I knew that the reveal of the bad thing that Alex has done to land him you'd get him arrested and land him sort of in this mandatory community service over the summer at an assisted living facility. I knew that had to be a slow reveal because if you found out about it before you knew Alex, you're gonna have maybe form a different judgment of him than when you find out about it and you know the totality of him. And I wanted it to be a much more complicated calculus for readers. I think some young readers will read about what he did and will decide he's a terrible person.

But most so far seem to think that he's a very sympathetic person because they understand the context in which he has done this thing. So it required that slow reveal, but with enough points that it felt true to Alex who himself is not able to kind of even think about what he's done because he's so full of shame

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Gayle Forman: And also as a device to keep the readers going. It's fun when I go into middle schools. I'm like, Alex did this terrible thing. Do you want me to tell you what what he did? And they're like, yeah.

I'm like, you really wanna know? And they scream, yeah. I'm like, tough. You have to read the book to find out. They they they hate me, and then they read the book.

And then with afterlife, I think there were two issues that I wanted to explore. One was, like, how we do and do not grieve well in our culture. I like what you said about the chasm between, like, who you are and who you want

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: to be. And that really it has to do a lot with both afterlife and not nothing. You know? And not nothing, like, it's like that rising to the occasion when you can, when you can, like, have these moments of, like, crossing a chasm even if you maybe come back. You know?

Here, you're taking these, like, little leaps.

Gayle Forman: These paths are not linear.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Right? Are not linear. Yeah. Yeah. Have you felt like that in your own life?

Do you feel like writing fiction is, like, moving you across that chasm?

Gayle Forman: That's an interesting question. I hadn't thought about that, like, whether the writing of fiction does. I think it probably helps. I think it really is more how I do my daily life, how I treat people in my daily life. And that also comes back to how I treat myself because the more forgiving and the less shameful I can be about the parts of myself, which I've come to realize even the parts that seem kind of troublesome are all there for a purpose.

They're all trying to help me in their way. The more I can do that, the more I can be open and generous and be the person I want to be out in the world and engaged out in the world. And so, you know, it's something I think about. I love Judaism for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that we have a whole holiday every year, Yom Kippur, which is a day of atonement, which is really a day of kind of reckoning. And it's also like a practice death, which is kind of interesting.

But it's for me, it's a time where I get to really think about, like, how did I do last year in terms of closing that chasm? In some years, I've done better than others. And on the years that I've done really well, I know that, like, I'm gonna atone and start over and screw up all over again. And that's just the work of life is just inching closer to the person that I wanna be. I think you become better at things the more you do them.

I have also changed the way that I write. But then there there was like a period where like writing just felt very fraught, possibly because I had had this big success with If I Stay and it's like lightning in a bottle, you're trying to capture it again, which is just not possible. But recently I think maybe this is age, maybe this is Lexapro, I don't know. But like I'm just much calmer about it and I write things and I know they're not ready and instead of just like grinding and grinding which felt so it made writing not fun, I put them aside for months, sometimes for years, and then I come back to them. And because they have such a inventory of things, it works.

And I think of my dog who like takes his bones out the backyard and buries them for a couple weeks and then brings them back in when they're all nice and seasoned. And I think I do that with my novels now.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Books like If I Stay and Afterlife don't shy away from heavy themes, grief, identity, mistakes that cannot be undone, topics that sometimes society deems too heavy for kids.

Gayle Forman: I think that it's almost like these books like these can help kids identify if something like that has happened to them Mhmm. And help them get through something like that if it has happened to them. But in the best of scenarios where they haven't been touched by any kind of tragedy or grief, it's almost like a a dress rehearsal. And they get to kind of experience some of the vicarious emotions in a really safe space, which I've been looking at research. We know that books, novels in particular, have a a link to empathy, but there's now research that suggests resilience as well.

And I think that by being able to kind of experience something like this at a remove, it is it is helpful. And we should stop trying to protect kids from them because we are seeing a mental health crisis right now with young people. So clearly, all this protecting from this kind of thing is is not really the key. There's a different kind of thing I think that we maybe need to protect them from like the exposure to social media and what have you. But there's something to just being able to experience this in a safe space that I think is helpful for for kids and for adults.

And I recently came across something where somebody said that afterlife should have a content warning because of grief. And I am very cognizant of like the parents who are reading this who have lost a kid. I think that they tend to self select and not read books like this, but I can't tell you the majority of letters I've gotten so far about this book have been from grieving parents and how thankful just to have their experience shown and they feel seen.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, that's so powerful. I imagine you might not have expected that would be.

Gayle Forman: I sort of knew from If I Stay that when you write honestly about grief and loss, people feel it. And I knew when I lost my friends, when I read other people writing about grief and loss, I felt so comforted to know that I wasn't alone.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. And what about, like, school visit? Any moments from those that have really stuck with you?

Gayle Forman: When I go to sort of middle schools and elementary schools with not nothing, it's really interesting because I will I bring a poster with me, at the end of the presentation, we talk about what does it mean to rise to the occasion. And they get to kind of fill out the way they wanna rise to the occasion. And in some schools, it's so much about accomplishment and working hard and that whole ethos. And in other schools, it's so much about being there for people in need and and volunteering and helping other people. So it's it's really interesting to kind of see the different forces at playing in people's lives in terms of, like, what it means to be your best self.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: What do you think is, like, you know, when rising to the occasion means what I think you want for rising to the occasion to mean?

Gayle Forman: You know, I I think there's less of an emphasis on accomplishment and achievement and more of an emphasis on sort of community and this idea that each one of us has this impact in our life that we cannot see. Like, when you look at the the number of people and the number of billions of years in the universe, we are all so so insignificant. And yet, within the context of our own lives, I sort of think each of one of us is like a pebble dropped into a pool. And we can see the ripple effects that are nearest to us, but we often can't see them the further out that they get. And so for that to happen, we needed to really sort of zoom out to kind of see these different people and zoom back in and zoom out and zoom back in until at the end, the various people on the various timelines, they all collide and connect into what I hope is a very satisfying ending.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: In honor of the friends Gail lost, the ones who inspired so much of her work, I asked her to share one last story to remember them by.

Gayle Forman: Every story in If I Stay is like that story. Like, the dad who was super super punk rock and then started wearing nineteen fifties suits and gave them all up. Like, that is that is Robert. And we actually he gave this leather jacket, this big heavy duty leather jacket to Nick who was Robert's friend and bandmate. And Nick wore it for years.

And the character who played Denny, was based on Robert in the movie, he wore it in the movie. It's in the Cool. The movie poster, him wearing that jacket. And now my 21 year old daughter has that. So

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, that's great.

Gayle Forman: I I just love how that one jacket is just this artifact in time that is its own immortality. And I sometimes think like, Rami, your jacket is on a movie poster. Like, it's on it's on, like, millions of books. People will never know. But I know, and that that makes me happy.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: For her reading challenge, flawed characters, Gail is going to bat for the prickly, the messy, the not here to be liked protagonist. She points out that kids are used to reading about heroes, but it can be just as powerful and maybe even more so to read about characters who mess up, who fall short, and who grow anyway. After all, real kids aren't perfect, so why should their fictional counterparts be?

Gayle Forman: I'm gonna put Harriet the spy on my list. I sometimes wonder if Harriet the spy would get published today because she's just just, you know, has some not great things about her. And yet and yet she feels very relatable as a very specific kind of, like, unparented child in in New York City. Kate Messner has a new book called, I think, the trouble with heroes or the problem with heroes. I am going to put the hunger games in there because Katniss Everdeen is real prickly.

And, you know, I I think about that character, and I think about if she was not such a badass warrior, would we like her at all? She shows herself to be heroic, but she's not super likable. And I love that those books succeeded not in spite of that, but because of that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I love that. And from your books, you would include?

Gayle Forman: Frankie and Bug. Bug is in particularly very I mean, I think all of my books. There's a bunch of them where, like, the reader's like, I hated this character at the beginning. So Frankie a book, not nothing. And then I would say I have a, a You novel called We Are Inevitable.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You can find Gail's reading challenge and all past reading challenges at the readingculturepod.com. This week's Beanstack featured librarian is Lori Shalio, the media specialist at Heritage Intermediate School in Middlebury, Indiana. She reveals how sharing spicy chicken nuggets and a very brave principal helped bring her school's community reading goal to life.

Lori Shallio: I feel our most successful reading challenge was actually our first community challenge, mainly because it really showcased kind of how my admin and other members of staff kind of came together to really support the kids in their reading goals. So I went to mister Dave Gaskell, our principal, and basically asked him, how best can we torture you if these kids reach their reading goal? And he came back with the idea of doing a really interesting, like, Hot Ones style interview. So our top 10 readers were able to ask him questions as he ate spicier and spicier chicken nuggets that were made by our lovely kitchen manager, Tracy. And it was really cool because the minute we announced what was going to happen, it was like the next day that the kids reached their community goal.

And it was just really cool to see them all come together and also to really be wrong. And I I completely underestimated how quickly they would get our first community goal done. So we recorded our Hot Wind style interview, and all of the kids watched it. It was very, very popular. They loved it, and so did we.

So it was a really, really good time.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: This has been the reading culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Gail Foreman. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and currently, I'm reading The Scammer by Tiffany d Jackson and Long Bright River by Liz Moore. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take one minute to give us five stars on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. Your reviews help us get the show recommended to others, so everyone is very important to us. Thank you for doing them.

This episode was produced by Mel Webb and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at the readingculturepod.com/ newsletter for special offers and bonus content. Thanks for listening, and keep reading.