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It’s Not Nothing that this book is narrated by a 107-year-old man in a retirement home, and again not nothing that the protagonist is a troubled kid “volunteering” at Shady Glen for reasons that author Gayle Forman keeps unrevealed for a good long time — for reasons that are, again, not nothing.

Roger Sutton: It was only when I was well into Not Nothing that I had a hint it was related to your first middle-grade novel, Frankie & Bug. It’s amazing the way you gave those two characters happy endings in Not Nothing.

Photo credit: Laina Karavani

Gayle Forman: One of the reasons I wanted to write Frankie & Bug is to show how quickly some social inequities that seem intractable can change and other ones can’t or don’t. I felt that even by writing a book about these two kids, one of whom in Frankie & Bug is a trans kid in 1986 when I was growing up — that kid would not have known how to describe themself. In setting that book in the eighties, I look back and see how much things have changed. When I sat down to write Not Nothing and realized, I’m not going to say exactly who, he might reappear, I wanted to give him the life that he wanted.

RS: As a writing process, where did Not Nothing begin? You have a number of different stories that intertwine with one another; what was the germ that started it?

GF: It was a lot of germs. My grandparents were German Jews who fled Hitler in 1938. They got out right before it was too late to leave by any legal means. Some of their stories were about: how long do you wait to leave when you have a business? Another part of it was that I have volunteered at assisted living facilities on and off throughout my life. My sister worked in one in Seattle, and I spent a lot of time in one with my mother-in-law. I love those places. I love the residents, I love getting to know them beyond the bingo-playing, because they all have these incredible stories. I don’t want to say everybody who’s old is wise, but everybody who’s old has lived a long time and has a different perspective. To me that is fascinating.

RS: There’s a lot of history, regardless of whether they’re wise.

GF: Exactly. They’re living history. After the 2016 election, we saw this huge spike in overtly proud hate groups that had previously been lurking in the corners, and it got me wondering what draws a person to that kind of hate and what draws a person away. I was thinking of Hannah Arendt’s line about the banality of evil and how it’s not a specific choice, it’s something you fall into. At my sister’s assisted living facility, I met a resident named Sam, who was ninety-eight years old. He had a better memory than I did and had incredible stories. He was an Austrian Jew who left Vienna in the 1920s because of quotas of how many Jews could go to universities, and he went back during the war. He told me such amazing stories — he was the most dynamic and incredible person and he inspired the character of Josey in Not Nothing. All the pieces kind of came together, and it “only” took me seven years to write!

RS: You make a very interesting choice of narrator.

GF: It’s not an obvious thing to have a 107-year-old man who hasn’t spoken in five years narrate a middle-grade novel, but I was obstinate that it had to be this way. I always knew I wanted Josey to narrate. The trick was figuring out his narration, which is an omniscient narration, and how that could channel a twelve-year-old’s voice in a way that felt authentically twelve and then pull back occasionally and offer his own 107-year-old perspective, because once again that’s the perspective I really wanted to frame the story.

RS: We don’t want to give away too much, but I thought the way you did that was really beautiful.

GF: I know you are a tough room, so thank you.

RS: In this book, as in Frankie & Bug, you have two kids who had some initial drama between them, but then they become allies. Why did you do that again here?

GF: It wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice, but I’m interested in the fact that as a society we are in a place of polarization. We are primed to get mad at each other, we are primed to assume the worst of each other. There are perceived slights and actual slights; these characters both do things that are not great to each other.

RS: More than slights, there are some terrible things.

GF: To be able to get past that can get you to a level of depth and connection that can be pretty powerful. It seems clear that Maya-Jade is going to trigger Alex, and he is going to react a certain way, and that will create this dynamic between the two of them. Alex is inspired by Josey’s story to rise to the occasion; he agrees to work with Maya-Jade, and he’s out of his comfort zone. She’s in her comfort zone, which makes it even worse. I’m speaking vaguely because of spoilers, but that gives him the confidence to acknowledge that Maya-Jade has vulnerabilities too and is not all bad. From there, something beautiful blooms.

RS: And he continues to withhold from her his own secret. We know from the beginning that he’s done something terrible, and we don't learn what he’s done until almost the end of the book. Occasionally you remind us that he’s done something bad, but as we grow to know him, we see him as a whole person before we find out the terrible thing that he did. It was tricky, in a good way.

GF: It had to be that way, right? If I told you what he did straight away, you would potentially and quite justifiably not want to read about this kid. I don’t think any person is the sum total of the worst thing they’ve ever done. We all have goodness inside of us, so by the time you learn what Alex has done, you understand the totality of him. And I imagine there will be some readers who still find it unforgivable, just like some adults in his world do once they find out. There are others who see the more complicated view of him, see where he has gone from the beginning of the story to the end, and give him the grace that Josey and Maya-Jade and some of the others give him.

RS: The grace that Josey gave Olka, who worked for his father, who says something terrible to him.

GF: Exactly. Olka did say something pretty terrible, but it got under his skin: this really smart girl who had been the top of her class while he’d gone off to university, and she’s stuck being the seamstress in his family’s business.

RS: What were the challenges of writing about the Holocaust?

GF: I didn’t want it to be a “Holocaust book,” so it was making sure that there were elements of the Josey/Olka story, which is of course framed by the Holocaust, and anyone who’s aware of history will understand what was happening in Poland in the summer of 1938. But I wanted to show their relationship, that they fell in love before the war breaks out. I really wanted to focus on Olka, who’s fictional, and on other people in the book who are not fictional, who are heroes, resistance fighters. I’m Jewish and had always been under the impression that the Poles were happy to hand over the Jews to the Nazis, but that wasn’t true at all. The Nazis basically rounded up the entire intelligentsia in Poland and they were the first to be imprisoned or executed. And Poland had a huge number of resistance fighters. And places: there was a pharmacy called the Eagle Pharmacy, which was in the Krakow Ghetto, and was sort of like what we could call today a safe space, and a place where information could get exchanged, and it was one of the only Gentile businesses that was allowed to continue in the “Jewish ghetto.” There’s a factory where Josey works, which is based on the Madritsch factory. It was a lot like Oskar Schindler, where we know he sheltered Jews in his factory — this was the same situation where the factory overemployed so there were four people for every one sewing machine and they would keep people later or on longer shifts when they knew there was going to be a selection.

I wanted to include all of that history so there’s this precursor, the feeling of the walls closing in, and Josey’s family, like so many families, trying to justify it away. “Oh, no no, I’m actually Polish, I fought in the war with the Poles, my grandfather fought in World War I with the kaiser,” so they thought when World War II broke out they would be fine. They were not fine. So all of that — and then making sure that the very graphic parts of this history are not too graphic. There are only a couple of chapters set in the ghetto and there’s one chapter at the Plaszow forced labor camp. I was not overemphasizing that because for readers who may not be familiar with the Holocaust it’s important to see how things grew and got out of control and led to these events without making it overly graphic.

RS: It’s tricky, because you don’t want the Holocaust story to take over the present-day story, but at the same time, you don’t want to minimize the Holocaust story in favor of the present-day story.

GF: I want them to inform each other, because history repeats, and it’s not always the same players, but it’s often a similar play. I showed it to my friend Marjorie Ingall, who writes a lot about Jewish children’s books, and I asked if this was a Holocaust book, because I don’t want to write a Holocaust book for a lot of reasons. I don’t want Jewish identity to be wrapped up in the Holocaust, I want it to be wrapped up in the spirit that Josey embodies, of having been through something like this and it’s terrible and should be remembered and also we still try to beckon people to their better selves even when we have lived through and seen people going the opposite direction.

RS: I worry about it happening here.

GF: Of course, I mean it’s not nothing that I started this book after 2016 and after Charlottesville.

RS: How did you find the shift from writing for teenagers — I’ll go even further back in your life to ask: how did you find the shift from writing journalism to writing for young people?

GF: That was an easier shift because I had worked at Seventeen magazine for so many years, and even when I wasn’t there I tended to write stories about young people. Before I worked for Seventeen, when I was in journalism school, I was gunning for Sassy magazine, which by the time I started working no longer existed. (Marjorie Ingall, P.S., worked for Sassy magazine.)

RS: A lot of people mourned its passing.

GF: It was only when I wrote my first young adult novel that it was like oh, right, there’s a reason I’ve always been drawn to writing about young people and for young people. The work I did at Seventeen — nobody could believe what we did. They sent me to Sierra Leone to write about child soldiers in the civil war and they sent me all over the U.S. to write about teen migrant farm workers, and we always had adults who thought, “Really, kids care about that?” They absolutely did, so that was the first taste of the fact that kids can really identify with other young people who don't have agency in their life and bad things are happening to them even if their experiences are very different. It was my first experience with respecting that reader and realizing they do rise to the occasion. When I wrote my first YA novel it was like this full-circle moment.

When I wrote Frankie & Bug it was challenging at first to find the voice. I think I was overly precious, and same with the first version of Not Nothing — it was what Marjorie would call ungapatchkert, just so over-bloated. I loved the Beverly Cleary books, the Ramona books in particular, when I was a kid. Looking back, it was because Ramona is so flawed and she’s treated with grace: her parents are always gently disciplining her and pointing her in the right direction. When I remembered how much I love Ramona, Bug’s voice came to me. I realized she can be kind of a brat, kind of self-absorbed, not because she was a bad person, but because she was eleven years old and trying to figure out how to be a human and cross that gap between the person she was and the person she wanted to be. Once I got that, I loved writing those characters — I felt like they were my kids. And I had the same challenge here, which was figuring out how to have Josey tell a story about a twelve-year-old boy. And then once I realized how he could do it, and got Alex’s voice, and got Maya-Jade — she was pure comic relief for me every time she was on the page, I was so happy being with her. You just get to the point — and it can be a lot of drudgery before you get there — where the voices really click and the story starts to flow.

RS: Do you want to stay in middle grade? Do you want to go back and forth? What do you want to do?

GF: I wish that I was the kind of person who could feel like I’m doing this thing and I’m gonna stick with it, but I have too many varied interests. I have a young adult coming out in January and I’ve been working on another YA with my now-twenty-year-old daughter — she’s not writing it but it’s sort of about her travel experiences.

RS: So in a way each book leads to the next book, but the next book can be something completely different. Do you feel freer with each book you publish? Like that you can do more? Different?

GF: I feel freer the older I get. There have been times when I’ve been like, “Oh I should do this for my career.” Now that I’m older I’m just like, “You know what? I hit the lottery because one of my books got made into a movie. I feel very, very lucky for that. It did very wonderful things, and that is something that will probably never happen again like that. So just write what you want, and work with people who you like.”

RS: That’s what Sendak always said about Where the Wild Things Are. Sometimes it bothered him that it was, like, the one book people knew him for. But he said, “It bought me my house, it gave me the freedom to do anything that I wanted.”

GF: Yeah, If I Stay is my retirement, so…

RS: Well, don’t retire yet.

GF: I’m not going to!

RS: But I gotta tell you, it’s kinda nice here!

GF: I like to say I’m in semi-retirement, I work way less than I used to. I used to force myself to work eight hours a day and I would throw away six hours of it, so wouldn’t you be better off gardening or walking the dog or cooking or seeing friends? And then just write the two hours that you know you’re ready to do. Before, I probably would have thought that was some kind of procrastination — but I still manage to move all of these things forward and through the process, so I’m all for it. I was probably worried about getting older, particularly because we work in children’s literature, and am I gonna be some old lady? I’ll take it, call me Grandma. Well, not yet, my kids are still too young, but I’m looking forward to it.

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