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David Levithan on Every Day

by Christine M. Heppermann
Dec 26, 2012 | Filed in Authors & Illustrators
From the November/December 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine:

Reviewer Christine Hepperman asks author and editor David Levithan about writing gender (and the lack thereof) in his YA novel Every Day. Read the full review of Every Day here.

Christine Hepperman: Were there specific challenges in writing a character who is both genders and neither?

David Levithan: When you think of a character as purely a voice, purely a self, purely as words, it’s easy to defy gender. I had never noticed before how largely genderless English is, lending itself well to this neutrality. The foreign translations, I imagine, are going to be more of a challenge, since other languages unfortunately gender language much more.
Christine M. Heppermann
Christine M. Heppermann
Christine Heppermann is the author of Ask Me How I Got Here, Poisoned Apples, and the Backyard Witch series, co-authored with Ron Koertge (all Greenwillow) and of Backyard Chickens (Houghton).

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