Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

Sponsored by

Bella is The Glass Girl, transparent to everybody but herself, and so, so fragile. And, certainly, she has a drinking problem, but as her story painfully reveals, twelve steps won’t be nearly enough. Please read on to learn more from my AA meeting conversation with author Kathleen Glasgow.

Roger Sutton: I haven’t had a drink in over twenty-five years, but this book sure made me want one.

Kathleen Glasgow: It did? I haven’t had a drink in almost seventeen, but I don’t miss drinking. I think I miss having something that can make you instantly feel better and calm down. And sometimes the smell of cigarettes, because I quit smoking, too, and that is so much more of a visceral, physical reaction for me. Whereas when I think about drinking, it’s more of an emotional response.

RS: Doesn't someone say in the book that staying off cigarettes is harder than not drinking? It’s true!

KG: Yes, it’s the counselor who says that. Something a lot of people don’t understand is that you shouldn’t judge people or shame them for what they need to do to survive. If someone quits drinking but they still need to smoke — sometimes you need to just pick your poison. People have different coping mechanisms and different methods of sobriety.

RS: I definitely got this reading the book, that it’s up to each person to become sober. You can’t force somebody to do it, you can’t keep someone on the straight and narrow, they’ve got to do it themselves.

KG: All you can do is be there for when they’re ready, to offer your support. Also, I don’t fault people who are like, “I can’t help them through it this time, I have to protect my space.” That’s okay too. I do feel like only if you’ve gone through sobriety can you understand what someone’s going through when they’re trying to get to that place.

RS: I am sober — I was a hardcore alcoholic for a long time — and I wonder what it’s like to read this book if you weren’t, because I’m sure it’s completely different.

KG: I think that’s true, and I’m interested to see what people say. In my previous book, You’d Be Home Now, I was writing about Emmy struggling with her brother’s addiction, and I got a lot of messages from readers saying, “I’m the Emmy in my family. My father is the Joey, or my brother is just like Joey.” I think some people will look at this book the same way, where they aren't necessarily Bella but they know a Bella, or they’ll be attached to something else in Bella’s life, like her parents’ divorce. I wanted to make sure she had experiences that other people can connect to reading the book.

One thing I did think about a lot, that I had been thinking about for a long time, is how substance abuse attaches itself to some people and not others. Like Bella, I started drinking at age eleven: a very innocent-seeming game of quarters and champagne with my cousins at a holiday event. It made me feel like, “This is so great! I feel different, I feel relaxed, and everything is better.” I just started chasing that feeling. But my cousins never had a problem with alcohol. So I’m really interested in what people have to say about that aspect of the book, how addiction can be physically generational and emotionally generational. Bella’s mother is the one who says, “We can have a drink together,” and a lot of people will let their kids have wine at dinner, and you just never know what’s going to happen after that. I’m always curious about how it starts, what was that core moment for people.

RS: I didn’t drink when I was eleven or even sixteen, but in my thirties it really kicked in. Once you get that connection of, “If I have this drink, I’ll feel better,” like as a cure, that to me is when it’s all over.

KG: That’s when the cycle starts, because you get really drunk and feel all the shame, but then, “If I just have another drink, I’ll feel better.” And then it starts all over again. I wish more people viewed binge-drinking as a form of self-harm.

RS: You know, I secretly wish we could bring Prohibition back. I know it wouldn't work, but I just don’t see the good that alcohol does. I guess it’s a social lubricant, but it’s really hard for me to make a case for drinking.

KG: I tried to talk about that in the book with Bella’s father, who thinks, “They’re teenagers, their job is to break boundaries and figure things out and make mistakes. Of course there’s gonna be drinking.” But what if you taught them something else? Like, really, you don’t need to go out and drink to have a good time.

RS: That was one of the hardest things for me, was thinking it wasn’t going to be possible for me to go out and have a good time without drinking. Or to write, which would have been a real problem.

KG: I would never have been able to complete Girl in Pieces if I had kept drinking. When I was younger, I used to like to write poems and stuff and drink while I was doing it, you know, let everything flow. But you know what? It wasn’t any good because you can’t focus. We’ll lionize people like Jack Kerouac, especially when you’re younger, like, “Look what he did: he was drunk and high all the time and he wrote these great novels.” But look what happened later. You don’t have to kill yourself to make art, you just need to make art. These other things don’t have to be part and parcel, making art or living life. You can go out and have a good time — I go to parties now and people are drinking and I’m happy to just sit and watch and go home when I feel uncomfortable. In the book when another character says, “My life has become really small because of my alcoholism” — my life became very small. In a lot of ways, it’s not a bad thing, to live a small, safe, healthy life.

RS: That’s the dream, to me.

KG: We’re living the dream.

RS: The first thing I ever wrote about children’s books was for a meeting of the Modern Language Association back in the ’80s, and it was about alcoholism in teenage novels. These would have been mostly published in the 1970s — The Late Great Me, Sarah T.: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic — very Afterschool Special. It’s so interesting to compare how your book works to how those books work. The whole YA audience has aged up. Those books were being read by mostly girls, mostly eleven and twelve-year-old girls, which is not the audience I see for this book or for YA in general. I see this as a high school book. That do you think?

KG: I’m fifty-five, so I know exactly the books you’re talking about. I grew up reading those books and reading Paula Danziger and Norma Klein. I was really grateful because I found them very comforting. They were talking about real things. And then it seemed like books for teens shifted and people weren’t writing about real contemporary fiction issues like drinking, sex, or birth control until Judy Blume’s Forever, which we all passed around in eighth grade. And I’ll say that kids can read whatever they want, they’re going to read what they want and they’re going to read when they need to read it. My books are fourteen-plus and they probably skew older, but there are so many kids who are younger than fourteen who find my books and read them because they need to, because they’re experiencing the same thing that the characters are experiencing, and then they write to me and tell me what’s going on in their lives. I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on what is a middle grade novel these days — they’re marketing Jane Austen now as young adult.

RS: Well, young adult has really aged up, but you wouldn’t find The Late Great Me published as a middle grade today even though it was read by twelve-year-olds back in the ’70s. Middle-grade fiction has changed, probably because YA fiction has become so sophisticated that there’s more of a safe space around middle-grade fiction to keep it distinct. But when I compare The Glass Girl to Sarah T.: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, your book is messier, and I mean that in a good way. What I found in all those books was that they all had the same plot points, they always kept a bottle of scotch and milk in their lockers.

KG: That must have gone bad too!

RS: There was always a car crash that was brought on by drinking, and they always ended with the hero or heroine going to their first AA meeting: “Hello, my name is Sarah T., I’m an alcoholic.” So they were realistic and ended at a point where anything could happen afterward, but the sense was, “She’s gone to rehab, she’s going to go home, it’s gonna be tough, but she’s conquered this.” No, she hasn’t conquered this.

KG: No, Bella relapses in rehab and then has that moment at the party where she does drink but then spits it out in his face.

RS: Oh, that broke my heart. I really thought that good things might happen with that boy, but maybe I’m a romantic.

KG: You know what, I thought maybe good things would happen, too, but then I realized he had a different plan, as I was writing. I also wanted to show that, for a young person who’s sober, the one thing you want is somebody besides your family to love you, and I think she was looking for that as a substitute for alcohol. Like, “Oh, Josh is so nice, and somebody loves me even though I’m damaged, but he can understand because he was there too,” and that’s an experience that happens as you’re working through your sobriety. You might meet someone and think that everything is going to be great, and then you realize that actually, no, I can’t be friends, or I can’t be lovers, with this person because of the way they’re going to live their life, that would be unhealthy for me. All my books are messy in that sense, and especially this one. Because I am writing for a teen audience, the one thing I don't want to do is lie and say that everything is going to be great. Relapse is part of recovery and making mistakes is part of recovery and then mapping out this new life you have to live.

RS: I remember my sister telling me she went to a Smokers Anonymous meeting, they used the example of: it’s dark, it’s raining, you’re in a car, and the car breaks down by the side of the road, what do you do? Everyone in the room said, “Well, you have a cigarette, of course,” and the group leader said, “Now you have two problems.”

KG: It’s very true. Now you have two problems. The important thing, especially when you’re writing about this stuff for a younger audience — they’re just discovering the world, they don’t know how to live in the world yet, and the world is a painful place to be. I don't want to lie to them about the pain of that world, I just want to give them a book that they can find some solace in as they’re working through stuff in their own life. They can feel like, “Here’s a character who feels the same way I do about my parents breaking up or my grandmother dying or my boyfriend breaking up with me, and me needing to self-medicate with alcohol in order to get through the day.”

Going back to Sarah T.: I had some really interesting conversations with my editor, Krista Marino, because in the early drafts I didn’t have Bella saying anything like, “I’m an alcoholic.” Krista asked, “Does she think she’s an alcoholic?” I said, “Well, you know, I think at fifteen you don’t really want to define yourself that way. That’s why I don’t have her saying it.” And she said, “I need her to do something to show the reader that she knows she has a problem and to admit it out loud. As a reader, I need her to realize that this is not good.” I said, “Okay, I will put in a relapse in rehab,” which does happen. People are always surprised to find out: “Wait, I thought nobody could smuggle anything into rehab.” You have no idea!

RS: So are you blaming your editor for Bella’s relapse? That’s very alcoholic of you.

KG: I know, it’s so sad, blaming everyone else but my character.

RS: I read that one of your ongoing inspirations is Laurie Halse Anderson. I was wondering if the tree painting in this book is a tribute to her tree painting in Speak.

KG: You know, someone else mentioned that, and I didn’t think about it until after they mentioned it, so maybe on a subconscious level it is. I was thinking about the tree painting, and in the poem in the beginning, you know, you’ve climbed so far to get away from everything when you’re in pain and when you’re actively in addiction, and one day you just fall and you have to pick yourself back up and clean yourself off and keep going.

Sponsored by