Round Table Review:
Westhill High School alumna Sara Kocek recently became a published author with her debut novel Promise Me Something, a novel about a freshman named Reyna who has been separated from her friends because of redistricting. A long the way she meets a girl named Olive Barton who is strange, straightforward, and not anything like any of her middle school friends. It’s obvious to anyone who lives in Stamford that this book’s setting is alluding to the author’s hometown. The characters live in the city of Springdale, and the two high schools are Belltown High (Reyna’s school) and Ridgeway High. They even go to a dress shop on Hope Street at some point in the book.
The book starts out slow, and sort of reminded me of a Lifetime movie. The main character, Reyna, has a tragic background, and it’s obvious that Reyna will have to overcome. I wasn’t very interested by any of the characters. Reyna seemed very one dimensional, but it was realistic in the sense that there are hundreds of kids like that in high schools. A character like that just doesn’t make for a good read, though. Olive was the only interesting character from the beginning. She was a little strange, didn’t have any sort of verbal filter and always said everything she thought – and I mean everything. However, this character seemed to be very back-and-forth with certain personality traits. She starts off being very possessive and jealous of anything that Reyna does, making it seem like an unhealthy relationship – she was being a possessive girlfriend. This all makes sense when she explains that she’s gay, and then her intense political outbursts (on why you need to be a Democrat and how on earth could you possibly think of being a Republican?) all make sense. Towards the end of the book she’s less chaotic, but it seems she’s only normal because it just fit better with the situation Kocek wanted to create.
It felt as if part of the book was trying to take a Mean Girls spin on it by turning “the Plastics” into “The Slutty Nurses,” and once Reyna became a part of this fold she was becoming cruel and a bully just like them. It was slightly predictable with Reyna’s – and Olive’s as well –“Lifetime” backstory. You can tell there was a Mean Girls feel to it, but it wasn’t a good part of the story.
My favorite part – I would have to say – is the end (no, not in the “finally it’s over!” way). The strange twist of the ending made the book more interesting than I thought. It made me overlook parts of the story that seemed too convenient. It made the novel become a good story – a better one than I thought it would be upon beginning it. For a first-time author, this was a solid effort and a good book. In the end I give the book a six out of ten.
Q&A With the Author
What inspired you to write this particular story? One that brings in a few different elements of the LGBTQ community.
I didn’t set out to write a book about homophobia, bullying, and suicide. The characters just walked into my head, and then I had to figure out a plot for them. The more I wrote, the more I realized that Olive was harboring a secret about her sexuality. She spends a lot of time online, talking to strangers, and the relationship with one of those strangers in particular leads to the central mystery in the book. There are three gay characters in the book, and it was important to me to make them very different from each other. They all have different levels of comfort about their sexuality, but they are all victims of homophobia, whether from their classmates, teachers, or families. I wanted to show that subtle, casual homophobia can do just as much damage as overt discrimination and bullying.
Did you do any research on people who suffer from depression or have suicidal thoughts while writing this book?
I read a lot online, especially on forums. Reading posts written by teens (as opposed to reading articles about depression) helped me understand the experiences they went through at home and at school. It also gave me a few details that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. For instance, I googled the phrase, “My teacher is homophobic,” and found a series of posts where students listed all the homophobic phrases and insults they’d heard their teachers use in the classroom—things like “Twinkle-toes” and calling a boy “Nancy.” I used some of those insults in the book. While Mr. Murphy (the homophobic teacher in the book) seems fairly extreme, I know from my research that there are still teachers out there who behave like this.
Olive is an interesting character to read; why did she seem so off and on about her sexuality, in the sense that she didn’t want people to know about it, but at the same time was proud of it?
Olive is very politically aware, with a lot of strong opinions on equality and fair treatment. She firmly believes that gay people should have all the rights of straight people (for instance, gay marriage) and that no one deserves to be bullied. But it’s one thing to believe something in the abstract, and another thing entirely to put yourself out there. I think Olive really admires Tim Ferguson, her classmate who is openly gay, but she is secretly afraid to open herself to the same level of bullying that he encounters.
Was it ever a thought in your mind to create a love triangle between Reyna, Levi, and Olive during the writing process?
Definitely not! Olive has no romantic interest in Levi whatsoever. I think she describes him at one point as being “like a dog that walks up to another dog and sniffs its butt.” In other words, she thinks he’s friendly but not all that bright. (Not true—he’s smart, but keeps that hidden.) And Levi, for his part, isn’t remotely interested in Olive. While he appreciates her intelligence and passion, he only has eyes for Reyna.
What made you want to be a writer in the first place?
I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I “wrote” my first stories before I could even write, by dictating them to my mom. As I got older, I experimented with different types of writing, from poetry to playwriting. During high school, I thought I might want to be a journalist, so I joined the high school paper. But I quickly realized that I had a little problem—I was really bad at telling the truth. Whenever I was assigned a personal essay for English, it didn’t even occur to me to tell the truth. One time I got halfway through an essay about losing my childhood best friend before I realized it was completely fictional, and the narrator (“I”) was someone else entirely besides me. But by that point, I was too invested. I liked the story too much, so I kept writing it. These experiences—these stories—piled on top of each other made me into a writer. Little by little, I realized that I could tell the truth better through fiction. And that’s what I’ve tried to do in my book, Promise Me Something. It’s not a true story, but I think there’s a lot of truth in it.
As we have a mainly high school audience, I was wondering if you had any advice for those who are thinking about a career as an author?
The sad truth is that the majority of published authors do not make a living from their books. Unless you happen to strike gold with a bestseller, or unless you are able to crank out multiple novels per year, you will most likely need additional sources of income to live on. Whether that money comes from a “day job” or writing-related freelance opportunities (e.g. freelance editing), it’s important to find paid work that enhances your writing life and leaves you enough time to work on your pet projects. Being an author is usually not glamorous, and it usually doesn’t pull in a lot of money. You have to do it because you love it and you couldn’t imagine doing anything else.