Before I became a blogger (?!?), I read Rachel Shukert’s first book, and thought it was so funny and great that I sent her my very first fan email, and she wrote back, and I thought I was hot shit, and since then I have observed her career with great pleasure. After publishing her second book, in which she’s crap at travel and men, she transitioned into YA, and wrote STARSTRUCK, set in the movie studio world of the 1930s. And now there’s a sequel, which came out this week: LOVE ME. Let’s get into it.
Hi Rachel! So glad to still be internet stalking you after all these years. Before we talk about your brand-new book, let’s talk about STARSTRUCK, because I want everyone to buy and read that one first. I mean, fans of Scandals of Classic Hollywood are going to go crazy for this series. And, honestly, why is this the first YA novel to be set in Hollywood in the 1930s? Why are they all girls getting their hair caught in wool machines and having their dads tarred and feathered for being Loyalists? Talk to me about how STARSTRUCK came to be.
I have no idea! To me, it seemed so obvious! When I was a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with all things classic Hollywood, and most of what I read (I mean, besides things like The Nazi Doctors and The War Against the Jews and Hitler’s Willing Executioners–although to be fair, I was already in high school when that one came out) were books about that place and time. We can get into these twin poles of my psyche later, although it is worth mentioning that the Third Reich and the Golden Age of Hollywood were almost exactly chronologically analagous. Somebody could write a Ph.D thesis on that (although it won’t be me, I’ve already picked my hypothetical thesis subject and it’s called “Actors Who Appeared on The Golden Girls Who Also Appeared on Dynasty.”)
But I just read and watched everything like that I could get my hands on. When I was in about fifth grade, I developed this weird sleepwalking problem, which kind of culminated–I mean, I’ll just say it–which culminated in me peeing in the corner of my parents’ bedroom one night, because in my sleepwalking I thought it was the bathroom. (Quelle glamor.) And after that, understandably, I was sort of terrified to go to sleep. So eventually, my mother and I came to this sort of compromise, that as long as I was “resting,” I could stay downstairs with the lights off and watch TV, and the only things that were really showing at that time were old movies on AMC and TCM. So that fed this rapidly developing obsession. I started memorizing all the facts about the stars from that time, who was signed to what studio, what films they made in what year, etc. Very inside baseball stuff. I mean, I had a 1930’s movie star alter ego, with a name, I had a list of fictional movies this cinematic version of me would have starred in. It was a very intense, very engrossing game of make believe.
So I had all these books, and I remember in particular one big coffee table book called: MGM: The Lion Roars or something like that. And there was this whole section about the “Kids of MGM” and it had this big picture of Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Deanna Durbin and Jackie Cooper all sitting in the commissary eating ice cream together at lunch. They were about fifteen. That stuck in my head, that picture. And I also was reading all these sort of novels about show business, some of which were pretty contemporaneous to the period: you know, Valley of the Dolls, What Makes Sammy Run?, Inside Daisy Clover, things like that. And the thing they all had in common was that they had very, very young protagonists–I mean, the girls in Valley of the Dolls are supposed to be about 16-20; Daisy Clover is like 13 years old. And this isn’t inaccurate–the female movie stars at that time were YOUNG. Jean Harlow was 18 when she made “Hell’s Angels”–she was only 26 when she died. Lana Turner first signed at MGM when she was 16, the next year she was playing femme fatales. It wasn’t until after the war that being a teenager really became this separate thing with its own separate culture, until then, you were a little kid, Shirley Temple-type, or you were playing opposite 36-year-old men.
But it didn’t sort of all come together until I think I saw “The Aviator,” the Martin Scorsese movie about Howard Hughes. And there’s this scene where Howard–who is probably in his late 30’s–screen tests this 15-year-old girl, and then later they are out together, she’s his new girlfriend. And everyone is sort of fine with it. And I thought: “Someone should write about that girl.” And then “Actually, someone should write a whole YA series about the studio system.” The more I thought about it, it made sense–the way the studio system was set up, with all these rules and codes of conduct and hierarchies, it reminded me of high school. All kinds of things happen within it, but the construct of school itself is this authority that no one questions. The studios were like that; they kept their stars in this sort of perpetual adolescence, with rules about what they could wear and who they could date. And so eventually I was like, “Someone should write that series, and probably that someone has to be me.”
Doesn’t tarring and feathering look awful? They make all those jokes about it in The Music Man, but it must have been horrific. I’m still haunted by that scene from John Adams.
What I REALLY adore about STARSTRUCK and LOVE ME is exactly that, the way to find a different path to “we’re constrained and constricted and becoming women in a closed space” YA essential idea, and the studio is just a perfect, perfect tool for it, while being completely different! I’m so curious about what the future holds for YA. You’ve got the people who are (naturally and skillfully) continuing down the dragons and boarding schools paths, and then there are just completely new out-there concepts, and I love it. What were your BIG YA experiences as a kid? Which ones really rocked you?
Well, when we were kids, as you probably remember, there was plenty of YA lit, but it wasn’t exactly the big business it’s become. It was more organic, I think, you went to the library and browsed through the shelves and chose whatever looked interesting to you–there wasn’t really the same social, word-of-mouth aspect to the marketing of it that there is now. At least not that I remember. There were these Paula Danziger books I liked, which were all about sort of mouthy Jewish girls who lived in New York: I remember one called Remember Me to Harold Square (the misspelling was intentional) where the girl wanted to be an actress and she got to visit the set of All My Children and fell in love with the farm kid that was visiting them from Wisconsin.
There was this book called A Royal Pain by Ellen Conford, which was sort of a proto-Princess Diaries, and I always wondered why nobody ever called that out. She wrote another one called You Never Can Tell where this teenager heartthrob soap star enrolls at this girl’s high school and they start dating, but he just wants to be a regular kid. I was very into The Babysitters Club until I was actually old enough to baby-sit, which I hated so much and found so simultaneously dull and stressful that I was like, “what the HELL? Why does ANYONE want to spend all their time baby-sitting?” I mean, obviously Mallory Pike was condemned to a lifetime of drudgery, and Kristy was trying to cover up some very deep seated issues of sexual and possible gender orientation by retreating into an eternal pre-pubescence, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But there was something so formulaic about those books, that was almost ritualistic. The part where she would describe everyone’s outfits in great detail, the part where Claudia would unearth some sort of snack from her hidden wonderland of junk food, it was always exactly the same, yet somehow you wanted it again and again. The Sweet Valley High books were the same way. The repetitiveness was soothing somehow, sort of the slightly older equivalent of being six and needing to watch “Mary Poppins” over and over again until the tape wore out, you know?
I think I was about 11 or 12 when I discovered the Adrian Mole books by Sue Townsend, and those just really changed everything for me. Because they were so funny, and so grown-up, but about a young protagonist–it was the first time I found a book like that–it was about a kid, but seemingly written for adults. They are among my favorite books to this day, I still read them over and over again. A couple of years ago I was asked to write the afterword for a reissue Harper Collins was doing of the first three books in the series, and I just lost my shit. Like, just cried and cried. I don’t think I’ve had a more satisfying, or genuinely humbling moment in my career than that.
But, yes, my biggest childhood obsessions were the sort of vintage show biz books I mentioned earlier, and another book, Chocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore, which got reissued by Harper Perennial, after being out of print for decades (and which I actually had something to do with, in another proud moment), which is this amazing story of this precocious 15-year-old girl in the ’50’s whose mother is a fading movie star and whose father is a screenwriter and she moves in this kind of Hollywood/boarding school milieu of pleasure/ennui, like an American Bonjour Tristesse. Those three were my biggest inspiration for STARSTRUCK.
But I didn’t get started right away. HAVE YOU NO SHAME? came out and then I got another deal for EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE GREAT, my second book (also adult.) So a couple of years passed. I had finished EIGTBG and was waiting for it to come out, wondering what to do with myself in the meantime, and my agent said, “you know that YA idea you had? Maybe this would be a good time to take that out.” So I finally sat down and mapped out the characters, the series, everything, and then we sold it. I thought for about 30 seconds that maybe I’d do it as an adult book, but I knew I wanted to focus on teenage characters, and I wanted it to have a really juicy, twisty, plot, and I wanted it to be a series. (I think unconsciously I was really writing it for the young teen I had been.) So YA seemed to make the most sense. I’ve never thought, “oh, I’m a YA author now,” anymore than I would say, “I only write for adults.” I want to write for whoever wants to read what I’ve written, and honestly, thinking of an idea that works for a book is so rare, and then writing it is so hard, that’s all you can really focus on. YA vs New A vs Old A or whatever; those are marketing distinctions that feel sort of arbitrary to me, and they’ve become so permeable. I’ve always felt that a good book is a good book, and I don’t care who it was written for or what the cover looks like. There’s incredibly mature YA writing, there’s not-so-mature adult writing. I just write.
What’s reader response been like? Did reader feedback change anything about how you approached the newest installment?
Well, due to the vagaries of deadlines and things like that, LOVE ME had to be done before the first book came out, so I hadn’t really had much reader feedback yet before the text was already pretty final. But luckily, the reader response has been pretty overwhelmingly positive, which I’m incredibly grateful for. I was unprepared by how nervous I was going to be about letting these characters free in the world. My first two books were memoirs, which you’d think would be more difficult, but I really don’t feel even half as a sensitive about myself as I do about my characters. You can say anything you want to about me, I guess, but don’t hurt my babies. I feel very maternal towards them and I didn’t want anyone to hurt their feelings. I am insane.
But like I said, luckily, mostly nobody has, and what has been critical has been very interesting for me. The main bit of criticism I’ve received is frustration that the characters do things that seem like bad ideas sometimes. And yes, that’s absolutely true! They do make bad decisions, or rather, they make what they think are good decisions with the information they have, and they turn out to be not so good. Just like any of us. That’s part of life, it’s part of growing up. The best storytellers think about the demands of their readers, and I think the best readers think about the demands of the story. You can’t have everything work out. You can’t have everyone make the right decisions all the time, or there would be no story! Or at least, not the kind of stories I tend to tell. I mean, I LOVE THE HUNGER GAMES, I love, love, love it, but I don’t tend to tell stories like that, where it’s Katniss bravely standing up to the unspeakable evil of the Capitol. The stories that tend to come to me, and the books I write (including my adult books) are mostly about being your own worst enemy. That’s the story I find most frightening, and most compelling, because you are literally the only antagonist you can never beat. So I guess I keep coming back to that again and again.
I’ve just turned in the first draft for the third STARSTRUCK book, so I did think about reader feedback a little big in regards to that. But there’s only so much you can do at this point. I’m at a place now where the story has so much history, the characters have been around with me so long, there’s sort of a winnowing of options. They’re all on tracks that feel relatively inevitable now, I’m afraid. I just want their stories to be satisfying. Then I’ve done my job.
When will STARSTRUCK be a movie how about NOW? I keep casting it in my mind.
I don’t know about a movie, but I can tell you it’s in very serious development for television. (I KNOW!!!) The pilot script is being written as we speak. And I mean, who knows what will happen, but I have incredible faith in everyone that’s involved–it’s a great team, and if we get to do it, I think it will really be something. And I’ll tell you, even if it doesn’t happen, that reading just the outline for the pilot of the series was a really weirdly moving experience from me. I’m not writing the pilot (which I am absolutely 100% happy about, I just don’t have enough distance to rethink things the way you have to to make it work), but seeing that these characters had so deeply inhabited someone else’s imagination was this amazing moment for me. That’s all any writer wants, for your characters to feel like someone else’s characters. For someone else to see that they’re real. You know?
This is an incredibly awkward thing to ask, but is there anything you want to share about money, or supporting yourself as a writer? I think it’s the million dollar question, no pun intended.
OH GOD. I’m starting to feel like money is this mythical thing that existed a long time ago but has died out now. Like dragons or something. We hear tales of it, and our parents vaguely remember it, but it’s never coming back, except maybe for people in some distant far-off land. Basically money is the Danaerys Targaryen plotline in Game of Thrones, is what I’m saying.
I have a good friend who is a director out here in LA who whenever you tell him about a deal you’re doing, or an idea you’re developing for someone, and the first thing he says is: “Has money changed hands?” It’s a joke, but it’s a BITTER joke. Because it’s true. You can work with someone for years on things, and never get a cent. It’s just not official until it is.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a couple of things where money has changed hands, but it’s a constant struggle. I like to think that I am a reasonably successful writer, and it’s still always a hustle…always pitching, always thinking of new ideas and having to let others go when they just aren’t going to work. And I manage to support myself, but there are plenty of things I go without. I haven’t taken a trip that wasn’t for work in over a year. I really, really need a root canal in this back molar, and I just can’t afford it right now. There are other things I need more. Like food. And my car. And my rent. You learn to make horrible choices, and it sucks, and it sucks that we live in a country where those choices are things you have to make, because we have no safety net. I can’t overstate how much that effects your quality of life, and how worried and stressed Americans are compared to much of the rest of the world because of this. If I lived in France, I would have had two kids by now. Here, I’m terrified I won’t be able to afford the doctor bills for delivery, let alone the kid. We can’t discount the fundamental things that have been taken from us because of the priorities of our political class.
But like I said, I do feel lucky that I’ve been able to support myself as a writer, without having to do anything else (even if, from time to time, I probably should have.) And the thing that does get a little easier, is that once you’ve amassed a body of work, there are more things that come out of the blue and kind of save you. For example, a few months ago, I was SO broke and getting a little freaked out about how I was going to pay my bills that month, and then I got a call out of the blue offering me some cash to record something I’d written a while ago as an audio book. Or an editor I haven’t spoken to in years will write me and say, do you want to do a quick piece for me on this, we can pay you $600 and that’s just a lifesaver that month. So those things have definitely gotten a little more frequent, and like I said, I just attribute that to having been around for a while now. There’s that saying, that an education is the one thing no one can take away from you. I think it’s your work.
I will let you go revel in the acclaim of your peers and critics, but because I’m such a superfan for your first two books as well, what’s it like to write so intimately about your family? I think you do it with such love.
Oh, I’m glad you think so! I don’t think they’ve always thought so. My mom probably has the biggest problem with it, which is sort of ironic since she’s by far the one I write the most about. (Actually, that’s not ironic at all; that’s logical.) I think they all realized it was done with love, but they were pretty relieved when I started writing fiction. But no matter what, aren’t you always writing about your family? The story of your family is the first novel you ever read, you know what I mean? It’s where you learn everything you know (or don’t know) about interpersonal relationships, about the way someone’s history informs their actions and who they become.
But I do have some rules for myself about writing about my family that I think are useful if I want to continue having a relationship with them–which most days I do. It’s okay to be candid, or revealing, but I really try not to give away anything that would be really embarrassing or harmful to someone. There are things about my family I DON’T write about, even though they would make amazing stories, because it would be too hurtful to people and I’m not ruthless enough to go there. Not while they’re alive, at least.
And I try to balance it out by being even harder on myself. That’s the only way I can think of to not sound like a total asshole. I’m happy to hear that it works!
