The Young and the Restless
‘Sister Mischief’ author Laura Goode on hip hop, high school and surviving the sterile suburban mini-van parade
‘Sister Mischief’ author Laura Goode on hip hop, high school and surviving the sterile suburban mini-van parade
Esme Rockett, the teenage protagonist of Laura Goode’s debut young-adult novel Sister Mischief (Candlewick Press, 2011), feels achingly familiar. Like local heroines that came before her—Marge from Fargo, Juno from Juno or Becky from Stuck Between Stations (2011)—Esme embodies a unique cocktail of sarcasm and sincerity. “I would…literally rather be barefoot and pregnant making Tater Tot hot dish,” she says on a particularly dismal afternoon, “than be in this class right now.”
Unfortunately, the fictional suburb of Holyhill (“the Orange County” of Minnesota) is too self-absorbed to appreciate Esme’s humor, her crew of “alienated smartgirls” and their affection for hip-hop music. When rap is banned (à la rock music in Footloose) for its potential to “incite violence,” Esme and her friends hatch a plan to convince their hockey-obsessed high school otherwise. Unlike many YA novels, “convincing” is done via poetry rather than vampires, werewolves or wizardry. At its core, Sister Mischief is about more than typical adolescent antics, traversing issues like race, religion and sexuality—topics often left out of “polite” potluck conversation.
Goode’s novel is an elegant portrait of Minnesotan teenage life, one peppered with midnight loops around Lake Harriet, Atmosphere on the radio and those ephemeral autumn days you wander back to in moments of nostalgia. “The October sunshine is orange,” Esme says, “all glow and shadow, the air tonic with possibility.” In those words, if even for a brief moment, each of us is 17 again.
METRO: You went to college and graduate school in New York. Now you live in San Francisco. Why did you write a book that takes place in Minnesota?
Goode: The easy answer is that I wanted to write what I knew. I wanted to write something that felt authentic. The more personal answer is that I had a very dear friend from childhood was killed very suddenly in a car accident in May 2007. I think that the experience of losing someone forced me to turn towards home in a way that I hadn’t been honest enough with myself to do before. I was very much the kind of kid who took off for New York and didn’t want to look back.
METRO: What changed?
Goode: Watching people go through the awful experience of losing a child caused me to look a lot of people in the face that I hadn’t seen in a really long time. I think the result of that was considering Minnesota as a place in a new and more authentic way. I think writing Sister Mischief was part of being honest about my relationship with it and my love for it.
METRO: How much of Sister Mischief is your own world and how much of it is fictional?
Goode: I would say that the only autobiographical aspect of it is its setting. Holyhill is pretty much a replica of Edina. Esme’s high-school experience, at least academically and contextually, was an atmosphere that I inhabited. The story about coming out, the story about being in an all-girl hip-hop crew, those are things that I admit I invented. It is not an autobiography, but for the people I knew in high school, I don’t think that Esme would come as a galloping surprise.
METRO: So where did the idea for the hip-hop crew come from?
Goode: I’m a poet. The poetry of hip hop was something that was really fascinating and I wanted to explore it in a deep, full-length project way. Sister Mischief is sort of like a carbonated cocktail of everything that is important to me: It’s feminism, poetry, Minnesota [Laughs.]
METRO: Was there a particular scene that that everything sprang from?
Goode: Well, I guess there are two of them. One, I actually was caught by cops in the back of a car with a boy once. [Laughs.] Two, I really wanted them to have a scene where they were rapping on the light rail. The light rail is really interesting to me because it didn’t exist when I was growing up in Minnesota. Public transportation didn’t really exist at all and I was in the suburbs, so it was different.
METRO: How did you prepare to write about the light rail?
I dragged one of my best friends from home and two of her friends on to a drunken light rail trip. Our only purpose for the evening was to ride the light rail so that I could write about it in a way that felt real. That was really early on in the process. I was actually with a girl who was puking on the light rail, if you can imagine that. It was the most Minnesotan scene ever. This girl was puking in a plastic bag: a bag from a store at Mall of America. My other friend was rubbing her back and having small-talk conversation with the guy who owned the bag, being like, “Oh, you work at the Mall of America? Do you know Dave? He’s my cousin.” So yeah, it all comes from the light rail. [Laughs.]
METRO: The community you depict in the book is very different from the Lake Wobegon image of Minnesota. Was this an intentional departure?
Goode: Very much so. The other reason that it was important for me to write something about Minnesota was that I get really sick of coastal attitudes that this is “flyover territory” and that nothing happens here. Of course, on the first page of my book I say, “Nothing happens here,” but then another 359 pages of stuff happens. It was important to me to broaden the world’s view of Middle America. I think that too often Minnesota is mistaken for just farmland and podunkery. In fact, Edina, for all its faults, is a very wealthy, well-educated community. I don’t think that is most people’s image of Minnesota. So as complicated as I feel about being fired in that cauldron, I also do think that it stands to expand the dialogue about how people perceive this place. That was a voluntary and purposeful departure.
METRO: Sister Mischief contains a lot of diversity. Were you intentionally trying to bridge different communities in Minnesota?
Goode: My first priority in writing Sister Mischief was writing a book where the heroines were both queer and of color. That was what I saw missing from young adult literature I loved growing up.
Laura Goode is doing a free Q&A at the Edina Public Library on September 26 at 7 p.m.
More information: L. Goode
Unfortunately, the fictional suburb of Holyhill (“the Orange County” of Minnesota) is too self-absorbed to appreciate Esme’s humor, her crew of “alienated smartgirls” and their affection for hip-hop music. When rap is banned (à la rock music in Footloose) for its potential to “incite violence,” Esme and her friends hatch a plan to convince their hockey-obsessed high school otherwise. Unlike many YA novels, “convincing” is done via poetry rather than vampires, werewolves or wizardry. At its core, Sister Mischief is about more than typical adolescent antics, traversing issues like race, religion and sexuality—topics often left out of “polite” potluck conversation.
Goode’s novel is an elegant portrait of Minnesotan teenage life, one peppered with midnight loops around Lake Harriet, Atmosphere on the radio and those ephemeral autumn days you wander back to in moments of nostalgia. “The October sunshine is orange,” Esme says, “all glow and shadow, the air tonic with possibility.” In those words, if even for a brief moment, each of us is 17 again.
METRO: What was it like growing up in Minnesota, and how did you work that into your novel?
Goode: I think that Minnesota is very much a place where things happen. I think that neither Esme nor I knew that growing up in the suburbs. It’s certainly a story that’s been told before: overly smart, slightly maladjusted kid growing up in the suburbs feeling dissatisfied. I think that that is part of the American narrative and that we don’t often hear that in a female voice. It was important to me that Esme express that dissatisfaction with her surroundings. It was certainly something I felt. But I also think that she definitely expands her world to include things outside of that sterile, suburban mini-van parade.
Goode: I think that Minnesota is very much a place where things happen. I think that neither Esme nor I knew that growing up in the suburbs. It’s certainly a story that’s been told before: overly smart, slightly maladjusted kid growing up in the suburbs feeling dissatisfied. I think that that is part of the American narrative and that we don’t often hear that in a female voice. It was important to me that Esme express that dissatisfaction with her surroundings. It was certainly something I felt. But I also think that she definitely expands her world to include things outside of that sterile, suburban mini-van parade.
METRO: You went to college and graduate school in New York. Now you live in San Francisco. Why did you write a book that takes place in Minnesota?
Goode: The easy answer is that I wanted to write what I knew. I wanted to write something that felt authentic. The more personal answer is that I had a very dear friend from childhood was killed very suddenly in a car accident in May 2007. I think that the experience of losing someone forced me to turn towards home in a way that I hadn’t been honest enough with myself to do before. I was very much the kind of kid who took off for New York and didn’t want to look back.
METRO: What changed?
Goode: Watching people go through the awful experience of losing a child caused me to look a lot of people in the face that I hadn’t seen in a really long time. I think the result of that was considering Minnesota as a place in a new and more authentic way. I think writing Sister Mischief was part of being honest about my relationship with it and my love for it.
METRO: How much of Sister Mischief is your own world and how much of it is fictional?
Goode: I would say that the only autobiographical aspect of it is its setting. Holyhill is pretty much a replica of Edina. Esme’s high-school experience, at least academically and contextually, was an atmosphere that I inhabited. The story about coming out, the story about being in an all-girl hip-hop crew, those are things that I admit I invented. It is not an autobiography, but for the people I knew in high school, I don’t think that Esme would come as a galloping surprise.
METRO: So where did the idea for the hip-hop crew come from?
Goode: I’m a poet. The poetry of hip hop was something that was really fascinating and I wanted to explore it in a deep, full-length project way. Sister Mischief is sort of like a carbonated cocktail of everything that is important to me: It’s feminism, poetry, Minnesota [Laughs.]
METRO: Was there a particular scene that that everything sprang from?
Goode: Well, I guess there are two of them. One, I actually was caught by cops in the back of a car with a boy once. [Laughs.] Two, I really wanted them to have a scene where they were rapping on the light rail. The light rail is really interesting to me because it didn’t exist when I was growing up in Minnesota. Public transportation didn’t really exist at all and I was in the suburbs, so it was different.
METRO: How did you prepare to write about the light rail?
I dragged one of my best friends from home and two of her friends on to a drunken light rail trip. Our only purpose for the evening was to ride the light rail so that I could write about it in a way that felt real. That was really early on in the process. I was actually with a girl who was puking on the light rail, if you can imagine that. It was the most Minnesotan scene ever. This girl was puking in a plastic bag: a bag from a store at Mall of America. My other friend was rubbing her back and having small-talk conversation with the guy who owned the bag, being like, “Oh, you work at the Mall of America? Do you know Dave? He’s my cousin.” So yeah, it all comes from the light rail. [Laughs.]
METRO: The community you depict in the book is very different from the Lake Wobegon image of Minnesota. Was this an intentional departure?
Goode: Very much so. The other reason that it was important for me to write something about Minnesota was that I get really sick of coastal attitudes that this is “flyover territory” and that nothing happens here. Of course, on the first page of my book I say, “Nothing happens here,” but then another 359 pages of stuff happens. It was important to me to broaden the world’s view of Middle America. I think that too often Minnesota is mistaken for just farmland and podunkery. In fact, Edina, for all its faults, is a very wealthy, well-educated community. I don’t think that is most people’s image of Minnesota. So as complicated as I feel about being fired in that cauldron, I also do think that it stands to expand the dialogue about how people perceive this place. That was a voluntary and purposeful departure.
METRO: Sister Mischief contains a lot of diversity. Were you intentionally trying to bridge different communities in Minnesota?
Goode: My first priority in writing Sister Mischief was writing a book where the heroines were both queer and of color. That was what I saw missing from young adult literature I loved growing up.
METRO: You use Twitter footnotes throughout the book. Could you talk about where that came from?
Goode: I think the fact that I am roughly contemporary with my reader-audience helped out at the technology level. I’m not calling myself 16, but the fact that I was in the first generation of Facebook and I’m not so foreign to Twitter and 3G Global Network. I couldn’t write a book about teenagers in the late 2000s and not engage with those media. It would have been a totally lost cause.
Goode: I think the fact that I am roughly contemporary with my reader-audience helped out at the technology level. I’m not calling myself 16, but the fact that I was in the first generation of Facebook and I’m not so foreign to Twitter and 3G Global Network. I couldn’t write a book about teenagers in the late 2000s and not engage with those media. It would have been a totally lost cause.
Laura Goode is doing a free Q&A at the Edina Public Library on September 26 at 7 p.m.
More information: L. Goode
