Even now looking back, I’m a little embarrassed. I don’t know if the shelf life of those tweets would extend now or if they would seem kind of hacky. And that gave me the confidence to then be able to do basically the rest of my career.īut I felt like the joke kind of ran its course. GuyinyourMFA was the first time in my life I felt like the world outside of my college bubble noticed that I existed and thought I was funny. Twitter was this amazing opportunity for me to shout into the void and feel like I was being heard.
Why did you decide to retire those accounts? Speaking of snark, a lot of people know you as the voice of and accounts that blew up because of their snarky, satirical tone. It’s earnest, and that was nerve-wracking. There are moments of Anatomy that are maybe funny, but there was no snark to hide behind. Social media has made it very easy for me to hide behind a layer of detachment and be a little snarky. It’s weird because I’ve written a memoir, but this felt like my most personal book. Even though it’s written for a young audience like some of your past books, Anatomy feels like a pretty big departure. That’s the feeling I’m trying to capture. I’m writing for my teenage self, and part of being a teenager is this weird optimism that you can do anything in the world. I made a playlist while writing Anatomy that had a lot of My Chemical Romance and Danny Elfman scores to allow me to regress into my suburban, emo-teen mentality, when I was 15 and wasn’t allowed to dye my hair and thought that the world was going to end because my crush wasn’t texting me back. It always made me laugh in dystopian books when people are literally dying and the protagonist is like, “Oh, but who will I love?” But on the other hand, I didn’t want to say that smart, ambitious women can’t also find love and have crushes. I didn’t want the book to say the most important thing is finding a boyfriend. Hazel is someone who’s incredibly ambitious, smart and focused. The book is called a “love story,” but it doesn’t follow the typical arc of a romance novel, and Hazel’s romantic life takes a backseat to her love affair with surgery. And when that became a threat in our real pandemic, I pulled it because I didn’t want people to get the wrong message. In my original version, I had a character selling a cure for the fictional plague that turned out to be a sham. Because plagues were a thing in history and I was writing a book that involves a lot of dead bodies, it only made sense that there would be this big atmospheric threat. I began writing this book a year before we had even heard of COVID. Did the pandemic influence your writing at all? There’s a plague making its way through Edinburgh in the book.
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