Friends with benefits

MANILA, Philippines - Ever heard the saying “love is temporary but friends are forever”? While the focus of many Young Adult (YA) fiction novels has been about the former, authors Amy Zhang and Andrea Portes have shifted their focus to friendships, seeing both the beauty that a strong friendship can bring, and the horrors wrought by a toxic one.

Both Amy’s latest novel, This Is Where the World Ends and Andrea’s The Fall of Butterflies, are beautifully written novels exploring both the development and the ill effects of an unhealthy friendship.

Amy and Andrea visited the Philippines a few weeks ago courtesy of National Book Store and we got to hang with  them at Raffles Hotel to ask them what advice they would give their angsty pubescent fictional protagonists, how they started writing, and other exclusive deets.

Amy Zhang

YOUNG STAR: What made you start writing?

AMY ZHANG: I always say that my favorite book is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. It changed my life. It was just the most influential book in this part of my life, I guess, so it’s very special to me in that sense. But it’s so hard to just pick one book, you know?

How old were you when you read The Handmaid’s Tale?

Sixteen? Seventeen? It just really sparked my feminist awakening. It’s such an important book to me — it has such a special place in my heart.

So what was the first thing you ever wrote?

Oh, God. So my first book — I wrote it when I was 13 — was about these five kids who were reincarnated in the Arizona dessert and raised there by this immortal dude to fight a dark lord. Very original, I know (laughs). But yeah, it was very much like living vicariously. They were so cool and they could do all this stuff like swimming with sharks.

What made you start writing?

So, long version, my family moved from St. Louis to Wisconsin when I was in eighth grade. Right: last year in middle school, great time to move. It was such a culture shock for me, like you know, St. Louis is such a decently sized place and then we moved to this town of 2,000 people and everybody had known each other since elementary school and I was just so angry with my parents. And so writing just became this… it started out as an act of rebellion, I was so upset and I was so determined not to assimilate myself, like I didn’t want to make friends. I was really trying to push my parents to move back, which obviously wasn’t going to happen. But I was just so angry, and lonely, and unhappy, and that’s how I started writing. It was like escape, hormonal rambling — it was like everything.

What topic do you enjoy writing about most?

I really like exploring relationships, especially friendships — I really like writing about friends. Because they’re just so complicated, and they’re so incredibly varied, you know. They’re never the same and they can be so strong and wonderful but they can also be so awful (laughs).

You once described the main characters of your latest book, This Is Where the World Ends, as a boy obsessed with apocalypses and a girl whose goal is to make the world fall in love with her. How did you come up with these characters?

Hmm, how did I come up with these characters? (Laughs) To me, I can’t tell you where they came from. I just really wanted to explore a toxic friendship. You know, when the girl was not quite what she wanted to be and the boy was not really what he could be. It was that relationship dynamic, I think, that drew me in, and then Janey and Micah took shape around that relationship.

Were they based on anyone you knew?

No, all of my friends are really wonderful! I answer this question a lot, like is this based off of a certain friendship, but no, I love my friends. I love them deeply and they’ve been so amazing through all of this. I don’t think any of us are toxic (laughs). But, I mean, I moved around a lot as a child, so I didn’t have the strong friendships that a lot of the other people in my life did, or at least the length of that. So it was really interesting for me to explore kids who had grown up next to each other, who shared all these experiences, had all of these memories, and still had things go so incredibly wrong. But the great thing about This Is Where the World Ends is that there was room to explore so many kinds of friendships.

What advice would you give Janey and Micah?

I’ve thought about this a lot, actually. I think I would tell both of them to grow up, and not like in a harsh way, just that there’s so much time to grow up and explore yourselves, and not be the person you were told to be. It’s so easy, I feel like, for that to happen to you in high school. Especially in my hometown, it was like 2,000 people, our grade had a hundred people in it and they had known each other since kindergarten and it’s like, even in kindergarten, you already had a person you were supposed to be. Everybody knows everybody’s families, so they know what the families are like. The people who would be successful and popular were already successful and popular because their families are. It’s such a box, you know, and it’s so hard to get out of it.

So, if you could write a story in a genre you haven’t yet explored, which would it be and why?

Fantasy! (Laughs) I really want to write fantasy. And not in particular, like I wouldn’t say fantasy as a genre, it’s just that I’ve been sitting on this YA fantasy for a really long time and I’ve been wanting to write it. I really want to explore magic, you know, I think there’s just so much room to play around there and I really want to do that. I want to do something magical set in Europe. I have no concept of what it would be, I just want to write something magical in Europe.

Andrea Portes

YOUNG STAR: What made you start writing?

ANDREA PORTES: I have no idea (laughs). I mean, I think that’s a big question — I don’t know why writers write, I just know that they do. Like, I have had friends who said to me, “I want to write a book,” and I’m like, okay, but most people I know that are writers have always been writing. They’ve always had this, whether it started when they were nine or when they were teenagers, they’ve always had the idea that they wanted to express themselves — just living in the world wasn’t always enough.

So what was the first book you ever read?

How about the first book I ever read that I remember? (Laughs) The first book I remember reading was A Tale of Two Cities. But the first “book” book that I ever read that blew me away was The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, which is a really insane, tragic book about a five-year-old during World War II who has dark hair and dark eyes in Europe, and he keeps moving around from place to place.

Do you think reading that book influenced the way you write?

I don’t think so — I just think that my world was affected. That was just a game changer.  The first book I read that I feel had the most effect on my writing in the long run was Catcher In The Rye, because I just remember reading that for the first time and thinking, “You can do that? You can write like that?” You know, you don’t have to write like, “In the darkness, there was…” You know, like, the way that he wrote that book was inspiring to me. And I think that’s like the feeling of experiencing something great for the first time, whether it’s writing or song.

So your latest book, The Fall of Butterflies, is very personal and really gets into the protagonist, Willa’s, head. How did you come up with Willa’s character?

Well, that’s kind of like a semi-autobiographical book because I lived in Nebraska and I went to the East Coast for college. So, for Fall of Butterflies, I made that more a prep school, she goes to a prep school. But the experience — that collision of being from basically a small town place and then going and meeting these people who have Warhols in their house and all that — that was the same. The feeling of feeling “less than,” you know? That was true for me then, and then also the feeling of encountering all these fabulous people and being weirdly taken in by them. Because there were people who, let’s say, had gone to prep school or other nice, good schools in the East Coast or whatever, but the fact that I was from a farm in the middle of nowhere was exotic.

So your book explores teenage drug use. I was wondering what drove you to write about such a serious issue?

Well, I mean, in the States right now it’s a huge problem. People going from regular prescription pills to heroin… it’s actually become a thing. And even though I have never experienced that, I have experienced my friends having addictions to other things — whether it’s to alcohol, or whether it’s to other things, I’ve watched people basically ruin their lives and ruin their potential. So even though it sounds really clichéd, I’m pretty much convinced that it’s a really, really bad thing. I feel like, all these people, all these amazing people, they’ve lost their own futures to their addictions.

If you could give Willa and Remy advice, what would you tell them?

Remy, I would tell her, she needs a therapist really badly, and that she needs to go to AA, or wherever, because she’s going to die. I didn’t make her die in the book because I thought that might be a little too dramatic, but if the book were to continue, she would be dead. Because, you know, now she’s into heroin and she’s in denial — I mean, the overdoses for heroin are huge these days — so I would tell her to stop doing that and to get professional help. For Willa, I mean, I think in the end, Willa figures it out. She gets out of there, she understands she can’t be with Remy anymore, but she also doesn’t pursue what her mom wanted her to do. The most important thing is she realizes that she may not be from that huge, amazing world where there are Warhols on the walls, but she realizes, in the end, that she has something that none of those people have. She has kind of a will and a force to her that is incredible, and she doesn’t realize it at the beginning, but in the end she does.

* * *

Amy Zhang’s latest novel, This Is Where the World Ends and Andrea Portes’ The Fall of Butterflies are available in all National Book Store branches nationwide.