American Saturday Interview: Amanda Howells
July 10th, 2010 by Danielle
Amanda Howells’ book The Summer of Skinny Dipping has a well deserved spot on our Top 10 Summer Reads 2010 list. It was one of those books that stays with you long after you finish it and when I found out about the opportunity to interview Amanda I jumped at it! Take a minute to get to know a little more about Amanda’s debut novel and also some exclusive info about the author you won’t have seen anywhere else! Enjoy!
1. Tell our readers your version of what The Summer of Skinny Dipping is about.
It’s interesting to me that I can answer this question differently every time it’s asked. I guess the book is about several things, one of which is something I have a very hard time with: living in the moment. My main character, Mia, is a very analytical 16-year-old girl who thinks she has everyone and everything figured out in advance. But over the course of a single summer she discovers that life—and love—is rarely predictable, and happiness is fleeting so you must make the most of it and live fully in the present.
2. Mia’s relationships with all the different characters in the book are what make the book so dynamic. How did you create such a diverse setting?
I knew at the outset that I wanted the various characters in the book to shed layers as the story progressed and that even the minor characters needed to evolve in surprising ways. This is in part because a key theme of the story is how appearances can be deceptive. The story is entirely fiction but there are echoes of me in Mia: when I was a teenager I thought I had my parents and everyone else all figured out, but part of growing up is realizing that your perception of people is rarely, if ever, the truth of who they are.
3. Simon is by far my favorite character in the book and I’m assuming probably a favorite for you as well. Which of the characters did you relate to the best and why?
Interestingly, Simon isn’t my favorite character. Or maybe I should say he was, for me, the hardest to do. I had an easier time with the girls, especially the minor characters of Corinne and Genevieve whose snitty dialogue came easily to me and was rather fun to write compared with the heavier, more emotionally intense scenes between Mia and Simon. My favorite character? Probably Mia, in that she evolves so much from start to finish. She was tough for me to write because she’s complex and stubborn, and yet I related to her feeling of being an outsider among insiders. That’s the quintessential teen experience, and we’ve all been there in one way or another.
4. The ending. There are some recently who’ve mentioned not being happy about the ending of the book, how would you address their concern?
I understand why some readers are mad about the ending. People don’t like sad endings as a rule and this one is sudden. I can’t convince those who don’t like it that it’s right for the book; I can only say that I knew from the very beginning what the ending would be and so it felt right to me when it happened. Maybe that’s because, as a person, I’m generally skeptical of happy endings. The books I loved when I was young—the stories that stuck with me—often had powerful, tragic endings (e.g., Bridge to Terabithia, A Summer to Die) and I wanted to try and write such a book. My hope is that whatever readers make of the ending, they leave the book with a sense of both joy and sadness. There’s a lot of joy in this story and I hope the ending doesn’t overshadow that. The book is bittersweet, but then so is life.
5. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors/writers you could share?
Get used to two things and they both begin with an ‘r’: revision and rejection. Most writers will become intimately familiar with both. Writing is hard work and it requires serious manual labor and a thick skin. This book was rejected by many publishers and took years to make it onto the shelves.
6. I just have to ask, how do get into “Ghost Writing”? I’ve known it existed, but could never really wrap my head around it. Why did you go that route as opposed to just doing your “own” thing first?
This was in the 90s. I was a creative writing student in New York City and a friend was working for a company that hired ghostwriters to step in and churn out books for series like The Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High, where the authors were so successful they simply sketched out a basic plot and got writers to take care of the rest. I thought it sounded like fun and a good way to earn some money as a writer, so I did a test sample for the company and was hired. I wrote many books for Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley and Fearless series after that. And at a certain point, after this warm-up to writing for teens, I just got the idea for The Summer of Skinny Dipping and thought it was time to try my own hand at YA. YA was a genre I hadn’t attempted before, except as a ghost. I have, however, always done my own thing as a writer. In fact, Amanda Howells is one side of a split identity. My real name is Amanda Gersh. I’ve written many mostly humor-driven stories and pieces of nonfiction as Amanda Gersh. I decided I needed to take a slightly different name and persona to tap into the more sentimental, romantic side of myself that produced The Summer of Skinny Dipping. So I guess you could say the ghosts have never quite left me. I’m used to writing under assumed names and taking on different voices. It’s become a part of me now.
7. Speaking of “Ghost Writing”. You mentioned that you wrote for Francine Pascal, author of numerous “chick lit” style books, how do you think this influenced your own writing? Or were you already inclined to write in this style and it was an easy complement to write for her?
What is easy for me is a mixed blessing: I’m fairly versatile as a writer, and I can easily mimic other people’s voices. It comes naturally to me, for better and for worse. And ghostwriting was both a cool job and also tough. It doesn’t pay much and it’s demanding, and yet, it’s a fun thing for a young writer to do. It certainly beat waiting tables (to me, that is—but many writers prefer to keep their writing life and their work lives very separate).
8. As a mother, I’d love to know more about (possibly where) your “motherhood” blog is?
For several years I wrote a blog called Crabmommy. I had my own blog and also a blog for the now-defunct Cookie magazine, a motherhood magazine that Conde Nast put out for a couple of years. I absolutely loved blogging. My personal blog is retired, for now. But you can still see it at http://crabmommy.blogspot.com.
9. Lastly, do you have any more books in the works? I know our readers will definitely want to be on the lookout, as will I!
Yes! Amanda Howells will be back! I am working on a darker, more suspenseful kind of summer romance. It’s set on the misty, spooky Oregon coast and may/may not have a paranormal element to it (but no werewolves or vampires). It probably won’t have a happy ending, but I certainly hope it will be a page-turner and leave the reader well satisfied.
Thanks so much, Amanda!
Posted in Author Interviews | 2 Comments »
I’m too skeptical of happy endings, but some books just must have them or it wouldnt be as memorable. I’m one of the ones that liked the ending of Summer of Skinny Dipping. It was bittersweet, but it somehow felt needed to take Mia where she was at the ending.
Amanda Howells huh, whatever happened to Muffy Van Pelt?