High School Awkwardness....aka The Stalker Chronicles

Cammie Bliss, the protagonist of my first young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles, is a teenage girl who routinely, almost pathologically goes too far in pursuit of love.  Because of this, her classmates have labeled her a “stalker,” and while it’s not a name she enjoys, Cammie realizes that she’s earned it.  But when a new boy named Toby moves to her small town, Cammie—with the help of her best friend Rosie and a sympathetic teacher—hopes she can change herself and win his love. 

My interest in creating a character like Cammie was initially very personal.  I’d written a long prose poem about five years ago, entitled “My Friends and Enemies” which was published in the journal Fence.  This poem was my attempt to create a catalogue or imagistic list of all of the people from my childhood, quite literally my friends and my enemies (not that I had all that many of the latter!).  I suppose I was interested in mini-histories, in how a list can somehow create stories.  But I was also struck by how many of those stories, for me, were about embarrassment, or moments in which I felt misunderstood or couldn’t quite speak my mind.  I thought of all the boys I’d had crushes on, and how many of those boys I scared away because I was a little bit too aggressive or a little bit too out there.  I wanted to tell some of those stories, and a young adult novel seemed like the perfect venue.  But of course, Cammie is not entirely me, and I’ll leave it to readers to decide which things in the book I may or may not have actually done.  But the flashback format is there.  Cammie remembers the boys she stalked so that she can figure out how to stop.

I’ve also always been intensely fascinated by the horrors of high school and the ways in which outsiders—nerds, punks, skaters, Goths, LGBT kids, theater and band geeks, you name it—cope with the daily humiliations of being different.  When I briefly taught high school in New York City, a colleague and myself asked our freshmen to perform monologues or scenes from Julius Caesar.  These performances were wonderful!  I remember one young woman in particular, who was as awkward as awkward can be—she had frizzy hair, a whole lot of orthodontia, and a very excited, high-pitched voice that sometimes cleared the room, but she was very comfortable in her own skin.  She was a bit of exhibitionist, actually, and her performance was particularly good.  We all gasped as she pulled a fake sword out of its sheath!  She was totally invested in her character!  She made me think about the difference between my students who could own their awkwardness and the ones were devastated by it.  Cammie Bliss is very much in the middle of that struggle.  Can she change?  Does she even want to?

I think we live in a culture that encourages us to be voyeuristic, and girls in particular can be easily embarrassed or even choose to embarrass themselves as a way to establish community and closeness with other girls.  I wrote my dissertation about Seventeen magazine and one of my chapters was about a column in the magazine, “Traumarama!.”  In “Traumarama!”, girls submit short, embarrassing stories about daily humiliations.  I became a student of this column, and obsessed with its repetitive, stylized, and heavily edited stories.  The Stalker Chronicles, in some small way, was an attempt to make some of those stories more real, more human.  I wanted to give a unique voice to embarrassment, to maybe help girls think more critically about it, albeit in a fun, readable way.