David Levithan
About Author
As well as being a New York Times best-selling author, David is also a highly respected children's book editor whose list includes many luminaries of children's literature, including Garth Nix, Libba Bray and Suzanne Collins. He lives and works in New York.
David Levithan won the Lambda Literary Award for his debut novel Boy Meets Boy, but is probably best known for his collaborations with John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson) and Rachel Cohn (Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which was also made into a movie).
Interview
EVERY DAY
ELECTRIC MONKEY
OCTOBER 2013
Every day, A has to get used to being someone else - a different body, a different life. But then something happens that will change how A sees life forever. A falls in love.
Author David Levithan talked to us about his startling new book, EVERY DAY.
Q: Your UK tour is underway at the moment - how is it going?
A: I'm loving it. I usually stay around London and Oxford so I'm getting the chance to visit lots of places I've not yet seen - Newcastle, Leeds, Bath, Cheltenham and even Dublin!
Readers in the UK have similar questions and concerns to those I hear about in the US and many of them know my readers back home - everyone is so connected in now through social media, it's like we have a global reader family now.
Q: How did you get started on the idea behind Every Day?
A: It really started with one line, 'What would it be like to wake up in a different body, a different life, every morning? I didn't remotely understand the manifold scenarios this would open up until I started writing it.
I tried not to make it theoretical but to approach the book through the character, A. I was writing the book to answer the questions and to discover what would your life be like if you're not defined by body or gender or race, and could you be in love with somebody whose body changed every day?
It's such an incredibly simple concept that I thought it had to have been done before, but as I wrote it I found that this approach hadn't been taken before.
Q: Every Day is written in the first person, did you always plan it that way?
A: The narrative voice and observations were the first thing that developed through the novel. I never questioned writing it outside of A's head. It would have needed much more explanation and I didn't want others' voices there. I was able to write the book because I could see it through A's eyes and I had to put aside the concept of being defined by race, religion or gender. It's a distinctive life but very universal, too, and I had to approach it in that way.
Q: How do you keep the reader engaged with a character who doesn't even have a name?
A: I knew that the central dilema of the book had to kick in during the first chapter. You first have to get an idea of A's lonely and isolated life, which he deals with in a moral way, but then we quickly move on to the conflict in the story which is him finding someone to care about and how he deals with that. Otherwise it's hard to relate to A and to put yourself as a reader into A's head. Because he falls in love, that quickly makes it easier for readers to relate to him.
Until this point, A has lived his whole life without making a true connection with another person and, as he's a good person, it's sad it's not happened for him. When he meets Rhiannon, she is in a relationship but she does not have that connection with her boyfriend, that pull, that she gets with A.
Q: What was it like, as a writer, to have a central character who basically changed - gender, setting, race - every day?
A: It was like writing from the seat of your pants! I didn't plan out anything, I just knew that A would just have a new body at the start of every chapter and I always wondered what would pop up next. It was very interesting where my head took me....
It was also challenging because as a writer, if you have a variety of characters you want them to sound different, but in this book I had the opposite of that, having to make it sound like the same person even if the body was completely different.
I never drew back from any of the situations A found himself in when he opened his eyes, especially the darker ones like a suicidal girl and a drug addict. Often I didn't know what the implications were until I was in the middle of writing it, how A would, morally and actually, get through the day.
I have written about depressed and suicidal characters before but with A, I had to decide how much the mind and how much the body is control. When the body is inflicted then the mind is also afflicted.
Q: How does A cope with going through all these different experiences?
A: I discovered that A approaches life differently from how we do. In order to make life work for himself, A sees everything we have in common. We see his life of jumping from body to body as an experience of difference but A sees the common thread between our bodies. In our everyday lives we see the differences but the reader jumps into these lives and, through A's perceptions, sees the commonalities as well.
Q: How hard was it to write about a lead character who has no gender?
A: It wasn't as hard as you might think it would be. This is my stab at writing a transgender novel, the notion of gender being questioned in a good way, and exploring that through A.
If gender is not an issue then sexual exploration is not an issue; love is love.
What I have found is that, of all thing things that A is (he has no race, family or religion either), gender is the one that people ask about. It has been interesting seeing how 'gendered' our culture and language are. It's not that people are people - they are either 'he' or 'she'. A exists outside of that.
Q: What do you enjoy about writing for teenagers?
A: Some of the most interesting questions I have had about Every Day have come from teenagers. They have commented that they are in a point of their lives where nothing seems fixed and things can change very quickly.
There is a power in questioning who you are and who you are defined as. Every teenager is aware of how people see them as against who they feel they are emerging as inside.
Q: What are you writing now?
A: I've started a new novel that will be a companion to Every Day, it will be the same events told from Rhiannon's point of view. If A is showing the ideal 'body-less' interpretation of the story, then Rhiannon will see it from a different reality.
Rhiannon's story is so different, she comes across well in Every Day but there are lots of things in her life that we are not told and we only see things from A's point of view. I'm intrigued by what her take on it is. It's the first sequel I've ever written, so it's an interesting one for me, too.
Q: Given that you have a job as an editor, how do you find time to write a book a year?
A: I mostly write on weekends and during vacations and I am lucky that when I need to write, I can write fairly quickly.... I spend the week on other people's work and the weekends on my own. Somehow, it all works. I also balance out my solo writing with writing alongside authors like John Green and Rachel Cohn, which is more fun and less arduous.
Q: How would you spend a day doing your favourite things?
A: It would be all about music, going to the CD store and buying music, just doing that and hanging out with friends in New York, going to the theatre and the cinema.
Thank you David for answering all our questions!
