In her continuing exploration of the American family, Sara Zarr is out this month with a new novel, How to Save a Life. As she has done so well in her previous books, she again shows us teenagers at odds with parents, (in this case a mother and daughter who are dealing with the lost of of a husband/father in wildly different ways), and continues to mine the complicated issues that always arise during adolescence. Where Sara excels however is by forcing readers to consider just what we would do if in a similar situation.

There is nothing uncommon or dazzling about the worlds Sara creates (no vampires, werewolves or angels are here), there are just people living in ways all of us can recognize and understand. It is this familiarity that makes her novels so rich and deep and difficult to forget however. Sara Zarr sees all of us, and that is who she writes about and that is why her books are such treasures.

Recently, via email, Sara answered a few questions about writing How to Save a Life:

CM: There's a particularly sad moment early on when Jill admits that the "elephant in the room" is that she was closer to her father than her mother and, for her sake, she thinks her mother feels guilty about being the one who didn't die. It's rare in a YA novel for a teen protagonist to be closer to one parent or the other without a reason (abandonment, abuse, etc.) You have crafted an All American family novel where the biggest issue is that a kid lost the parent she favored. Was this something you intended from the start or did it evolve as the characters came to life? Did you have any difficulty writing it while still keeping Jill a sympathetic character?

SZ: That aspect of the story, like most pieces of it, evolved in the writing and editing process. I started out with nothing more than a premise: "Teen girl's mom is adopting an infant." Digging into that premise, and that puzzle, took me so many places I could not have imagined. Jill's relationship with her dad and how she's affected by losing him, her anger, her feeling that she doesn't love her mother as much as she should...all of that was discovered in drafting. And there was definitely an issue around keeping Jill sympathetic. I think at one point my editor wrote something to me like, "Make sure Jill isn't just a heartless bitch." Which was funny, because I already loved Jill, and felt she and I were so much alike, which of course led me to wonder, "Am I a heartless bitch?"

The answer: No. But being in emotional pain can make you very self-focused. It's a temporary state, hopefully. We just happen to meet Jill at her moment of most extreme emotional pain.

CM: The changes for the characters in How to Save a Life are all major plot points - Mandy explains that part of why chose to have the baby was force a change in her life; Jill states she must change into someone else because without her father she can not be the person she used to be and Robin explains that change has been forced upon her by the death of her husband. None of these moments are casual or standard high school
dramarama. Did you intend to hinge the novel on change for each of the main characters or did any of this sneak up on you during the writing process?

SZ: In a way, "change is hard" could be the theme of any young adult novel. Whether or not I think about it ahead of time (I don't tend to), it always presents itself, because adolescence is nothing if not a time of rapid and extreme and necessary change. Though I have to say, at 41, I feel like I could say that about every stage of life. While writing this book I sort of entered a time of, for lack of a better phrase, midlife crisis. So I was right there with the characters in their fear as well as their courage in dealing with what life brings them. I think this is one of the reasons I love YA fiction so much. There's no other place to explore and experience in such immediate and raw ways what it feels like as life comes at you, relentlessly, painfully, and beautifully.

(CM: I should say here that it kind of killed me not to be able to do a follow-up on this answer as I'd love to compare mid-life crises with Sara!)

CM: As you know, I've written before about how all of your novels are (to me anyway) first and foremost about family and the way that teen relationships with parents change. That is certainly true in How to Save a Life - perhaps more true than any of your other books. The relationship between Jill and her mother is one that was largely taken for granted - the father was the center that each of them orbited around and although they certainly were a family, the connection between mother and daughter was fleeting. (That might be too strong a word, but I hope you know what I mean.) How do you feel about your long term literary relationship with teens & their parents? What answers are you seeking to find or explore as you continue to write about families?

SZ: I tend to describe my stories that way, too. One of the things that's so personally interesting is to look at my four published books (and the three unpublished ones) as a body of work, and ask myself these questions that you're asking. Why do these same things come up over and over in different ways? What am I trying to figure out or explore? I think a lot of it has to do with my idea of God. I was raised to see God as a parent--an adoptive parent, at that--who loves his children despite their issues, who is loyal and forgiving but not a doormat. And I'm interested: Is that kind of love possible among people? The most likely place to see it is in families, biological and chosen, because it's our families that spend the most time with us and see us at our worst and take the brunt when we're hurting or angry, like Jill. I think I'm hopeful that some version of that kind of love is possible, yet I'm also realistic about the inevitable pain involved, and I'm always wondering about the tension between those things in my fiction.

CM: Finally, what was the most difficult aspect of writing How to Save a Life - and what was the most gratifying?

SZ: I had a great experience writing this book. The difficulties were mostlyin the fine tuning--pulling back from melodrama, truly understanding why the characters acted as they did, letting them be inconsistent humans without being unbelievable. I don't know why I do half the stuff I do; figuring it out for characters is always a challenge! So many things about the writing were gratifying, but probably what I enjoyed most was weaving
the two narratives and arcs together. I loved getting to see the world through the eyes of both Jill and Mandy, and I really got excited every time they were in a scene together. They are such an unlikely pair, and never would have met in any other circumstance. Bringing their lives together has been the most fun I've ever had writing.