My face still hurts… for so many reasons.
School Library Journal sent a photographer to our house yesterday to take a picture of me that will run (July, I think) with an article about the Margaret A. Edwards Award. It’s going to be the cover photo, so there were specific demands of the picture in terms of surrounding space for text, etc. There was also a request to try and get the picture in a natural setting, possibly because of the tree themes in Speak, and the amount of time I spend gardening, etc.
The photographer was a super nice guy from Syracuse. He took pics of me in our Forest, on the stone wall behind the garden, in the house, and by the Magic Window in the cottage. Queen Louise developed a new job skill; she had to hold the whatsit that softened the light. Now she is officially a Grip. And she has a grip on life. Many bad puns were made while the guy shot – I kid you not – hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Here’s hoping that one of them turned out OK.
Me standing on the wall. Do I look like a target for haters? Keep reading.
In other news, a small firestorm about WINTERGIRLS is raging over on the New York Times website, on the Well, a discussion section. The question posed was “In writing about eating disorders, are authors, unwittingly, creating an alluring guidebook to the disease?”
The debate is fascinating; take a peek.
Some of the comments were very painful for me to read, like the one that accused me of writing “anorexic porn.” The debate seems to be boiling down to a question that pertains to many YA novels: Will our children act in a dangerous manner if they read about dangerous behaviors in books?
And then the good people at the Jezebel blog joined the fray, with a blog entry called “Are Teen Girls Really That Fragile?” Plenty of response to that question, too!
What do you think about all of this?
