40 Things I Want to Tell You (21 page)

Thanks, Lynne and Hadley. Thanks, Sarah and Allyson and everyone else at HCC.

Thanks, Carol, Michael, Jocelyn, Juna and Community Relations. Thanks, everyone at Saskatoon Public Library, for the terrific residency.

Thanks, Holly Calder, for directing me to the recipe.

Thanks, Barbara Hansen. The recipe Bird uses on page 241 is from her book
Mexican Cooking.
Find more recipes at EatMx.com

Thanks, Cassandra and Karen, for answering my calls.

Thanks, Jen, Richard, Natalia, Tim-Tim, Alexia and Adrian, for lots of fun.

Thanks, Emile, for printing. Thank you, Nicole, for holding the baby.

Thanks, Jocelyne Martel, both times.

Thank you, Mum, for all you’ve done. Thank you, Paul.

Thank you, Dad, for reading, advising and more. Thank you, Liz.

Thanks, Anneke—you’re the best. You are too, Jack.

Thanks, Yann. You know why.

What inspired you to write
Forty Things
?

When I initially came up with the idea, I was pregnant with my first child. I wanted to write a list of things that would be good rules to live by, things I wanted to tell my baby when he arrived in the world. I’d been toying in my mind with the idea of a teenage advice columnist, called Bird. She just kept appearing on the page when I’d sit down to write. I realized it was her story to tell, not mine. Her list of forty things gave me the structure I needed, and so the novel was born.

What was difficult about writing the novel?

Bird isn’t me, and so her decision process about her pregnancy isn’t the one I went through. Bird’s pregnancy is unplanned, and she has difficult choices to make. The choice she makes is right for her, and hopefully readers agree. But I also hope that readers don’t feel Bird is telling anyone else how to live. Sure,
she starts the book thinking she has all the answers for everyone else, but by the end she comes to realize that her way of living is only one way of living, not the only way of living. It was difficult to get the right balance when I wrote this book—I wanted to tell Bird’s story, but I didn’t want to endorse one choice over the other.

The other part of the book that was tricky was getting the advice columns to sound right. I asked people to help me come up with particular problems and then to write their own letters so the voices would be distinct.

In the novel, Bird and Griffin have a complicated relationship. Why do you think she stays with him for as long as she does?

Bird is the type of person who finds it hard when her vision of the world doesn’t work out. I tried to hint at this by giving her photography as a hobby. When she takes a photograph, she’s trying to make order out of her world—except the world isn’t an orderly place that can be controlled. She’s so sure that Griffin is the right guy for her that, even when it’s obvious he isn’t, she can’t give up the security he provides.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another YA novel and a book for young children. The novel is still in the mysterious, murky phase. The picture book is called
The Best-Ever Bookworm Book by Violet and Victor Small.

What writing tips do you have for aspiring authors?

I have three main tips that I give (and check out my website, www.alicekuipers.com, for regular prompts and writing advice):

40 Things I Want to Tell You
Copyright © 2012 by Alice Kuipers.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

ePub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-40589-8

Published by Harper
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Flan recipe on p. 241 from
Mexican Cookery
by Barbara Hansen,
reprinted by permission of the author (www.EatMx.com).

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data Kuipers, Alice
40 things I want to tell you / Alice Kuipers.

ISBN 978-1-44340-587-4

I. Title. II. Title: Forty things I want to tell you.
PS8621.U38F67 2012     jC813’.6    C2011-905892-8

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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