SWNOVELS No Words: Chapter 12
LITTLE BRIDGE BOOK FESTIVAL ITINERARY FOR: JO WRIGHT
Saturday, January 4, 9:10 a.m.–10:00 a.m.
Speaking Panel
“From Little Women to Teenage Assassins in Space, How Young-Adult Literature Focused on the Female Point of View Has Developed and Changed Through the Years.” Bestselling authors Jo Wright & Bernadette Zhang in Conversation
(Moderated by Molly Hartwell Will Price)
Things only got worse from there.
I was sitting in the front row of the library’s newly renovated auditorium, a gorgeous room featuring a well-lit stage, on which Will Price stood with a microphone.
Molly and her team—which I knew now included Will—had done a wonderful job of making the stage look like a warm and welcoming place for the festival panelists. There was a Persian carpet set across the middle of a raised dais, on which three black leather chairs had been arranged to look more like a living-room conversation nook than a literary panel. Someone (probably Molly) had even been thoughtful enough to set out a couple of large potted ficus trees and little end tables, complete with bottled waters and boxes of tissues in case a panelist needed to blow their nose—or possibly dry their eyes from weeping if things got too emotional.
The only way you’d know, really, that it was a set and not someone’s home was the handheld microphone resting on the seat of each of the chairs . . . and of course the gigantic scrim behind the chairs, onto which was being projected a very professional graphic proclaiming the words Little Bridge Island 1st Annual Book Festival.
But it didn’t matter how homey the set looked. It was where, my roiling stomach was telling me, I was about to die.
Why, oh, why, had I let Rosie talk me into saying yes to this gig?
Will was standing in front of the chairs doing a not-terrible job of welcoming the almost five hundred people in the audience. I knew there were almost five hundred people because I’d seen a sign on the wall that said MAXIMUM ROOM CAPACITY: 500, and nearly every seat was full.
Obviously they were all there for Will. I could see Lauren and her friends smack-dab in the middle of the audience—close to the stage but not too close—gazing up at him, enraptured, as he thanked everyone for coming.
And who could blame them? He did make a very fine literary ambassador. Whoever was running the stage lighting from the back of the house was doing an excellent job of it, the spotlight bringing out the glossy highlights in Will’s dark hair and causing shadows to form just right on . . . other parts of him.
Whoa. What was I doing, looking at those parts? I was a celebrated children’s author of books that empowered little girls (even if I wrote about them through the voice of a feisty teenaged cat). The fact that I’d even noticed Will’s “parts” was so beneath me, especially when there were so many young women around. The Snappettes were milling about in their cute little matching shorts and shirts, helping with crowd control and passing out festival programs to anyone who hadn’t received one yet, and still trying to sell their baked goods.
Of course there’d been quite a few gasps of excitement and some scattered applause when Will announced why Molly wasn’t there—everyone in the audience seemed to be invested in the birth of her baby.
But there was no getting around it: Will Price was the real draw at this festival.
And that’s why when I got up onto that stage, I was going to be super, duper nice to him.
Not that I’d ever intended to be mean to him. Why should I? He’d apologized. The past was all water under the bridge. I was completely letting go of the whole New York Times thing and welcoming this new journey we were on together . . . whatever it was.
And I had to admit that The Moment was not the worst book I had ever read. The actions of its hero were morally questionable, and the heroine had no backbone whatsoever.
But the book was at least more entertaining than the Bible, the only other book in my hotel room, which I’d (spoiler alert) already read.
So I was going to be as sweet as pie to Will Price, whatever he said up there onstage, and as soon as Bernadette showed up—I had no idea where she was—I was going to tell her to do the same, no matter what infuriating thing he might end up saying as moderator. This was his town, and we were guests here. It was like in Kitty Katz #15, when Kitty and her best friend, Felicity Feline, were hired to puppy sit in the beach town of Dogsville. Did the two of them back down from that challenge?
No, because they were competent as well as gracious. Bernadette and I would be the same, because we were just as good a team.
Which was why it was a bit odd to me that Bernadette was taking so long with her phone call. We were almost five minutes into Will’s welcome speech (which was mostly a long list of thank-yous to various sponsors and donors) when she finally showed up, breathless and looking a little shaky.
“Jo.” She knelt in the aisle beside my seat.
“Bern,” I whispered. “Where have you been? We’re going on as soon as Will is done up there.”
Then I saw her expression. As nervous as I felt, she looked a thousand times worse.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered. “Was it the mango? Do you need some ginger ale or something? I think they have some in the green room. We could—”
She shook her head. “No, Jo. It’s worse.”
For Bernadette, there was only one problem worse than digestive issues. I knew without her having to tell me what it was:
Sophie, her eldest. It was always Sophie.
She waved to me to follow her. I did, the two of us creeping out a side exit into a hallway, letting the door to the auditorium close softly behind us so we wouldn’t interrupt Will’s speech.
“What’s happened?” I asked, my stomach in knots.
“Somehow Jen got it into her head that it would be a good idea to let Sophie have her friend Tasha sleep over last night.” There were tears in Bernadette’s eyes. “Don’t ask me why when Jen’s never supervised a playdate on her own before. So of course this morning when the girls woke up at the crack of dawn, they decided to play Horsies and were crawling all around on our not-yet-totally refinished wood floors, neighing. And now Sophie’s got a splinter in her knee.”
I was confused. A splinter? A splinter? “Can’t Jen take it out? She’s a doctor, for pity’s sake.”
“That’s just it. She tried. But this is no ordinary splinter. It’s huge—maybe an inch long—and it entered vertically, way too deep to reach with tweezers. Jen’s had to take Sophie to the ER.”
I bit my lip. It wasn’t at all funny.
But it was exactly the sort of thing that would happen to Sophie.
“Sophie’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”
“Yes, of course she’s going to be all right. It’s a splinter. Only they’re surgically removing it in exactly fifteen minutes. And Sophie wants me to be there with her via FaceTime while they do it. Jen swears Sophie can’t feel a thing—they’ve numbed the area thoroughly. But she’s already screaming bloody murder for me. I can’t not be there for her, Jo.”
“Of course you have to be there for her.” I took a deep breath. I knew what I had to do. “I can do our panel on my own. Don’t even worry about it.”
“Are you sure?” Bernadette looked as if she might break into tears. “I so hate to ask!”
I hadn’t even had a chance to break the news to her yet about Will being our moderator.
But I certainly couldn’t do it now. She was frazzled enough already.
Being a writer could be hard sometimes.
But being a parent, I knew, was the hardest job in the world. I was grateful sometimes for my easy—if sometimes slightly lonely—life with only the responsibilities of my sweet elderly Miss Kitty and accident-prone dad to worry about.
“Of course,” I said. “Go be with your daughter.”
Bernadette looked relieved. “I knew you’d understand,” she said, giving me a quick hug even as her cell phone chimed. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Of course you will.”
There was no way she would. An inch-long splinter, buried deep in her six-year-old daughter’s knee? I’d be lucky to see Bernadette again before lunch.
But I plastered Fake Jo’s smile across my face and turned back toward the auditorium doors, opening them just in time to hear Will Price say, “So please join me in giving a warm Little Bridge welcome to New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors Bernadette Zhang and Jo Wright!”
The audience applauded with—I liked to think—more than mere politeness as I trotted up the stairs along the side of the stage and over to the three chairs where we were to have our chat. Will was standing in front of the middle chair, still clutching his microphone. He smiled as he saw me approach, looking as ridiculously handsome as ever . . . but that smile wavered as he saw no one following me up the steps to the stage.
Yep, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I’m on my own. But everything is going to be fine.
I kept Fake Jo plastered across my face and, waving to the applauding audience, willed the jitters I felt to calm down. Then I reached for the microphone on the seat of the chair to the right of Will and sat down as gracefully as I could.
But not, of course, before I noticed that on the screen behind me, the graphic had changed. Now instead of welcoming everyone to the Little Bridge Book Festival, it showed two gigantic headshots: one of Bernadette, and one of me—our glossy back-of-the-book author photos.
But mine was as I’d looked years earlier, when I’d first started out in publishing, with a hopeful, radiant smile, sparkling blue eyes, and loose curling waves of blond hair, way before Will had ever publicly trashed my writing.
Great. This was not helping at all.
I had no choice but to address it, and the fact that I was alone.
“Wow, would you look at that,” I said into the mic, gazing up at myself. “This is what one night of partying on your island does to people. It killed the author Bernadette Zhang and it turned me from that sweet young thing into this.” I gestured at my black hair and the sunglasses I had forgotten up until that moment that I was still wearing. No wonder Will hadn’t been reassured by my gaze.
For a second or two the audience sat in stunned silence, as if uncertain what it had heard. But I knew the mic was on, because I’d heard my own voice reverberate quite clearly from the back of the auditorium. The acoustics were dynamite.
Then a wave of appreciative laughter came pouring toward me: they got the joke.
And right then the butterflies fled, and I felt fine. Everything was going to be all right . . . so long as I could Kitty Katz my way through it and keep up the furr-endly banter.
“I’m so sorry that you ordered this,” I said, gesturing toward the photo and then myself again, “but got this instead. But I assure you, I am Jo Wright. It’s just been a while since I updated my author photo. And I’m loving my stay here on your lovely island. Thank you so much for having me.” I gave Will a slice of my smile to show that my thanks extended to him, as well, but he was only staring at me with a sort of stunned expression on his face, so I turned back to address the audience. “Bernadette Zhang’s been called away for a family emergency—all of you parents out there know how hard it is to balance work and family life. But she’ll try to join us as soon as she can. In the meantime, Will and I are going to have a great conversation about female empowerment in children’s fiction today, aren’t we, Will?”
Come on, buddy, I urged him with my eyes. Get it together.
But he had sunk down into the middle seat as if he couldn’t quite believe the mess he’d stumbled into.
Why? Because he had to talk to me alone, on a stage? Was I that scary?
“Um,” he managed. “Yes. Yes, we will.”
“Great!” Oh my God, he was totally leaving me dangling. “Okay, well, we might as well get started. Will, what was your favorite children’s book growing up—one that contained a strong female lead character?”
“Uh.” For such a big man, he looked as if his chair was swallowing him whole, he’d sunk so far back into it. “I don’t—I guess, er—Peter Pan?”
“Oh, Peter Pan.” Peter Pan? Dear God, how was this happening? I glanced at the audience, although honestly the stage lights were so bright I couldn’t see them, even with my sunglasses on. “All right. So the strong female lead you’re referring to is Wendy?”
“Yes.” He appeared to be growing slightly more confident, if the way he was straightening up in his chair was any indication. “Wendy.”
Oh, no. Not Wendy.
But he was serious.
“Wendy,” I repeated. “Okay. You’re sure? The girl Peter Pan abandons at the end of the book after dragging her all the way to Neverland so that she can essentially function as a domestic servant for him and all the rest of the Lost Boys? You see J. M. Barrie’s character Wendy as a symbol of female empowerment?”
While a large portion of the audience sat in silence—probably bored witless—a few people laughed, including, I noted, Frannie. She had a very distinct laugh that I could pick out anywhere.
But Will wasn’t yet down for the count. He sat up even straighter in his seat.
“Peter doesn’t abandon Wendy,” he surprised me by arguing. “She has some agency. He asks her to stay in Neverland—”
“As a mother figure. In the book he informs her that his feelings for her are those of a devoted son.”
“—and she turns him down.”
“Because she doesn’t want to sit around darning his socks all day, competing for his affections with Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell.”
“Right. Which makes her a feminist character.”
Although I was impressed that Will had actually given so much thought to a children’s book, a form of literature he’d publicly declared beneath him, I couldn’t pretend to agree with him, even to be polite. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Wendy’s choice—I wouldn’t want to stay in Neverland, either. I’m just saying hers was the only choice a man writing in J. M. Barrie’s day could conceive of for a female character. Fortunately today there are tons of great books for kids to read that show female characters having all the same opportunities and rights as their male counterparts—”
Will nodded. “Like in my books.”
Whoa. I stared at him. “Excuse me?”
“Like in my books.” He said it again! And went on to say more about it: “In my books, the female characters are treated as absolutely equal to the male—”
“Hold on. You do realize every single one of your books features an unrealistically perfect female character who is unfulfilled until she meets a man—usually a man whose heart has been badly damaged by some sort of ‘evil’ woman.” I made quote marks in the air with my fingers when I said the word evil. “But then that man is healed by the perfect woman’s love. And then, just as they’re about to find blissful happiness together, the same thing happens: tragedy.”
This got a nervous titter out of the audience . . . and one big horse laugh out of Frannie.
Will stirred awkwardly in his seat. “First of all, that isn’t what happens in all of my books. You obviously haven’t read them all. But secondly, even if that were true, what’s so wrong with that? They’re works of fiction, written to help readers escape reality.”
“You’re right, I haven’t read all your books, but I know how they all end—you yourself call them tragedies. How is that escape fiction? Escape fiction is supposed to make you forget your problems and feel happy.” Like reading about a funny teenage cat who earns her own money, I wanted to add, but didn’t, because that would sound too self-promotional.
“But for some people, having a good cry over a sad story does make them feel happy,” Will insisted. If he was still nervous, it didn’t show anymore. He was no longer slumped in his chair. Now he was leaning forward, clutching his mic with both hands, his elbows on his knees, looking intently into my face. “It was Aristotle who first coined the term catharsis, only he was talking about the emotional release or purge people experience when watching a tragedy take place live onstage. He felt that it could help to get them to move past their own stress or grief.”
Whoa again. Also . . . was it my imagination, or was this guy even hotter when he was riled up about literature?
“So is that why you always write such sad endings?” I managed to keep it together enough to ask. “Are they an emotional release for you? Do they help you move past your own grief about . . . ?”
I let the end of the sentence dangle, hoping he’d fill in the blank. Come on, Will. What happened just before Novel Con that made you be so mean about my books? Let it out. It will be cat-artic.
But he only gave me an enigmatic smile and leaned back in his chair, crossing an ankle over his opposite knee. His body language could not have been more clear: Back off.
“I think we’re getting a little off topic here,” he said. “Aren’t we supposed to be discussing female empowerment in YA novels?”
Whiskers.
“Right,” I said, leaning back as well and reaching for the bottled water on the end table closest to me. “Yes, of course. Let’s move on.”
But my mind was a blank. I’d done this talk a thousand times with Bernadette as well as other authors, and even on my own, and suddenly I couldn’t remember a single thing on the topic. It had nothing to do with the raw masculinity being exuded from the person in the chair opposite me. Nothing at all.
And I didn’t need the water because I was feeling hot all of a sudden.
“What about you?” Will prompted. “What was your favorite children’s book growing up—one that contained a strong female lead character?”
“Uh . . .” I hated this question, because the truth was, I didn’t have one: I had a hundred. I’d read voraciously as a kid, using the library to escape my mother’s illness and my dad’s inability to cope with it. The names of dozens of books and authors raced through my head as I twisted the cap off the water bottle. Ouch. Why was this always so hard? I needed to remember to pick one and write it down on my hand before these things began.
“Wait,” Will said, lowering his foot and leaning forward again. “Don’t tell me. I think I know. Would you happen to have been named after its main character?”
I stared at him, startled. “What? No. Who?”
“Really?” He was smiling mysteriously again, like he’d got hold of some secret information about me. “You’re not named after one of children’s literature’s greatest female characters of all time, Josephine March from Little Women?”