Author Interview: In Conversation With Simmone Howell

In the third of my interviews this summer I've chatted summer camp, chocolate and movies with Australian author Simmone Howell. 

SR: First up, can you tell us a bit about Everything Beautiful?
SH: Everything Beautiful is about Riley Rose, a sixteen-year-old plus-size drama queen who is sentenced to a Christian holiday camp for bad-behaviour. Riley is atheist with a chip on her shoulder. She is appalled by the happy campers and sets out to escape in a dune buggy across the Little Desert. It’s a comedy drama romance.


SR: What inspired you to write it?
SH: I think I always had a Christian camp story in me. I went to several holiday camps as a teenager and I don’t remember any of the parables, I only remember mean girls with whopping great cans of hairspray. I wanted to write about a teenager who doesn’t really think she’s looking for answers but ends up asking lots of questions.

SR: Riley is a colourful character. Her language is full of expletives, she openly drinks and talks about sex. Some reviewers have questioned whether this is appropriate in a Young Adult novel. What do you say to this?
SH: My favourite back-handed compliment review said “this book is perfect for girls who drink, smoke, sleep around and read.” Riley’s experiences aren’t representative of all teenagers but they feel very real to me.

SR: Riley is overweight and proud of it. Yet, like modelling, plus-size girls rarely feature in literature. Why do you think this is?
SH: There is this idea that the reader wants to identify with the heroine – we read the kind of characters we wish we were. All the signs of the mainstream world tell you that there is no greater sin than being fat. But I was sick of reading about girls who kept food diaries. I imagined Riley like Beth Ditto, the singer from the Gossip, with the idea that her weight is only an issue to the people around her; to her, it’s just part of who she is.

SR: There have been a lot of strong female protagonists in Young Adult literature over the last decade. From Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials to Katniss in The Hunger Games, Sabriel and Lirael in Garth Nix Old Kingdom trilogy and many more. What has inspired this arse-kicking revolution?
SH: I’m not sure but I am glad to be part of it!

SR: One of the few things that remains unchanged between Riley’s manifesto at the beginning of the book, and her updated one at the end, is a love of chocolate. What are your favourite chocolate bars?
SH:
Cadburys Dairy Milk
Toblerone (dark)
Old Gold rum’n’raison
Black & Greens white chocolate
I could go on.
(This was the easiest question to answer.)

SR: What is the significance of Riley’s reading of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia?

SH: I wanted Riley to start imagining worlds. She goes from one imperfect world to another. She’s trying to find a place where she feels happy all the time and it’s not possible, just as the only utopias are failed utopias. Perfection only exists as an idea … Something like that. Oh, okay. I was just trying to be clever.

SR: Your books are littered with film references. What is it about movies that appeals to you?
SH: Well, I’m always imagining worlds too.

SR: And what are your favourite movies of all time?
SH:
Ghost World
How to Marry a Millionaire
Night of the Hunter
To Sir with Love
Valley Girl
Harold and Maude
Midnight Cowboy
North by Northwest


SR: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
SH: Yes.

SR: What do you like most about being a writer?
SH: Setting my own clock.

SR: Are your characters extensions of yourself or do you try to write about totally different people?
SH: A bit of both.

SR: Where and when do you do most of your writing?
SH: At home at night in bed. Or in my office which was once the panning room of the old Castlemaine Hospital. (Sometimes it smells weird.)

SR: What do you write on/with?
SH: Laptop and notebooks

SR: Are you working on anything at the moment? What is your next project?
SH: I am just finishing my third novel, another YA called Girl Defective about a record shop girl in modern day St Kilda who solves a crime … kind of.

SR: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
SH: Read, read, read and write, write, write! Good writing takes time. Grow a thick skin. Keep some things just for yourself.

SR: What books do you remember reading while growing up?
SH: My teenage reads:  Sweet Dreams books, Sweet Valley High, John Steinbeck, Jackie Collins, Judy Blume, Virginia Andrews, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, S. E Hinton, RobertCormier, Paul Zindel, Stephen King

SR: Which writers do you admire?
SH: Barry Gifford, John Fante, T.C Boyle, Megan Abbot, Charles Willeford, Denis Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, Gavin Lambert, Nathaneal West

SR: Are there any up-and-coming writers you are particularly excited about?
SH: I am a bit hopeless with new writers but I really loved the book Hollywood Ending by Australian author Kathy Charles. It’s about Hollywood Death Hags and it’s lovely.

SR: What are your five favourite books?
SH:
The Goodbye People, Gavin Lambert
Ask the Dust, John Fante
In the Night Café, Joyce Johnson
The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham
I Should have Stayed Home – Horace McCoy

SR: Simmone Howell, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. We look forward to reading more from you in the future.

This interview was conducted on behalf of Writers’ Centre Norwich as part of the Summer Reads programme launching in June. For more information, please see www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk

Book Review: Everything Beautiful - Simmone Howell

Read: February 2010
 
Everything Beautiful in one Tweet-sixzed chunk:

Slightly illicit and thoroughly escapist, Everything Beautiful is a journey is self discovery for teens everywhere.

I believe in Chloe and chocolate.
I believe the best part is always before.
I believe that most girls are shifty and most guys are dumb.
I believe the more you spill, the less you are.
I don’t believe in life after death or diuretics or happy endings.
I don’t believe anything good will come of this.

Belief and scepticism of all sorts are at play in Simmone Howell’s warm and edgy coming-of-age novel Everything Beautiful. At times outrageous, always funny, and emotionally involving, it is a great young adult read, perfect (I assume having never been one) for teen girls everywhere. There is plenty of outlandish, risqué behaviour – including foul language, sex, drugs, and all sorts of rebellion – yet this is encapsulated within a plot that is trustworthy and empowering, that promotes self-worth and respect for others above all else. Reading Everything Beautiful is a little chance to walk on the wild side without ever having to leave the safety of your own bed.

Riley Rose is sixteen-years-old and determined to be the bad girl. She’s still mourning the death of her mother two years earlier and it doesn’t help that her father has got himself a new girlfriend, a born again Christian named Norma who seems intent on being Riley’s best friend. It’s all left Riley rudderless and out of control, experimenting with sex and drugs and alcohol in an effort to find the love and comfort that’s missing from the rest of her life. Now Norma has tricked her father into sending Riley to Spirit Ranch, a Christian holiday camp in the middle of nowhere in the hope that the team-building exercises and wholesome company will cure her wayward ways.

But Riley has other ideas. She’d much rather be back home, preparing for Ben Sebatini’s big party with her best friend Chloe. If she has to go to Christian camp, she’s going to “go as a plague.”

Within hours of arriving, she’s ensured that all the other campers know who she is, and that most hate her. She is a big boisterous girl, sassy and quick to air her opinions. She’s rude, rebellious, and obnoxious, particularly when it comes to religion. Yet she’s also fragile and easy to identify with. And as she gets to know her fellow campers, she discovers that they are all as lost as she is. There’s the lovely over-protected Sarita, conceited beauty and love-rival Fleur, siblings Bird and Olivia who, like Riley, don’t quite fit in. And then there’s the newly paraplegic Dylan Luck, in who she finds an equally angry co-conspirator and, ultimately, an unexpected friend. Together, they turn the camp upside down and no-one emerges quite the same.

Everything Beautiful is a book about self-discovery and self-expression. Riley is a wonderful, unusual, heroine. She’s entertaining when she’s angry, prone to insensitive outbursts which one cannot help but smile along with. She’s capable and resourceful, a generous and thoughtful friend when she wants to be and a bit of a bitch when she doesn’t. She’s unashamed of her weight, a plus size role-model who doesn’t feel sorry for herself and we don’t need to pity. Above all she’s thoroughly human. Even when she plays sport, and struggles with her bouncing flesh, we do not take it as an author prosthelytizing about the need to be a healthy weight. It’s presented as just another part of Riley’s experience of life. Indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of Everything Beautiful is that it doesn’t lecture or present an agenda in anything. The sex isn’t there to be cautionary, the scrapes Riley gets herself in are nothing more than the scrapes of a teenage character trying to find herself and her place in the world.

Similarly, although structured around the Biblical tale of creation – On the first day… etc – religion is a fairly insignificant backdrop. Riley’s emotional journey is one of spiritual discovery, but this is in its widest sense, in finding balance between rebellion and conformity, self-affirmation and self-destruction, what you believe, and what you don’t. Indeed, Riley intersperses her rebellion with reading Thomas More’s Utopia, and it is in this that she finds new acceptance of the mixed-up world she finds herself in.

Everything Beautiful is not the genre of novel I usually read but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless. It’s good, slightly illicit and thoroughly escapist fiction. It’s impossible not to come away from Everything Beautiful wishing you could spend a week experiencing life in all its many forms in such an immediate and desperate way as Riley and the others do at Spirit Ranch, or feeling that the world makes a little more sense. And this transformation, this coming-of-age, is reflected in a new manifesto, one which is a lot less strident than it’s predecessor.

I believe in Chloe and friendship and love now.
I will always think of Dylan when I hear the Boobook owl.
I believe most girls are insecure and most guys are bluffing.
I believe the more you spill, the messier you get.
I don’t believe in miracles but I do believe in spirits.
I believe there are more questions than answers.
I believe the best part is still to come.
(I still believe in chocolate!)

Bloomsbury, January 2009, 9780747597858, pp278

7 out of 10