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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: THE AREA 51 FILES
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.juliebuxbaum.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
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PERSONAL
Born 1977; married; children: two.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania; Harvard Law School, J.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Lawyer and novelist.
WRITINGS
A movie adaptation of The Opposite of Love starring Anne Hathaway is in talks.
SIDELIGHTS
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Julie Buxbaum is a lawyer and New York Times best-selling novelist who writes for a younger audience in order to provide a connection and sense of freedom for younger readers. Her themes focus on topical events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks and the college admission bribery scandal.
Buxbaum’s first novel, The Opposite of Love, written for adult readers, centers on Manhattan attorney Emily Haxby who should have it all but self-defeatism strikes her hard, beginning with dumping her nearly perfect fiancé, Andrew. Other life events that conspire to tank Emily’s life include representing a reprehensible corporation causing environmental pollution, her boss attempts to sexually assault her, and her beloved grandfather has Alzheimer’s. Beth Gibbs in Library Journal commented: “Can Emily pull it together—work, family, love life, and all? You’ll be turning pages until you find out!”
In After You, another novel for adult readers, Ellie Lerner flies from Boston to London after the murder of her best friend and American ex-pat Lucy Stafford. Still grieving over the stillborn birth of her baby, Ellie takes Lucy’s 8-year-old daughter Sophie under her wing. Ellie finds refuge in London away from her estranged husband and finds purpose again taking care of Sophie. “Buxbaum skillfully handles this tale of grief and growing, resonant with realistic emotional stakes and hard-won wisdom,” declared a Publishers Weekly contributor.
Buxbaum switched to writing novels for young adults beginning with the contemporary book Tell Me Three Things. In an interview with Sara Grochowski in Publishers Weekly, Buxbaum explained that she was devastated by the responsibilities of being an adult and “I missed being a teenager with wide-open options… I started writing YA to open my world again, to revisit that feeling of possibility in a non-dangerous manner.”
In Tell Me Three Things, teenager Jessie is reeling from the sudden disruption in her life. Her mother dies suddenly, her father elopes with wealthy Rachel, a woman he met online, they move from Chicago to Rachel’s mansion in Los Angles, and Jessie is placed in an elite school for the richest people’s kids. On the verge of a breakdown, Jessie receives a mysterious email from someone called Somebody Nobody (SN for short) offering to guide her through school, how to befriend the right people, and being less of a target for bullies. Jessie feels better with SN’s advice but is also dealing with Rachel’s distant son, her hot study partner, and a job in a bookstore working with the owner’s son Liam whose girlfriend hates Jessie. “Within the standard-issue teen romance is a heartfelt, wryly perceptive account of coming to terms with irrevocable loss when life itself means inevitable change,” reported a writer in Kirkus Reviews. DeHanza Kwong said in School Library Journal: “Buxbaum’s debut is hard to put down because of its smooth and captivating text.”
What to Say Next features a charming romance between two loners. Indian American teen Kit has just lost her white father in a car accident. Grieving, she just wants to be alone during lunch so she sits at the table of quiet David, who is autistic, has no friends, and always eats alone. But the two soon develop a friendship and upset the social dynamics of their high school. David is honest and insightful, and Kit gets his help investigating if her father’s death was really an accident. Writing in Voice of Youth Advocates, Elizabeth Matson said: “This is ultimately a story of friendship and finding one’s tribe.”
Hope and Other Punchlines highlights the legacy of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Abbi Hope Goldstein was one year old on that fateful day and was immortalized in a photograph as she was carried out of a day care center as the first World Trade Center tower fell. She was famously known as Baby Hope. Now it’s 16 years later and she has a worrisome bloody cough that she believes is 9/11 syndrome from breathing the toxins at ground zero. She confides in a summer camp counselor, budding comedian Noah Stern, and together they reminisce about how the 9/11 tragic effects affected their lives.
As Buxbaum realized that her teenage readers were babies or not even born when 9/11 happened, she revealed in an interview with Norah Piehl in BookPage: “It’s ancient history to them. So I wanted to find a way to make 9/11 accessible and digestible to this generation, for whom 9/11 feels like what Pearl Harbor feels like to me.” The novel is “an emotionally resonant, wryly humorous portrayal of two young adults navigating trauma and acceptance years after 9/11,” according to a Publishers Weekly contributor.
In a ripped from the headlines story, Admission follows high school senior Chloe Berringer, the daughter of a famous sitcom actress, whose world turns upside down when the FBI arrests her mother for participating in the college admissions bribery scandal. The book depicts Chloe’s rich and privileged lifestyle contrasted with the struggles of her Nigerian American best friend Shola who studies hard to earn a college scholarship. “Though Buxbaum…is heavy-handed with the moral lessons, her assessment of the entitled 1% feels spot-on,” reported a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. Samantha Lumetta noted in School Library Journal: “This timely character-centric novel, … is a gripping, thoughtful exploration of contemporary themes.”
Buxbaum’s debut middle grade book, The Area 51 Files, illustrated by Lavanya Naidu, begins the “The Area 51 Files” series. Indian American orphan Priya “Sky” Patel-Baum is sent to live with her eccentric Uncle Anish in the notoriously secretive Area 51. There Sky learns the secret—humans and a variety of alien species live in harmony. But one of the species, the Zdstrammars, are disappearing and Anish, who is the deputy head of the Federal Bureau of Alien Investigations, is the major suspect. Sky partners with her new shapeshifter alien friend Elvis to find the real culprit and exonerate her uncle. A writer in Kirkus Reviews commented: “Though the main mystery is neatly wrapped up, the cliffhanger ending promises more laughs.” In School Library Journal, Deanna McDaniel said: “Readers who like their science fiction with a touch of humor… will enjoy these sci-fic high jinks.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2007, review of The Opposite of Love; July 15, 2009, review of After You; January 15, 2016, review of Tell Me Three Things; June 15, 2017, review of What to Say Next; March 1, 2019, review of Hope and Other Punchlines; February 15, 2022, review of Year on Fire; July 15, 2022, review of The Area 51 Files; May 15, 2023, review of The Big Flush.
Library Journal, January 1, 2008, Beth Gibbs, review of The Opposite of Love, p. 80.
Publishers Weekly, July 6, 2009, review of After You, p. 32; March 11, 2019, review of Hope and Other Punchlines, p. 54; March 23, 2020, review of Admission, p. 85; November 23, 2022, review of Year on Fire, p. 116.
School Library Journal, February 2016, DeHanza Kwong, review of Tell Me Three Things, p. 98; May 2020, Samantha Lumetta, review of Admission, p. 65; December 2022, Deanna McDaniel, review of The Area 51 Files, p. 84.
Voice of Youth Advocates, August 2017, Elizabeth Matson, review of What to Say Next, p. 56.
ONLINE
BookPage, https://www.bookpage.com/ (May 2019), Norah Piehl, “Julie Buxbaum: A Love Story Born from a National Tragedy.”
Julie Buxbaum Homepage, https://www.juliebuxbaum.com/ (June 1, 2023), author profile.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 20, 2017), Sara Grochowski, “Q&A with Julie Buxbaum.”
Julie Buxbaum is the New York Times best selling author of the young adult novels: Tell Me Three Things, What to Say Next, Hope and Other Punchlines, Admission, and most recently Year on Fire. Her middle grade debut, The Area 51 Files, is the first in a forthcoming three book series for readers ages 8 to 12. She’s also the author of two critically acclaimed novels for adults: The Opposite of Love and After You. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages, and she is finalist for the Edgar award. Julie’s writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times. She is a former lawyer and graduate of University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and more books than is reasonable.
BIO
Julie Buxbaum is the New York Times best selling author of Tell Me Three Things, her young adult debut, What to Say Next and most recently, Hope and Other Punchlines. She’s also the author of two critically acclaimed novels for adults: The Opposite of Love and After You. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Julie’s writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times. She is a former lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and more books than is reasonable. Visit Julie online at www.juliebuxbaum.com and follow @juliebux on Twitter.
Hancock Park Writer Julie Buxbaum on Her New Book “The Area 51 Files”
By
Guest
October 1, 2022
Hancock Park writer Julie Buxbaum (above) spoke with Buzz contributor Mia Gabriella about her new book, “The Area 51 Files,” now available at Chevalier’s Books.
Editor’s Note: Buzz contributor Mia Gabriella interviewed Hancock Park resident and best-selling author Julie Buxbaum about her newest book, “The Area 51 Files,” available at our beloved local bookstore, Chevalier’s Books. Gabriella, a writer and poet, will be writing for the Buzz about local authors in the Young Adult book genre, in a column she’s calling “Mark My Words.”
From conquering Harvard Law School to publishing two critically-acclaimed adult fiction novels (The Opposite of Love and After You) to earning the coveted a New York Times bestseller title with her young adult debut Tell Me Three Things, Julie has her eyes set on a new mountain to climb – Middle Grade books. Her most recent release, The Area 51 Files, is the first in a three-book series geared toward children (or anyone still young at heart). In the story, filled with aliens and mysteries to uncover, Sky Patel-Baum is joined by her new best friend, Elvis, a pizza-obsessed hedgehog, and the lovable fluffy pup, Pickles, to crack the case.
So what made you, a lawyer, decide to become a young adult and children’s author? That really intrigues me, it’s such a drastic career change.
I was a lawyer, I graduated from law school, went to work at a large law firm for quite a few years and I really hated it. I was just incredibly unfulfilled. And every Sunday night I would cry about having to go to work on Monday morning. And so about, I think about 17 years ago now…as part of a New Year’s resolution, I decided to quit my job and write my first book. It’s literally the only New Year’s resolution I’ve kept my entire life. I make one every year and break it every year, but this one I kept. I quit my job the first Monday after New Year’s, sat down the very next day to start writing my first adult book. And the thought wasn’t, ‘oh, I’m going to become a writer’. The thought was, ‘I’ve always wanted to write a book before I die. I’m going to write this book and then figure out what kind of lawyer I actually want to be. Where I won’t cry on Sunday nights about having to go to work on Monday morning.’ But after maybe two weeks, it occurred to me that I was doing what I always wanted to do with my life, it just felt so natural and so organic in a way I had never anticipated or expected. Then after that, I got ridiculously lucky. I found an agent, who sold it to an editor, who got a deal with Penguin Random House, and within nine months I became a writer with a book deal. I was able to not return to law and I’ve been a full time novelist ever since.
Wow, that’s really amazing.
But I do feel like it’s really important to stress: first of all, I had the privilege to quit my job. And secondly, I got outrageously lucky. I mean, I was very proud of the book I wrote, and I still love that book, but there are plenty of people who write fantastic books and the stars don’t line up like they lined up for me. So when people ask me, ‘should I quit my job to write a book?’ do NOT do that! [Julie laughs.] That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But for me, it happened to work out.
Could you walk me through the genesis of The Area 51 Files? How did Sky come to be?
So during the pandemic, my kid used to ask me all sorts of questions I didn’t have good answers to. And I’m sure a lot of parents felt this way. My kid was asking, ‘When are we going back to school? Are we going to get sick? When should we wear a mask?’ There were a million questions and I didn’t have the right answers to all of them. As a parent there’s nothing more painful than not knowing what to say to your kid. So every time my kid would ask me a question, my heart would sink and it was just a really tough time. So one day we’re sitting at dinner and my kid turns to me and says, ‘Mommy, I have a question!’ and my first thought was ‘Oh my god, what now?’ I started to well up but was like, ‘Of course you can ask me a question, buddy.’ And my kid goes, ‘Mommy, what do you think happens in area 51?’ And a lightbulb went off above my head and it was like ding ding ding, I can answer this question for you! And I decided to write a book to answer his question.
I wanted to know how publishing your first book changed your process of writing. And what have you learned from writing for a younger audience compared to an adult one?
Oh, interesting! I don’t know if it did. I don’t know that my process changed fundamentally from the first book to the second. I definitely became less disciplined. I think when I sat down to write my first book I still had, sort of, the hardcore mentality of a lawyer. Where every minute counts, so there’s this ruthless efficiency that’s applied, and I’ve gotten slower and slower and less efficient the older I’ve gotten.
That’s so funny because I usually hear the opposite of that. Like, ‘Oh, this is my job now so I have to really double down on my craft.’
Yeah, I have two children who keep me very busy, and my life just keeps getting fuller, and the amount of hours in the day remain static so it just becomes harder. I think I was more efficient when I was younger, unfortunately. [She pauses to think.] I think that writing adult and writing young adult is very similar. I don’t find that my process changed dramatically in between. Except for, um, I think a little bit more about how language will be perceived in the teen mind versus the adult one. But otherwise, my process is exactly the same. With my middle grade book, because it’s illustrated, that is different. For me the process of writing is way more visual, where I have to imagine and see things, and then I have to describe the pictures to an illustrator. It’s something I hadn’t done before and turned out to be really fun. And the most fun part about that is trying to be funny in a picture rather than with words.
So was the process for writing Year On Fire somewhat easier or more difficult than The Area 51 Files?
I think it was harder. Technically speaking, writing The Area 51 Files was more like exercising a new muscle, so that might’ve been more difficult. But in terms of joy, not all my books are joys from beginning to end, but with The Area 51 Files, I just smiled the whole way through. Like, it was just pure fun. Partially because I wasn’t even writing necessarily for my career, I was writing for my kid, which is a totally different thing. I think Year On Fire was a little tougher, partially because I put it down to write The Admission and I had to pick it back up again.
Earlier you asked me why I turned to YA, and I answered why I turned to adult. So the answer to why I turned to YA is because most of my adult life, I used to play at being a grown-up. Like, I would get up in the morning, put on my business suit, and go to work, then I’d go home, take off my jacket, put on The Bachelor or something, and be like, ‘haha, I tricked them another day!’ And as I got older and older, I published two books, I moved to London, then New York, then LA, I got married, bought a house, had two kids, and it suddenly became very clear to me that I was a grown-up. You’d think that realization would be a relief because when you’re faking it, when you have that imposter syndrome for so long, you’d feel like when it lifted things would feel lighter. But in fact, I found it really sad. I missed not knowing what my future held. There were no more what-ifs. There were no more big life questions that needed to be answered. I turned to YA because I wanted to write about that time in life where everything was wide open, when all the firsts are in front of you, not behind you.
Okay, so I have some rapid fire questions to wrap things up. I want you to answer as fast as you can. Ready?
Ready.
Top three things you need on your desk while writing?
Cup of coffee, a pen, laptop.
Plotter or pantser?
Pantser.
Favorite character you’ve ever written?
David from What To Say Next.
Name an underappreciated novel that you love.
Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert.
Name five authors, dead or alive, you’d want to have a dinner party with.
Zadie Smith. Jane Austen. Milan Kundera. Richard Powers. Mo Willems.
Julie’s upcoming book will be the next installment of The Area 51 Files, titled The Flush. Coming next summer of 2023! Mark my words, you won’t want to miss it.
Julie Buxbaum: How I Write
"It’s important to write about things that matter to you and scare you."
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Julie Buxbaum
Julie Buxbaum, a Harvard Law School graduate and former lawyer, decided to step away from her legal career to pursue a career in novel writing. Her first adult novel, The Opposite of Love, was published in 2008, followed by another, After You, in 2009. She eventually made the switch to YA in 2016 with her smash hit Tell Me Three Things, which became a New York Times best-seller. Her highly anticipated second YA novel, What to Say Next, was published in 2017 and was met with much praise.
With realistic and well-developed characters and interesting plots, Buxbaum has a gift for creating YA novels that are immensely appealing. She is masterful at capturing the teenage experience with poignancy and humor.
Julie Buxbaum’s next YA novel, Picture a Blue Sky, is scheduled for release in May.
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Legal training
As a lawyer, you’re trained to use as few words as possible. You’re not allowed to get flowery. You stick to the facts, the bare bones. That’s helped to make me ruthless when it comes to editing. I think that discipline I learned as a lawyer translated into my novel writing.
Starting point
It’s different with each book. Usually, I have a character and a voice in mind, and a theme I’m interested in exploring. Sometimes it’s obvious from day one, and sometimes I’ll look back and realize that I was obsessed with something. When I’m in the thick of it, I don’t necessarily see it. I’m not an outliner. I trust the process will take the book where I need to go. You have to really believe you’re going to get to that place. It’s less efficient than outlining, but it keeps it interesting.
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Voice
I approach YA the same way I approached adult novels. The process is the same when you’re getting into the head of a character that’s 40 or 22 or 16. I feel like being a teenager has changed dramatically in some ways, such as social media. But the underlying feelings, like you’re on the cusp of adulthood and the world is about to explode open but it feels closed – those are universal feelings. I can’t remember details from that time, but I can remember the feelings so vividly.
Inspiration from real-life suffering
I write to make sense of the world. Writing is a how I process what I’m feeling. I write as a form of therapy, and I’m much less happy when I’m not writing. It’s important to write about things that matter to you and scare you. Grief and loss have been a huge part of my life and make me the person I am. I actively try to avoid it, but it shows up in my work. It’s interesting to write about the balance between the hardest and the best things in life.
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What’s great about YA?
While the process is similar, the community is different, and the responsiveness of readers is very different. Readers weren’t as easily accessible when my first novel came out. Teenage readers are smart and engaged, and it’s fun to travel and meet them.
What’s next?
I’ve had multiple full drafts on my next book, and this one has been a particularly brutal revision process. This is one of the harder ones, but I was due for one because What to Say Next flowed for me. This one has a story that is highly specific. It’s about something that happens to one person, and the specificity makes it more of a complicated story. I want to make sure readers relate to it, in spite of and because of the specificity. It’s also rooted in history.
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Allison Futterman is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A college admissions novel that’s less about gossip than complicity
Julie Buxbaum
Julie Buxbaum’s latest young-adult novel, “Admission,” explores the implications of a college admissions scandal ripped from last year’s headlines.(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
BY ZAN ROMANOFF
NOV. 27, 2020 7 AM PT
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ON THE SHELF
Admission
By Julie Buxbaum
Delacorte: 352 pages, $19
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
When news of the college admissions scandal broke in March 2019, much of the nation was thrilled by its promise of good gossip and ample schadenfreude. The story had everything we love to hate-read — it was a tale of extreme wealth and extreme greed. Celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin had collaborated with Rick Singer, a “private admissions counselor,” to fake test scores and athletic resumes in order buy their kids’ way into elite colleges. In a deeply divided nation, here, at last, was something we could all agree on: These people were monsters, and they deserved to be exposed, mocked and punished for their sins.
“When the scandal broke, I, like the rest of the United States, was totally and completely obsessed,” says Julie Buxbaum, “but times a thousand — more than anyone else.” Buxbaum is the author of five novels, mostly for young adults, including the New York Times bestselling “Tell Me Three Things,” but before she started writing, she was a lawyer. So she knew what she was looking at when she sat down and read through the actual case that had been brought by the Massachusetts district attorney — all 500 pages of it. Even that wasn’t enough; as Buxbaum explained during a phone call, the scandal “wouldn’t let me go.”
For all the information she’d gleaned from the legalese, Buxbaum was still left with questions that reached beyond guilt or innocence. Which is what led her to write her sixth book, out next week. “Admission” is a young adult novel about a teenage girl named Chloe who has just discovered that her parents faked her way into her dream school — and now her mother, a B-list actress best known as a charming sitcom mom, may end up going to jail for it.
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Though the details are ripped from the headlines, Buxbaum lets us know in the novel’s introduction that Chloe isn’t meant to be a cipher for any of its familiar faces: “I do not know anyone involved in the scandal, nor did I do any investigative reporting.”
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She wrote the disclaimer, she explains, because “it was important to me that I was telling a larger story, not the particular story of the famous names.” She wanted to ask broader questions about privilege, complicity and what we allow ourselves to know about the unattractive underbellies of our lives.
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While no one ever tells Chloe explicitly what’s being done for her, she spends much of the time half-noticing how oddly her parents are acting: the sudden arrival of a private college counselor, something her prep school expressly discourages; her parents’ insistence that she has a heretofore undiagnosed learning disability; her father asking for a picture of her where she looks “tan.”
“I’m always interested in that gray area in life where you know something but don’t know something,” Buxbaum says, “where your instinct is at odds with what you want the world to be, so you sort of squash down the information. The central mystery of this novel is not whether her mom did it — we know as much immediately. The question is, how much does Chloe know, and when does she know it? Which is a much more interesting and morally ambiguous question.”
Buxbaum also wanted to explore the effect of that kind of parenting. “We had seen so much talk about the parents and why they did it, but not enough talk about the kids at the center of it,” she says. “What are you telling your child when you parent this way? What lessons are you imparting? You’re imparting a lesson of pure entitlement, like, ‘You deserve this no matter how hard you’ve worked.’ And second, you’re imparting a message of inadequacy — ‘You can’t do this on your own.’ Which are two conflicting messages. How do you navigate that as a teenager?”
"Admission," by Julie Buxbaum.
(Delacorte Press)
It was important to Buxbaum that “Admission” doesn’t read as a plea for sympathy; instead, she sees it as an attempt to understand Chloe’s experience in all its messy complexity. “The point of the novel is not to make you like the main character but to understand them,” she says. “As a culture, we don’t have the impulse to understand these teenagers, but it’s important that we do, because it tells us this larger story about how we’re raising a generation.”
Actress Felicity Huffman, escorted by her husband William H. Macy, makes her way to the entrance of the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse September 13, 2019 in Boston, where she will be sentenced for her role in the College Admissions scandal. - Huffman, one of the defendants charged in the college admissions cheating scandal, is scheduled to be sentenced for paying $15,000 to inflate her daughters SAT scores, a crime she said she committed trying to be a good parent. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo credit should read JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images)
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Buxbaum lives in the Hancock Park neighborhood of L.A., and her kids, ages 8 and 10, are enrolled in the local public elementary school. But she’s familiar with the hypercompetitive world of private schooling and the way that the desire to give one’s child the best of everything can lead to tunnel vision that prizes personal gain over communal care. “There’s a literal limit to the number of spots” for these schools, Buxbaum points out. “We talk about how it takes a village to raise kids, but we’re pitting the kids against each other, so parents are not in it for the village.”
Ultimately, the questions Buxbaum asks apply not only to the extreme cases we see in the tabloids but to any parent who must draw the line between helping their child succeed and showing them how to live. We can all agree that what Singer’s clients did was appalling, but what about sending a child to an elite private school instead of a public one? What about getting them an SAT tutor, or having your professional writer mother give your college essay “a little polish”? One of the people Buxbaum was seeking answers for was herself.
Writing the book made Buxbaum reassess her own parenting, she says — it forced her to think through “all the sort of littler messages we send along the way, and how to tell them the right story of their privileges. I haven’t figured it out!”
In the meantime, Buxbaum is at work on a new book, set at the school Chloe attends, a prep school called Wood Valley that was also the setting for “Tell Me Three Things.” The three books are very different, she says, but their common thread is her interest in characters with privilege.
“It’s the moral boundaries,” Buxbaum says. “It’s the kids at the center of power. I’m ultimately fascinated by: How complicit are we? Every decision I make on behalf of my kid, which happens every day — how complicit am I in this system?”
First Draft Episode #72: Julie Buxbaum
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni, today I am talking to Julie Buxbaum, New York Time’s Bestselling Author of Tell Me Three Things as well as Adult Novels The Opposite of Love and After You. . [Birds chirping in the background] Julie is a super smarty-pants lawyer who has lived all over the world and seen a thing or two. But she and her husband found the exact three blocks in Los Angeles that they felt was more home than anywhere. Knowing that, I felt so privileged to get to visit Julie at her adorable house, have coffee, and talk about how writing for kids might be one of the bravest things she’s ever done. So bust out the coffee cake and a hand painted mug and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Alright, are you ready?
Julie Buxbaum: I’m ready!
Sarah Enni: Okay, so how are you doing?
Julie Buxbaum: I’m doing well, thank you for having me.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh, thanks for having me over at your house, this is so nice.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s my pleasure and I love that this is a podcast so you can’t see that it’s messy.
Sarah Enni: Not at all, and the listeners should know that I am being served delicious coffee and there is an amazing candle and flowers, this is awesome. So, I like to start these interviews with going way back to the beginning which is where were you born and raised?
Julie Buxbaum: I was born in a hospital in New York City and I was raised in a little town called New City, New York.
Sarah Enni: Were you there the whole time, all through high school?
Julie Buxbaum: I moved there when I was probably about four, maybe three, from Teaneck, New Jersey and then, yes, I was there all through high school. So my whole childhood in New City, New York, this little town that I could not wait to get out of even though it’s a lovely place.
Sarah Enni: I was going to say it sounds like when places are voted the safest place it feels like family and backyards and then like really, really wanting to get the heck out of dodge.
Julie Buxbaum: You know it’s funny, it was family and it was backyards but it’s not at all charming.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Julie Buxbaum: It’s not pretty, well, it’s pretty – I mean there are trees, but it’s not…it doesn’t have a charming downtown area that you’d want to walk to. It’s a little strip-mall-y. I feel that a downtown makes all the difference, you know, a cute little coffee shop that you can hang out at with your friends. We did not have that. Well I am kind of old, so maybe they have one now, but back then, well they didn’t even have a Starbuck’s, well, Starbuck’s didn’t exist, but we didn’t have anything that sort of felt like a gathering place of any sort like a pizza joint, or frozen yogurt, that was big.
Sarah Enni: I was going to say in my high school my friends and I would meet at the Safeway parking lot.
Julie Buxbaum: You want to hear something funny? So, we used to go to this place called AMPUM,
Sarah Enni: AMPUM?
Julie Buxbaum: AM/PM Market.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s the AM/PM Market that’s attached to a gas station and everyone called it The AMPUM. And I would never in high school, just be like, I can’t, I can’t call it The AMPUM. I’m above calling it The AMPUM and my friends were like, “Julie, just get over yourself” that’s what we would do, we would go to AMPUM.
And that’s it, accept where you live and it’s the AMPUM. And in my, I can’t remember if it was in TELL ME THREE THINGS, or the next, I think it was TELL ME THREE THINGS… I was going to have them gather at a 7-11 parking lot and my editor was like, “People don’t really do that! That’s like that seems a little bit not right for this crowd,” and I was like, “Alright, but I went to The AMPUM”!
Sarah Enni: I know kids that hang out in parking lots!
Julie Buxbaum: Where are you supposed to go?
Sarah Enni: Look it, you can’t…there’s no place to go, and in San Jose we had an 11 PM curfew, or something, and there were a lot of restrictions. You are one of several interviews I’ve done lately where people do not immediately go into writing. So, I find this question even more interesting which is how was reading and writing a part of your young life?
Julie Buxbaum: So I have always been a reader, since I was really little. I mean, I spent my entire childhood in a corner with a book. I was super shy and all I wanted to do was read. It was a huge part of my identity forever. I did not identify as a writer though until I was like 29 which is weird, I feel like most people who are writers were [unintelligible] from five on. I always had journals and I always used to take notes and I used to write a lot in my head. So I remember very clearly in high school working on my first sentences in the shower and reworking them and reworking them until they were perfect in my head. Never wrote them down.
Sarah Enni: For sentences for fiction?
Julie Buxbaum: Fiction, sometimes personal essays, but a lot of fiction in my head, but just the first sentence or the first paragraph in my head but never written down which is super weird.
Sarah Enni: That’s so interesting! Almost like meditation a little bit.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, it was something that I really enjoyed doing, which was getting it exactly right and I also did a lot of rewriting conversations in my head. So I’d have a conversation with somebody where I didn’t say the clever thing and I’d go back in my head and say the exact zinger. I was big on zingers in my shower! But I didn’t write much on paper and I went to a school which actually had a really great writing program where a lot of the kids got published in like newspapers and magazines and stuff; short stories for teens. But I was always too scared to submit I never really did it.
And then I went to college and I studied political science, philosophy and economics and I went to law school but while I was in college my best friend was an English Major and I read a lot of the books on her syllabus.
Sarah Enni: Which is hilarious!
Julie Buxbaum: Which is hilarious, I took one English course the entire time and it was required. I took a writing course, required, and I did one English class because I had it as a fifth level requirement but I didn’t take the classes and I don’t know why. I mean, I love to read. I think I was scared. Looking back, there must have been some sort of subconscious fear of really embracing what I loved. But I didn’t.
Sarah Enni: I find it really, interesting because I did the same thing. I did, I liked reading, writing, poetry, all that stuff, but it was never something I thought about as a - I think for me, I was like “Get a Real Job”. So then I studied journalism which was like good enough. I was still writing but I was feeling like the urge to be practical. It sounds like you were really focused on getting a vocation.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, I am still super practical which is a huge part of who I am; it’s this sort of inherent practicality. So, law school seemed like the perfect place and I really, really enjoyed the study of law. My years in law school were amazing. I’m a big nerd and so it was really fun to study some of the greatest legal minds in our country. It was really an amazing experience. The practice of law though was really, really, really boring and miserable but I do remember when I was a lawyer being miserable and thinking to myself that if I had a calling, if I was good at something, that I would just do it. That I would be brave enough to do it but I don’t know what that is.
Like, if I was a musician and I played the piano, then I would go and be a pianist - I would just do it. I have the hutzpah, but there was nothing that I really wanted to do which was a lie to myself because there was something I wanted to do but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t self-identify and it took me a really long time. I was a lawyer for four or five years, maybe four years – totally miserable and I was like, “You know what I really want to do? I just want to write a book.” But, I never said I wanted to be a writer.
I still, even when I quit to write my first book, I never said I’m doing this to become a writer. I said I’m going to write this first book because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, that sort of secret thing but it was a fantasy I never really thought I would end up as a writer. I thought I’d do it and then I’d go back and figure out what kind of lawyer I wanted to be. I started researching all these different other kinds of law thinking that I’m going to write this book but then pivot back. And then about two weeks into writing I was like, “Oh, this is how I should spend my …this is it! This is how it’s supposed to feel when you’re doing what you want to do!” and I loved it. And then the Universal Line and the Magical Way allowed me to actually do it.
Sarah Enni: That’s crazy! Okay, before we jump too far ahead I kind of want to hit a few points in between there. You were kind of writing in your mind and journal writing, but then going to college and deciding what to study, I mean?
Julie Buxbaum: I studied - I ended up doing, PPE, Philosophy, Political Science and Economics which is one major but three different things. Partially because you’d have to really decide if you have to cover more ground which I liked, I’m very indecisive and it seemed the obvious choice was to pick three things
Sarah Enni: Wait, where were you going to school?
Julie Buxbaum: I was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia which is an awesome city and PENN was great, I loved it. So I hated economics and I think that’s one of the reasons why I chose to study it because I found it really hard.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Julie Buxbaum: It wasn’t a natural fit, I was like, this is hard then let me do this, like, I’m going to conquer it. It was this thing that I was afraid of and felt that since I was afraid of it and knocked it out, it would be a good idea to major in it. Which, looking back makes no sense. I never said this was going to make sense Sarah!
Sarah Enni: No but this is so interesting to me because you’re scared of Economics, not a great fit, but I feel like I think what you are saying is probably true that you’re also scared of being a writer but you were like (Gasp) it’s almost like the writing was so, clearly, so special.
Julie Buxbaum: I think with writing I was so scared to be bad at it. Economics I knew I was bad at it and I was totally fine with it and I wanted to just be good at it. I wanted to be, like, well I can still get an A even though I suck at it. I wanted to prove something to myself. Writing, though, if I was bad at it, that would have been heartbreaking to me.
And I think that’s why I didn’t do it. I didn’t want the universe to tell me that I wasn’t good. I’m sort of a perfectionist when it comes to my work and stuff, so that would have been really hard for me at the time. Now I can take criticism but back then I didn’t have the self-esteem to know that even if someone tells you this isn’t good doesn’t mean you’re not a writer.
Sarah Enni: Well, the inevitable thing about writing, unlike ECON, is that in writing someone is going to tell you if you’re bad at it. That’s the nature of it.
Julie Buxbaum: It has to happen. You can’t please everyone all the time and you actually don’t want to but as a college student where you’re kind of putting your work out in the world for the first time it’s really terrifying. And, I don’t know how I ended up in law school. I always had talked about being a lawyer. It’s sort of like how you know you get these “myths” about yourself that get created very early. There is a tile at my elementary school in sixth grade, we did these tiles that we made, and they were on the walls and mine is a picture of me in a justice… oh, what’s it called? The justice gown – the Robe-The Judicial Robe.
Sarah Enni: I like the Justice Gown!
Julie Buxbaum: The Justice Gown! And I’m holding a little gavel and we were supposed to paint what you wanted to be when you grew up. And I really wanted to be the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. That was sort of my goal.
Sarah Enni: Wow
Julie Buxbaum: That was in like, sixth grade. That was the dream.
Sarah Enni: Like why? How did that even come about?
Julie Buxbaum: I remember in the 90’s the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Sarah Enni: Um-hum, you remember watching them?
Julie Buxbaum: I remember hearing them on the radio. I don’t know how old I was, I should look it up, and I remember being horrified that he was going to be put on the Supreme Court.
Sarah Enni: As every child should.
Julie Buxbaum: As every child should be. That didn’t turn out so well, so ya, I was right. I wanted to be a justice on the Supreme Court and I knew there had never been a Chief female Justice so I was like, that’s what I can do.
Sarah Enni: Wow
Julie Buxbaum: And that’s what I wanted to do.
Sarah Enni: That’s super interesting
Julie Buxbaum: It’s super dorky
Sarah Enni: It’s kind of dorky; I’m not going to lie about it. I love how you said that, the “Myths” that get created about yourself because that is, I think it’s true for everybody and it’s really, I find, one of the most compelling things about talking to people about their pasts and how they come to things is that we’re really just born these little things that grow and develop naturally. You are a mom, you have kids, and you know that they are born, and the things they are in to and it’s like…why?
Julie Buxbaum: There are also things that people tell you and they stick. And then you will be them and follow them. Like I probably argued a lot when I was a kid and my parents were like, “You should be a lawyer!” And I was like, “DING, DING, DING , DING, DING.” And then I decided in sixth grade I’m going to be a lawyer and I’m a rule follower and it was a direct, easy path and I love when you can succeed by following A to B to C to D and that is the opposite of the writing world.
But in the legal world, it’s incredibly lock-step. You go to law school and then you get your first job and then your first year and second year, and third year and ultimately you make partner. It’s such a direct path especially if you go into the corporate sector, that is comforting to me, I guess. Though I did go to law school hoping to get into public interest law and came out a corporate lawyer, which is a whole other story. Talk about practicality.
But yes, I do think there are these myths. You hear something once, and for whatever reason it sticks and it just builds, it’s like a snowball effect, it just builds and builds and builds. Then you take the LSAT and I did well on the LSAT and then I got into a great law school that I couldn’t say “No” to and it was like, “Oh, I guess I am going to be a lawyer now”, and away you go and away I went…and I became a lawyer.
Sarah Enni: Okay, I do want to talk about that, because you went to Harvard Law School, which is amazing.
Julie Buxbaum: You know what, it was an amazing place. It really was a great, great experience.
Sarah Enni: It makes me happy to hear that because I feel that the school part of it would be my favorite part too. So what kind of law or, what kinds of classes were fascinating to you? What did you love to study?
Julie Buxbaum: I loved it all. I really, really loved it, in a way that I did not anticipate loving it. It was so hard, but in a good way. It was so intellectually stimulating and challenging and I felt so in over my head. And I think everyone starts Harvard that first day thinking they don’t deserve to be there and then as time goes on, you are like, “Oh, but, I’m okay, I’m staying afloat.” There’s a wonderful feeling attached to that. So I loved it, I absolutely loved it.
My favorite class was constitutional law. I took it with Tribe who is just a giant in the legal world and he is brilliant and wonderful and is as amazing as you would imagine. So that was great. There is one thing I really did enjoy about being a lawyer is coming up with the arguments and trying to see it from a different perspective and sort of unlocking when two people are fighting.
Sarah Enni: That is a very empathetic way of thinking about an argument
Julie Buxbaum: It was fun to come up with interesting ways to tackle a legal issue. That was sort of fun. But, in reality, you had to match the law to your argument, right? So even if you came up with this amazing argument, if there wasn’t a law to support you then, you were shit out of luck.
Sarah Enni: You were sunk.
Julie Buxbaum: So, it was such a small portion of what I did. Mostly what I did was procedural crap to block someone from going forward; everything was stalling which was really boring and annoying and going through boxes and boxes of documents and reading hundreds and hundreds of really boring documents, and I didn’t stay long enough to get far enough in my career for it to get interesting.
Sarah Enni: The other thing that strikes me about how you’re talking about law school experience it seems like maybe as a young adult you were really looking to, I don’t want to call it self-esteem, but building up the sense that you could achieve something or reassuring yourself that you had the capacity to do these scary big things.
Julie Buxbaum: I still have that problem. I am definitely someone who needs outside validation to feel good about what I am doing which is really hard when you’re a writer. It’s kind of like in free fall. There aren’t that many times when people pat you on the back and say you’re doing a good job.
Sarah Enni: Sometimes even editors don’t say that when they buy your book!
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, it’s very rare where you really get a moment of pure victory and when you’re in the legal world or when you’re in law school where just even getting in was a victory there’s constant validation; you’re grades or whatever it is and so yes, I am someone that definitely seeks that. I’m trying so hard to outgrow it; I really am because it’s not a healthy way to live. It should come from within not from without. But yes, you nailed me on the head very quickly.
Sarah Enni: It’s hard because I relate to it. Gold stars are my favorite thing but it’s just, knowing that about your self doesn’t mean that that impulse stops, so it’s hard.
Julie Buxbaum: And we don’t need permission from other people to do things we want to do. And yet I do. I sometimes feel like I seek permission to even continue having this career even though I’ve had this career for ten years. I still have these moments of like should I keep doing this, is this the right choice for me because no one is saying, there’s not a constant gold star and that’s really hard.
Sarah Enni: That’s a very nebulous state so that’s difficult to be in all the time. So, you leave school and I can imagine that would be really upsetting to leave an environment that you ended up liking so much more than you even thought you would and then go into that profession and then be really disappointed by it.
Julie Buxbaum: I set myself up. I’ll be honest. I loved law school but then I went and did something that I hadn’t intended- I went and took a job for money. I went straight into the corporate world when I had said from day one that I wanted to be a public interest lawyer. And I was going to follow my heart and be passionate and then they dangled a big salary in front of me and I took it. So I completely and totally set myself up.
I could have had a completely different life and I may have been really happy, actually, had I gone into public interest , I may never have even become a writer had I gone an been a public interest lawyer and felt fulfilled by the work I was doing. Because my biggest problem being a corporate lawyer was I felt that not only was I not making the world a better place, and in some cases making the world a worst place. There was nothing satisfying about it. I felt completely and totally unfulfilled. I was bored out of my mind and I didn’t feel like I was exercising any important skills. I wasn’t bettering myself, I wasn’t bettering the world, and it was just a wash.
Sarah Enni: Everyone goes through this in their twenties where like reality is settling in and it’s very difficult for anyone regardless of career or circumstance but that’s a really tough one to be so intellectually stimulated and excited and then a ninety degree turn to like, this is not right and a panic, like what do you do when you’re just not happy?
Julie Buxbaum: I’m eternally fascinated by the question of like you’re adult expectations hitting up against reality in our adult life, because we all have these fantasies of what it means to be an adult. Some good and some bad and then when you get there, you’ve arrived and it’s nothing like you anticipated- how do you reconcile that? How do you do all of the things that seem terrifying and sort of not so pleasant because you have to? You have to pay your bills and pay the rent and live a stable existence. Well, I guess you don’t have to, but I was brought up to believe that’s what I wanted. So there is something really disconcerting when you find out that there is a price to be paid for all of that.
Sarah Enni: I would love for you to talk about just how you dealt with that and how your writing came out of that?
Julie Buxbaum: My first book is actually a lot about that, it’s a coming of age story about a girl who is in her late twenties who is a lawyer and is miserable. I mean, it’s about more than that, but underneath it all she’s at a law firm very much like the one I was at and she’s very unhappy. So, I sort of wrote my way out of it. So I was miserable as a lawyer and I really thought about what it is I want to do and I really wanted to write a book so it turns out the one thing I want to do before I die is write one book.
Sarah Enni: So you did have that in your head?
Julie Buxbaum: I guess I did. When I told everyone I was quitting to write a book, most people, after saying, “You are out of your fucking mind!” Said, “Well, you always talked about it, so, I guess it makes sense.” And then I was like, “Really?” I didn’t know I had always talked about it, but I guess I had.
Sarah Enni: The myths that you don’t know you’re creating about yourself.
Julie Buxbaum: Exactly! I was really lucky in a sense that it was in a time of my life when I could do it. I didn’t have any commitments. I didn’t have a mortgage or kids. My husband and I weren’t married. We were renting a tiny apartment. So it was like and I had made this money as a lawyer so I was able to take some time away, I was really lucky that I could take this big jump.
People always ask me, “Should I quit my job and write my first book?” And I will always say, just because it worked out beautifully for me and I was so, so wonderfully lucky I could never, in good conscious, tell anyone else to do it. It was the stupidest decision I ever made and it turned out to be the best decision I ever made in my life but it was also, by far, the stupidest and it was part of my New Year’s Resolution. It was the only New Year’s Resolution I’ve ever kept in my entire life.
Sarah Enni: Not the only one you’ve made, but…
Julie Buxbaum: Oh my gosh, I make one every year but I never keep it, but that’s the one I kept and I quit my job on January 1st or January 2nd and I started working the next day when I got off work, I think it was like two days later. I started writing and I was completely and totally keeping the New Year’s Resolution and I did it.
Sarah Enni: Was the resolution to finish a book, or was it to just start writing, or?
Julie Buxbaum: It was to quit my job and write my first book. And then figure out my life. That was sort of like a three step thing: Quit Job, Write book, Figure out Life. And you know what? I bet I have a list somewhere written down somewhere still that says those three things. That’s exactly it, I had a “To Do List” for the year, and that was it.
Sarah Enni: That’s amazing
Julie Buxbaum: And I followed it, I did it, I did!
Sarah Enni: That’s crazy!
Julie Buxbaum: It’s so rare that I actually would do it, but it did that one time
Sarah Enni: The compulsion then to quit and give yourself time to write pre-dated an idea of what to write?
Julie Buxbaum: So, during the fall, so I quit on January 1st, so during that fall I took a story workshop for a weekend at UCLA Extension.
Sarah Enni: Where you living in LA at the time?
Julie Buxbaum: I was living in LA at the time and I sort of created a character in my head then but I didn’t know where the story was going to go. I didn’t know anything, other than this one character and then when I quit, then I started really developing her and creating an arc and writing a book for real.
Sarah Enni: Okay.
Julie Buxbaum: I guess the seeds were planted maybe a few months before I quit.
Sarah Enni: So you were, and I’m only harping on it because I think it’s so funny, that you were taking classes, creative writing classes in your free time. I mean, by that point, did you know that you were gearing up to?
Julie Buxbaum: Actually, it was only like a two day workshop.
Sarah Enni: Right.
Julie Buxbaum: I had no idea where the impulse came to sign up for that story workshop. I guess I knew. I guess there was part of me that was gearing up but there was probably a six month period of time.
Sarah Enni: I just really love stories like this because we can be so blind to ourselves and I like hearing where it ended up working out the best possible way but there are so many times when I talk to people and they are like, “Well, I mean, I didn’t know I wanted to do this but, I mean, I had just helped my friend write a 500 page book for the last seven years. “ And it’s like, “Wait. What are you talking about? You were doing this the whole time!” But we just don’t piece the puzzles together in real time, it seems like.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s weird in looking back and applying for law school, I spent so much time on my essay. So much more time on the essay than any other part of the application than anything else the essay was what was important to me.
That tells you everything you need to know. Clearly words were my thing and I just didn’t know it. And then looking back when I was a kid when I was angry my parents, I was never one of those people who could articulate speaking out loud, as you can tell from this interview, but, I would write it down. I would write these long, angry letters then when I was pissed off about something.
Sarah Enni: You wrote hate mail to your dad!
Julie Buxbaum: I wrote hate mail! Thank god we didn’t have email back then cause I would sit and I would write for hours on my laptop and I would write out these long letters, all the ways they had wronged me and I would slip it under their door and I’d go in my room and shut the door and hide in the closet until someone came. But I couldn’t talk it out I had to write it out. I just was not able to articulate my feelings.
Sarah Enni: So you were kind of developing this character, which is you?
Julie Buxbaum: No, so we have a lot of things in common. This is the character in THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, which is my first book. We have a lot of things in common. We both lost our moms young, we both worked in corporate law. That’s about it. She was, I mean, I know it looks like those are big important things but I am not diminishing those things, I definitely used my own experiences to inform those things but she’s much crazier than I am. Much, much, much more, what’s the word? Not unadjusted; badly adjusted? Misadjusted? What’s the word?
Sarah Enni: Maladjusted?
Julie Buxbaum: Maladjusted! Thank you, maladjusted; just a little crazier and wackier than I am.
Sarah Enni: I do want to talk about, I haven’t read the adult books but I have read about them and the reviews of them and it seems to me like very, very, very explicitly talking a lot about mother and daughter issues. Did that, I am wondering if that came first? You lost your mom young but were you thinking that you wanted to deal with that in books, or did it just happen?
Julie Buxbaum: It just happened. So, it’s funny how with writing years later you look back and you’re like, “Oh, that’s what’s going on in my head.” So, my first book, dead mom; second book, kill the mom; third book, TELL ME THREE THINGS, kill the mom. My fourth book which comes out next April, I was like, “I am NOT killing any more moms!” This is getting embarrassing. Clearly, I need to call my therapist and work through this, and enough. Page two…I kill the dad.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Julie Buxbaum: So the next, next book no parents are dying whatsoever! All the parents have to stay alive.
Sarah Enni: Sure, sure, sure.
Julie Buxbaum: Okay, I’m setting up this thing, like now it’s embarrassing. Clearly, it was a huge experience in my childhood. Completely formative; changed who I was in every way possible. And it’s something I’ve worked through and am still working through and I work through on the page, so with THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, it was looking at how it formed me as an adult. And when I say adult, I mean that second coming-of-age, when you are about to turn thirty which I think is a very distinct period of time in your life sort of like how we were talking before, how it’s sort of that time when your adult expectations are being matched with reality and sort of shift around.
Sarah Enni: Mismatched.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, exactly. In TELL ME THREE THINGS though, I wrote TELL ME THREE THINGS twenty four years after my mom died which is a long time and it took me that long to feel comfortable to go back and actually look at what it was like when I was 16, which is very different than the experience of being 29. And dealing with a mother loss at the age of 14 versus being 16 and thinking back to a mother loss at 14. Cause that’s when you are in it, that’s the [unintelligible] of grief and those were really horrible, horrible years for me and so to go back and kind of unpack those, it took me a really long time to have the courage.
So yes, I’ve written a ton about grief, I’ve written a lot of personal essays about grief because I feel like I have a lot to say but TELL ME THREE THINGS was the first time I felt comfortable going back and being a teenager and stepping into that mind again. I didn’t feel ready to do it until now. The funny thing about the book is that it is actually a really happy book; it’s not a sad book. At least I think it’s not a sad book but it’s marrying this sadness of first loss with the pure euphoria of first love and sort of balancing it out hopefully, because I didn’t want to just write another, you know, wa-wa dead mom book.
Sarah Enni: Well, and, maybe having the promise of… I love at your event you said, “It’s not a spoiler alert that there’s a happy ending there’s like waffles on the cover.”
Julie Buxbaum: There are waffles in the shape of hearts. I think we know where this is going and it’s not going to be a book about a pedophile.
Sarah Enni: Which is great so I love that you don’t mind us talking about that it’s a happy ending book, but maybe you needed that to be able to go back because, and though I do want to talk about THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE and AFTER YOU, it’s always fascinating to me when people have something that’s huge and formative in their young life that it feels like it’s sort of this gravitational pull. Maybe you were dancing around writing a Young Adult story? Did you feel like when you were writing for younger; did that feel like the right voice?
Julie Buxbaum: So, for my entire adult life I felt like I was pretending to be a grown up and I wasn’t actually a grown up and only very recently did I sort of look around and I was like “Alright, I am married. I have two kids. I have a mortgage. I have been writing for a long, well not long, but a novel writing career. I am as grown up as I am going to get. The jig is up, come on, you’re a grown up!” And once that realization sort of hit, and it was devastating, it was really devastating.
I was sort of like “Oh, but I can write about being a teenager. I can go back and sort of when the whole world was wide open and I didn’t know what the future held.” Because, let’s be honest, In order for my life to change right now, something terrible would have to happen. In order for it to change it has to be bad, not good and so I kind of missed that feeling of not knowing my life’s questions, I mean, not knowing the answers to my life’s questions which is why I wanted to write a YA and then once I decided to write YA, the idea of revisiting sort of that period became an obvious choice for me.
Sarah Enni: I mean, I don’t think it’s obvious.
Julie Buxbaum: I think, It just sort of felt like a place I hadn’t yet explored and had a lot to think about, and wanted to think about and sort of was like, I tend to, as I said, I do things that are hard for me and so it was a hard thing to do and so I was like, “Let me do it”. Usually the hardest things in life are worth doing. So that was one of the reasons. I also feel like the idea of marrying first love and first loss was a natural one because I feel like only recently have I come to the realization that when you have a big loss in your life, when you have any sort of grief, that’s going to live alongside the best moments forever and that’s okay.
It’s okay that at all of my life’s big moments; the birth of my children, which were the happiest moments of my life, there’s always this part of me that’s grieving and saying “Oh, I wish my mom was here.” And it’s okay to feel joy and sadness at the same time. That’s what life is about. And that’s okay. It took me a really long time not to feel like it tipped the balance in any way when that happened and let one thing ruin the other. I am allowed to feel sad and still feel happy and it doesn’t take away from the joy that there is this sadness that lives alongside.
With any sort of bad emotion there’s this really, it’s really hard to either, I find that you either indulge it or push it away and there’s something to be said for just experiencing it instead of resisting OR overindulging and making it all about that. And with grief you make it all about that, then your life becomes a miserable existence and if you push it away too much that also, then you’re numbing yourself during the joyous moments. And so, there’s this sort of middle ground that’s pretty much impossible to cultivate but I’ve tried to at least and that is what I was hoping for in the book was to marry that high and low.
Sarah Enni: Yes. I think in therapy language they talk about anxiety in this way where it’s like you acknowledge the anxiety and you recognize that it sort of lives within you all of the time and then if you can think of it as this thing that is there then you can sort of live around it in a way that enables you to have a fuller existence. But not denying that it’s there because that makes you feel even more out of the loop.
Julie Buxbaum: And it’s instead of assigning it to bad necessarily. It’s just a feeling.
Sarah Enni: Yes, and it’s just there and it’s yours to incorporate. And the sadness and happiness living together I think is uniquely appropriate for young adult fiction. I feel like, at least for me, that’s something I really like to mine out of it because young adults are getting to their first end of something and also the beginning. It’s inherently hopeful because they are young people, but they are also dealing with, as you know more than anyone, young people deal with real shit.
Julie Buxbaum: Exactly, you’re not immune just because you’re young. And also it’s a time when your emotions, things are turned up a little bit, and so it’s important to recognize they’re real feeling s and sometimes they’re not about something as big as a mom dying. Sometimes it’s as small as a breakup, or I shouldn’t say small, but sometimes it’s a breakup or it’s a bad grade or whatever it is you feel and they’re real feelings and they are legitimate feelings and what I love about young adult literature is that we weigh all that stuff, it’s all in there it’s not just the big stuff. Jessie in TELL ME THREE THINGS, a girl makes a rude comment to her. She feels that it’s no smaller for her even though her mom died. Those are both legitimately real things that hurt her.
Sarah Enni: Right, right, right. Okay. I do want to talk a little bit about the adult fiction because I think there’s a lost book in there too so things like that so I want to get to those as well. So, let’s back up just a minute to the experience of writing THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE and how that went, because you set yourself a goal, you set out to write the book, how long did the writing of your first book take you?
Julie Buxbaum: I had a draft within four months, but just a first draft. And then I had a clean draft in about month seven or eight? And then an agent very shortly thereafter and then a two book deal with Random House shortly after that. It was, the stars aligned in a way that does not happen in the universe. It was like magic. Stars aligned and so much luck and things having, coming together in such a perfect … I got really lucky.
Sarah Enni: Well, I don’t like the word luck though.
Julie Buxbaum: I’m super proud of the book. I love the book. But there are plenty of beautiful books that just don’t land in exactly the right hands at the right time and my book landed in exactly the right hands at the right time and got handed off to the right people too. So I found the perfect agent who found the perfect editor for the book who really understood what I was trying to do who had also lost her mom young. Totally got the book a hundred percent and so who is also a wonderful, amazing editor and person and so I just got handed into the, like, passed to the right hands every way you could possibly imagine.
Sarah Enni: Which is amazing, I like that!
Julie Buxbaum: Really Lucky. Really amazing and it encouraged me to have a career.
Sarah Enni: You worked really hard for your career
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, absolutely, and you need to have the book, right? It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have the book. But I do feel like the universe came together in a wonderful, in such a wonderful way that like, did I use up all of my luck in one year? Did I just spend it all at once?
Sarah Enni: Right, right, right! Did you get the feeling, that’s pretty quick, especially for a first book when you’re still figuring out not only the book but how to write a book? Do you feel like there was some element, like it was all pent up and just waiting to kind of like starburst?
Julie Buxbaum: Maybe. I mean, writing that first book was the easiest book I’ve written. I mean, first of all, there’s enthusiasm and excitement not to be in a law firm. So that was a huge motivation. I also was so much more focused. I did not have two children. So I was sitting down every day, eight hours a day, and writing for most of that time. Now, the thought of writing eight hours a day, that never happens! I just can’t even imagine. I don’t have that focus anymore.
And so yes, it spilled out of me in a way that has not happened since. Though, TELL ME THREE THINGS came pretty fast too. It was interesting, it happened really fast and then now I’ve had a long time since, and now it feels earned. But back then it did not, if that makes sense? I had been working at this for a long time so TELL ME THREE THINGS is my first book in six years so I kind of feel like a veteran now, even though I am totally new to the YA world, but it sort of came really fast in the beginning and then it slowed down and now it’s sort of this long…it ebbs and flows.
Sarah Enni: Well, yes, and shifting and changing what you even want to do. Super interesting. So, you had the first book and then it sold in a two book deal, and I can imagine the first book felt really special too because it was not you, but there is a lot of you in there. Did you have an idea for the second book already?
Julie Buxbaum: No, so I had a two book deal with a blind second book. And then I spent a good year, I think, coming up with ideas. It took a really long time to come up with an idea that my editor and I were both happy with that I was going to write. And then I wrote that second book which is AFTER YOU and then after that I signed another contract with Random House for the third adult book and that is the book that broke me.
Sarah Enni: And, sadly, I want to hear all about it.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, of course you do! Took a really happy story….no, you know what? I actually am happy it happened because I do think there is something to be said for this career being hard fought. So, I wrote this book and I spent two years of my life on it. Two years after my daughter was born so I went to a coffee shop every day, left her with my mother-in-law, I’d make it home and went and worked on this book, I was writing it.
And, I wrote it. And its fine. It’s a totally competent book. It lives in a drawer now though because who wants to put out a totally competent book? You want a book that people are going to be like, “You HAVE to read this. This is the best book I’ve ever read!” And it wasn’t that book. And I just felt like, after two years, there was no way it was ever going to be that book; at least then. I mean, there might a possibility of returning to it one day with a fresh brain and being able to see why it wasn’t spectacular but it just wasn’t great. Like, it was fine and I think was even publishable but I was at a point in my career that it didn’t make sense to put out something that was publishable. I was trying to grow readers, not lose them.
Sarah Enni: Okay. I have like three ways I want to go with this.
Julie Buxbaum: Okay.
Sarah Enni: One is; what was it about just generally? Do you mind?
Julie Buxbaum: It’s funny I remember the elevator pitch anymore it’s been so long. Two time-lines, one is set in the 1950’s and one is set present day; two women who are unexpectedly connected in time.
Sarah Enni: Okay, so it was different.
Julie Buxbaum: It was different.
Sarah Enni: And I can see that taking two years that would be complicated.
Julie Buxbaum: It was definitely more ambitious than what I had written before mostly because there were two different perspectives and both women, which I think is harder than doing, um…
Sarah Enni: Oh, for voice and stuff?
Julie Buxbaum: For voice, I had to make sure the voices were distinct. One was set in the 1950’s and one was set in present day. I had to make sure that the voices were distinct and they were clear for the time period and the historical element was challenging. But I don’t think that’s where I went wrong actually. It was more technically challenging but that’s not why the book didn’t work. The book didn’t work because it just didn’t sing.
Sarah Enni: I hope you don’t mind, I would love to just like hear you talk about why you think that is? I think it…like what is it about some books have magic and some don’t.
Julie Buxbaum: I don’t know, I was talking to a friend about this. I just had lunch with a friend who is a writer and I was saying I want to give the advice, “Write the book that you’ve always wanted to write from your heart and that’s the book that’s going to make your career!”
Sarah Enni: Right.
Julie Buxbaum: But that was the book that was the book from my heart that I felt I had to write and it just didn’t work. I thought I had something to say and for whatever reason… I think looking back actually the reason, my agent died while I was writing that book. So ask my husband and he will say that it’s because I didn’t have sort of agent oversight during that period of time. I don’t agree. That’s his version. I think my version is I wrote it the two years after my daughter was born and the adjustment to motherhood was a really tough one for me. I was living in London. It was dark and rainy. I was away from family. I definitely had some post-partum depression issues and I think those two were just tough years and I think I write better when I’m happy. And that book was written when I was sad. And I think it might be as simple as that. It just doesn’t have the magic of happiness in it. There is no joy in the pages.
Sarah Enni: Okay, first of all…whoa, you’re agent died?
Julie Buxbaum: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Oh my god. Hang on; we’ll come back to that, because that’s crazy. Your agent died…bullet point. I think that’s really interesting to think about. Like that that book then just sort of became the project that got you out of the house instead of being something that you were fearlessly drawn to in that other way.
Julie Buxbaum: It just wasn’t written in joy. I enjoyed the act of writing it, and I enjoyed the escape of writing it and I need to write to be happy, I’m miserable when I’m not writing. So, I needed to do it but it felt very conflicted. I felt guilty going, which is crazy looking back, I mean, I had this certain new mom guilt that is just deeply ingrained in my subconscious and I wish I didn’t have it because I don’t believe in it but how you believe and how you act are totally different things, right?
Sarah Enni: Totally.
Julie Buxbaum: I wonder if I went back to it now, happy, if I could infuse that joy into the characters because I feel like that’s what I do best and maybe there is a chance for it maybe it’s not as.. Maybe it won’t live forever in a drawer. But I did put it in a drawer and it was an incredibly painful decision, incredibly, because it was a choice. It was sort of like, either I can keep editing this and get it to a point where they’ll want to publish it, or, I put this away and I say sorry, this is not the book.
Sarah Enni: First of all, I don’t want to be insensitive to this, I’m really sorry that your agent died because it sounds like she was amazing for you.
Julie Buxbaum: She was amazing. She was an amazing person and an amazing agent, just the best, the best. Her name was Elaine Koster and she had this tiny literary agency called the Elaine Koster Literary Agency that had these enormous books. She represented Khaled Hosseini from the “Kite Runner” and she was just known to discover…sorry, that’s my alarm! That’s the door alarm announcing that the door is being opened… she was just this powerhouse, had this tiny literary agency that was a powerhouse in New York. She was amazing in every way and just a wonderful, wonderful person. She died of metastatic breast cancer.
Sarah Enni: Whoa, okay, so it was like unexpected? I mean it was like… she was younger
Julie Buxbaum: So, she was in her sixties, so she was young, but she was sick for a very long time but didn’t tell anybody except for her immediate family. No one knew in the industry. And so she kept it a secret forever, for years. And when she died it was completely and totally unexpected to all of us. So it was incredibly heartbreaking, incredibly. I mean it would have been incredibly heartbreaking anyway, but it was a huge shock.
Sarah Enni: It’s profound to have someone die in your life in any way but that was someone who was guiding you, and like a mentor type of figure.
Julie Buxbaum: There is no doubt I owed my entire career to Elaine; my entire career. The fact that I’m a writer right now is one hundred percent because of Elaine because she found my first book and championed it in a way that I never dreamed possible. One hundred percent owed my career! On top of that I loved her as a person. But yes, she was absolutely wonderful and I feel so lucky that I got to work with her.
Sarah Enni: But, how did that, I really hope this…you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, but I do think it’s something that’s like helpful for people who are professionals. How do you deal with that? When something like that happens, I mean, functionally, for your career, how did you move on from that?
Julie Buxbaum: I didn’t for a while; I just put my head back down and just kept writing, writing a book that went nowhere basically. And you know what? It’s interesting, I said I wrote this book in a place that I wasn’t happy and that was probably a huge part of it for some reason I divorced that in my head but it’s actually a huge part of it.
Sarah Enni: And its funny your husband looking at it from the point of view of thinking that you didn’t have agent oversight over it, but you didn’t have, like, agent love for it.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, love for it and also just grieving her as well. I was really heartbroken about her death, unrelated to my career just on a personal level. So I guess it’s not even… the agent oversight is such a small part of it, it was more about having her in my life and knowing that she…ya, just having her. So, I guess it was just a tough time all around; a really shitty time.
Sarah Enni: And I don’t want to harp on this terrible time too much but I do think it’s really inspiring given that you were able to come out of it and everything. And one thing that I really do want to talk about with that time, is that you are saying about making a choice; a career choice.
Because, I don’t know, I like talking to women who are willing and [unintelligible] to take this on as a business and think about their writing as a career and make choices like that because it’s so tempting to talk about it in touch-feely ways and a lot of times that means we set ourselves up to be taken advantage of or we don’t assert control in ways we can and should.
Julie Buxbaum: Especially as a mom, there’s a huge … first of all, the outside world sometimes looks at it as a hobby as opposed to a career; which is really tough. And also, you have to really guard your time as a writer and that’s a tough thing to do for something that other people consider a hobby. I have chosen to one hundred percent commit to my career. It’s my full time job.
I have childcare to make sure I can write and it’s a huge financial commitment to do it that way, but it’s an investment that’s necessary for me for my career. I look at it as one hundred percent business expense when I have a sitter pick up my kids from school every day. I one hundred percent agree with you about sort of committing to it and making sure you treat it like a career. It’s definitely a privilege to be able to treat it as a career. I think I am incredibly lucky that I don’t have to have another full-time job and I write because of that every day and I appreciate that every day.
Sarah Enni: And, you’ve also worked your butt off and now are in the position where you can say, “I want to position myself”, I mean, that’s kind of why I am thinking you are able to sort of pivot and think like when you are talking about TELL ME THREE THINGS that was a choice to move into the Young Adult market and do a different thing. I’d love to hear how you thought about that?
Julie Buxbaum: I wish I could say it was a business choice. I wish I had the foresight to be like well, “Okay, well, let me do a Young Adult because it’s a burgeoning market!” No, none of that’s true; I wish it were true I’d feel really good about my view. It was one hundred percent, I put that book in a drawer and I was broken. I did a little television writing in the middle to sort of like as a pallet cleanser and I had this idea for a YA novel and I felt that I could do it and I didn’t feel like that with my other adult novel.
And also, I was fascinated by the idea, as we said before, of going back and sort of exploring this time that felt joyous again. I mean, and also horrible, but joyous. And the act of writing felt joyous. And that was important. That’s what brought me to YA. I was excited to write the book. It’s passion, right? Which is such a weird thing alongside business but it is. And I wish I could make decisions about what I write for business reasons but I am just not that kind of writer, it doesn’t flow naturally for me.
Sarah Enni: I love that looking at YA brought you joy. What was your familiarity with YA when you were looking at that?
Julie Buxbaum: Well, I had read, I have been a YA reader forever, well not forever because it’s sort of a semi-new genre but since it sort of has resurrected, or taken off, I have been a huge YA reader. I loved it and I enjoyed reading it. I think it in some ways it’s voice is, well voice is really important in the adult world too, but some of the YA literature has such wonderful distinct voice and I love that and that’s what I like to do.
And so that’s one of the other things that attracted me, but really, it’s the writing about sixteen year olds…I mean writing about those years which are so complex and so interesting and not knowing where you’re going to go especially coming from this place feeling ridiculously settled. We had moved around a ton so this was the first time I was actually settled someplace. It gives me the adventure that I don’t get to have otherwise.
Sarah Enni: That’s huge! The adventure in the sense that like anything could happen and the…
Julie Buxbaum: And firsts are so magical right? First kiss, I love writing about first kisses. That moment, I don’t get to have first kisses anymore! I miss first kisses, I really do! It’s so fun to write about that and then I’m also a huge romantic comedy person, I ‘m a huge romantic so I love all those magical moments and I feel like YA is particularly rife with them.
Sarah Enni: How did, okay so you were thinking about that time, that age. What were the other germs that brought the idea together? How did it develop?
Julie Buxbaum: I definitely wanted to write about a girl who had lost her mother relatively recently and I also wanted to write about first love so in TELL ME THREE THINGS It is about a girl who recently lost her mom, her dad very quickly remarries a woman he met on the internet, moves out to California, and she starts at this super fancy pants private school. She’s in way over her head and on her first day she receives this anonymous email from someone who calls himself “Somebody/Nobody” offering to help her navigate her new school.
I say that all by the way of a background because I once received an anonymous email, and that’s what inspired the book. It was this weird, totally weird, magical thing that happened – again, another magical thing that again happened to me and when something that weird and magical happens in real life, you have to borrow it, how could you not? The universe handed me a plot – that never happens, right? So I had to take the plot that the universe handed to me and it was such a happy thing and so to marry this really sad thing with this really remarkably happy thing was a natural fit for me and that’s where it came from.
Sarah Enni: Well, tell me about this email?
Julie Buxbaum: I had graduated from law school and I was working at this law firm and I was miserable and I was feeling horrible about myself and I’d gained weight I was feeling gross and tired and sort of at a low self-esteem wise and out of nowhere, I received an anonymous email from someone who was a secret admirer from law school who was basically like, “I always noticed you in law school and I never said hello,” I think he said he had a girlfriend or something, “And always wanted to say Hi and now I live in a different city but just thought you should know what I think about you sometime.”
That’s it! Just a very small, very sweet…I had never in my entire life thought of myself as someone anyone would ever have noticed from across the room and that’s what he said, he said it was from across the room or something like that. In a million years that it is not who I thought of myself as and to have someone actually say that out loud just changed everything. It came at exactly the moment I needed it. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, swears it was not him. Swears it was not him! I really, really hope it was not him. If it was, he has to go to his grave with it because I will kill him.
Sarah Enni: That’s really neat, and really interesting.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s so weird. It’s so weird, and every once in a while I wonder if he would google me and find out that I wrote a book about it?
Sarah Enni: Right, totally.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s totally within reason, I guess? I don’t know. I assume he went on with his life and hasn’t thought about me since but you never know.
Sarah Enni: Those little acts of kindness can be like…
Julie Buxbaum: It was an act of kindness, exactly; it’s a little act of kindness. He was giving me a gift.
Sarah Enni: Yes, because especially the way it was phrased, it seems it was really respectful and just really sweet.
Julie Buxbaum: And not asking for anything. He didn’t want to meet. There was no expectation whatsoever in the email.
Sarah Enni: Yes. That’s huge. I was an undergrad and was sitting across a study hall coffee shop and writing a paper and this guy left a little note while he was walking out and it just said, “You’re really cute”, and a smiley face. And I still have that thing.
Julie Buxbaum: Wow! It’s exactly…it’s a little gift. Someone noticing you and making you feel so wonderful.
Sarah Enni: And seen and acknowledged. Anyway, that’s a really great seed of inspiration. It does seem like you had just had a really hard time with this book that was not full of joy and then you want to write this book that has elements of joy but you’re also willingly diving into super, super, tough, real grief stuff and remembering that vividly. Was looking at it this way a way of finding some peace in it? Or, how did you feel about that?
Julie Buxbaum: I think so. I was also in a happier place. So yes, I put the book in a drawer and that was heartbreaking but I had also moved from London to New York and then New York to LA and I had my son around that time and it was a very different experience than when I had my daughter. It was sort of like how it is supposed to be when you have a baby, and felt really wonderful and happy even though he was a terrible, terrible baby.
He didn’t sleep and he cried, he was such a pain in the ass. He’s a wonderful little person but a pain in the ass. So, it was coming from a happy place and a place of strength. I felt like I was where I wanted to be in my life at least personally, maybe not so much professionally after putting that book in a drawer. I felt stronger and able to go back and look and yes, it was really hard but I was coming from a place where I was able to do it. I felt ready. I don’t think I would have done it if I wasn’t in a happy place.
Sarah Enni: You were also a mom now. Was it really different to think about the way your mom…
Julie Buxbaum: The loss? Yes, every experience, now, I mean since then, has been colored by the fact that I lost my mother. I think it’s a lens in which I view the world. So I am totally obsessed, it so sad, I’m totally obsessed with my husband or I dying and imagining my kids not growing up with a parent. That’s a huge fear of mine because of it. And I know exactly where it comes from. Just because you know where something comes from doesn’t mean it’s easier to get rid of, as you were saying.
Now, as a mom, I think about what that must have meant to her letting go of me? I had never thought about it from that perspective. I had always thought about letting go of her. So that changed, I mean, it’s a new thing for her to miss. Like, my kids don’t have a grandmother on that side and that’s really heartbreaking to me and that was something I needed to process.
I have processed a lot of it through writing. I have written a lot, well not a lot but a few, personal essays about grief and mother loss because I feel like writing is the way…same as when I was five years old or ten years old and writing to my parents because I was angry. It’s the way I process and so when I am trying to understand feelings about something I will sit down and write an essay about it. There were years there that needed sifting through and I was finally in a strong enough place that I could do it. It’s amazing that it took so long, but you know, that’s how grief works.
Sarah Enni: That’s incredible. It really kind of speaks to the fact that this book does have the magic. It was the right time and being able to approach it from this place of a more peaceful mind and then getting to have kissing! That’s really great. So you did know that you wanted to write a love story, a kissy love story?
Julie Buxbaum: I love swoons. I love happy endings. I love first kisses, first love and all of that stuff.
Sarah Enni: It’s the best.
Julie Buxbaum: It is the best and I think it’s important. I think people are very quick to dismiss, just because something has that warmth and first love to dismiss it as having, is being of lesser quality especially because it appeals to girls and women which I find incredibly frustrating because it doesn’t make it any lesser just because it deals with love. Our lives are full of love. That’s what life is about, so…
Sarah Enni: And, if it’s a heterosexual love story, there’s a guy there too! Who is also falling in love and kissing for the first time. It frustrates me. I’m like, hello? We’re not experiencing this on our own!
Julie Buxbaum: There’s something about anything that interests young women that is automatically discounted in this culture and I find it incredibly frustrating.
Sarah Enni: And lame!
Julie Buxbaum: And lame, and upsetting and yeah. It exists in the women’s fiction world too, the same sort of prejudice when you write about the women’s fear. If a man writes a book about war then it has literary merit, but if a woman writes a book about a family it’s not considered important. If a man writes a book about family they’re saying something new. You can apply the same argument to YA. You see it again, and again, and again. It’s just really depressing.
Sarah Enni: I think it gets more frustrating because we‘ve been talking about this for so long, and then every once in a while you’re confronted with people not knowing, or understanding, that that’s what’s happening and you’re like, “Ah, really?” For some people this is a new conversation and that’s exhausting. How can we not all see that this is what’s going on? But, it’s getting better, hopefully.
But, I love that too because I think there is an element of bravery in just being like, “I want to tell a really good love story.” I’m glad that writing YA was such a good experience for you. Do you feel like this is a home base? Do you feel like you want to settle in?
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, so, I have a YA coming out next spring 2017 which was actually a real joy to write. Maybe my favorite book I’ve written which you would think would make me excited about it coming out…it makes me terrified! I don’t want to expose it to a big bad new world.
Sarah Enni: True, these precious months where it’s still exciting but not out!
Julie Buxbaum: I know, no one to tell me it sucks yet because I really love it and I’m working on the next idea right now for the third YA. It’s what I want to write.
Sarah Enni: I would love to hear your advice for new writers and then maybe if you have any advice for people writing with kids in particular.
Julie Buxbaum: I think that the number one piece of advice I would give is to read everything you can possibly get your hands on. But I think not only read as a reader but read as a writer and read critically. So, if you read something particularly wonderful, ask yourself why it’s wonderful. What did they do right and learn from it. Yes, it sometimes robs you of some of the pleasure of reading and it makes reading work, but if you want to be a writer reading is work. I think that’s a huge, huge part of it.
If I know as a writer that it’s a huge thing, obviously it took me a really long time to do it, but once that switch was flipped it made a huge difference in giving myself permission to write. So I think giving yourself permission to be a writer is really important and then alongside of it, giving yourself permission of sitting your ass in the chair and writing.
There are so many people who have the flip side of the problem – identifying as a writer but not actually writing. I think it’s really important to sit down and write and be bad at it, that’s okay, but you have to keep writing. You’re not going to be a writer until you write.
Writing with kids? Lauren Brock gave this amazing answer in the New Yorker on-line about how she is always asked about balancing work and motherhood and how the question itself expects women to talk about how hard it is and how to go through this dance like, “the balance is so difficult, and woe is me” and how it shouldn’t be that way. Yes, being a parent is hard but that’s just life and her answer was brilliant.
Sarah Enni: I’ll look into it.
Julie Buxbaum: And I wish I could just give you her answer. The truth is, as much as I believe that day to day I’m to get mixed up in the minutia of being a mom and the writing life and I haven’t quite figured out how to do it and make it seamless, it doesn’t feel as easy as I would like it to be and as I believe it should be, but one bleeds into the other.
I think that balance is one of those overrated things. It doesn’t really exist that it’s not real and some days I am a much better mother than I am on other days and some days I’m a better writer than I am other days. But, at the end of the day, my kids are loved and they are fine and I have to remember that and my work is important too and sort of carve out both and feel confident about the decisions and making work a priority is not something that I have to be apologetic about. But, it’s obviously easier said than done.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
Julie Buxbaum: Thank you for having me. This was so fun!
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Julie. Follow her on Twitter @juliebux and follow the show @FirstDraftPod and me @sarahenni. You can also find the show on Facebook and on Instagram you can get a sneak peek at future guests. But, for show notes from this episode and every episode, as well as my favorite quotes and other interesting links, visit www.firstdraftpod.com
If you like what you heard, please think about leaving a rating or review on iTunes. Every 5 Star review brings me closer to living the Ann Hathaway-iest version of my life and I think that’s a good thing.
Thanks to @hashbrown for the theme song and to Collin Keith and Maurene Goo for the logos and, as ever, thanks to you somebody nobodies for listening.
Julie Buxbaum
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Julie Buxbaum
Born 1977 (age 45–46)[1]
Occupation lawyer, novelist
Nationality American
Citizenship USA
Notable works
The Opposite of Love
After You
What to Say Next
Tell Me Three Things
Hope and Other Punchlines
Admission
Julie Buxbaum (born 1977) is an American lawyer, and novelist, who specializes in young adult novels.[2][3][4][5][6] Her first two novels were written for adults, but Buxbaum has told interviewers she enjoys writing for a younger audience to connect with the sense of freedom open to younger readers.[7]
Buxbaum's undergraduate degree is from the University of Pennsylvania, and she earned her J.D. degree at Harvard Law School.[8]
Kirkus Reviews characterized her 2009 first novel, The Opposite of Love, as a "proposed merger of literary fiction with chick lit [that] contravenes the conventions of both genres."[9] The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Anne Hathaway had been tentatively cast in a movie version of the book.[10]
Several of her young adult novels revolve around topical events. The primary characters of Hope and Other Punchlines are both deeply affected by being born around the time of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.[11] The hero of Admission is embarrassed to learn their parents are accused of using bribery to get them into an elite college.
Bibliography
Julie Buxbaum (2009). The Opposite of Love. Bantam Trade. ISBN 9780385341233.
Julie Buxbaum (2010). After You. Dial Press. ISBN 9780385341257.
Julie Buxbaum (2017). What to Say Next. Random House Children's Books. ISBN 9780553535709.
Julie Buxbaum (2017). Tell Me Three Things. Random House Children's Books. ISBN 9780553535679.
Julie Buxbaum (2019). Hope and Other Punchlines. Random House Children's Books. ISBN 9781524766771.
Julie Buxbaum (2020). Admission. Random House Children's Books. ISBN 9781984893642.
Q & A with Julie Buxbaum
By Sara Grochowski | Jun 20, 2017
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Indy Flore
Julie Buxbaum.
A lawyer turned author, Julie Buxbaum moves between writing for adult and young adult audiences. Her newest novel for young readers, What to Say Next, chronicles the burgeoning relationship between Kit, mourning the sudden loss of her father, and socially awkward David, whose blunt but sincere kindness offer a refuge. Buxbaum spoke with PW about her tendency towards themes of love and loss, depicting a character on the autism spectrum respectfully and responsibly, and the ways in which her legal background affects her writing.
How did you come to writing, particularly for teens?
I was writing adult novels, but felt like I was pretending to be a grownup. Like I was just playing one on TV. In my head, I was actually a kid playing dressup. I’d moved from London to New York to Los Angeles, I had a house, a second child, and was on the PTA when it occurred to me that I was officially a grownup. I packed lunches and carried Cheerios in my bag for my kids. This left me feeling devastated instead of liberated; I missed being a teenager with wide-open options. As an adult, I know what my future entails, it’s mostly set in stone. So, I started writing YA to open my world again, to revisit that feeling of possibility in a non-dangerous manner.
How has your training as a lawyer affected your approach to storytelling?
I think it makes my language more precise. Legal writing has to build; A builds on B which builds on C. You can’t just say something because it sounds good or run away with words. This makes my writing significantly less flowery; I justify every choice and word choice.
Do you think this attention to detail affects the speed at which you write?
I think it’s easier. I have no problem killing my darlings. I just don’t invest in the same way. It’s still opening up a vein and bleeding on the page—all writing is.
In addition to your two novels for teens, you've also written two adult novels. Does the intended audience affect your writing process? Do you feel more drawn to writing for a particular audience?
I don’t write any differently depending on audience. I believe it’s really important not to underestimate the YA audience. It’s composed of really, really sophisticated readers and I’d be doing them a disservice to approach writing YA differently. The only difference is that my YA characters are in high school. I’m a little more careful about using profanity, too, because that rings differently depending on the audience. If I use profanity, it’s for a specific reason.
Have you found any differences in your engagement with YA vs. adult readers?
Engaging with YA readers is so much more fun. YA has a really active fan world; they show up for you. This level of interaction doesn’t exist as much in the world of adult publishing; YA feels more personal. There is nothing better than meeting a 16-year-old who is excited about your story and characters.
Do you recall any particularly special interactions with YA readers?
Occasionally readers will hand me fan art. They show up again and again to hear my dumb jokes and laugh a second time. I’ve received really heartfelt emails from readers who have lost parents, too. Meeting teens who have also experienced that loss and connected is absolutely mind-blowing and magical.
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Your first book for teens, Tell Me Three Things, was inspired by an anonymous email. Can you talk about that a bit?
I once received an anonymous email that changed the course of my life. It was basically a secret admirer-type email that came at a time when I was at a personal low, working a new job with 80-hour work weeks. Out of nowhere an email arrived that was the encouragement I needed. I had never thought of myself as someone to be noticed. I still don’t know who the secret emailer was.
We’ve all experienced that overwhelming feeling of wanting to be seen and recognized for who we are. The anonymous email gave me a dose of encouragement; it wasn’t a demand, nothing was asked for. The sender was purely reaching out to give me a gift.
What inspired your most recent novel, What to Say Next?
It all started with David’s voice. Once I realized I was writing about a character on the spectrum, I knew I really had to do my homework before digging in. Kit came second. The story is ultimately about two people who find a connection in the place they least expect, just when they need it the most.
Kit and David match in unexpected ways; they naturally give what the other needs. David tells Kit the truth; he has an underlying sincerity. I recall going back to school after my mom died; I have a clear memory of the feelings I experienced as people either avoided me or offered very fake cloying hugs. It’s a very isolating experience. I wanted Kit to meet a person who can just say the right thing.
Both of your YA novels have themes of love and loss, particularly regarding the loss of a parent. Why do these specific themes appeal to you? Why are they important to include in YA?
When I wrote my first book, I was working through my own feelings [of losing my mother at age 14]. I was finally brave enough to unpack the feelings I hadn’t acknowledged at the time of her death. I keep circling around to my endless fascination with first love and first loss, which are both profound experiences. I like to explore highs and lows, finding humor in the darkest moments and balancing the two. There’s nothing bigger than the death of a parent when you’re a young adult. I’m writing books I wish I had when I was 16; my life experience is reflected on the pages of my books.
What to Say Next features two points of view, Kit and David. How did having dual points of view affect plotting?
I’ve mostly written linearly with one voice, so this is my first time writing from the perspective of a boy and a girl. The perspectives pick up where the last left off, so I had to keep track of what the other saw and knew to move the story forward. I also had to be sure both stories had a natural arc. To do this, I sometimes read one voice all the way through, then the other voice. So writing two points of view was slightly more technically complicated, but not much.
David’s voice was always clearer. Most of my female characters feel like a slice of me—either a distorted or better version, but with a kernel of me—while David feels like my child. I love him in a protective way. In the same way that you love your children more than yourself.
David is on the autism spectrum, having Asperger’s Syndrome. What type of research did you conduct to ensure David was portrayed in a realistic, truthful way? Were you concerned with inaccurate representation?
Yes, very. My number one goal was responsible and respectful representation. I read a lot of own voices narratives and watched documentaries and YouTube videos, looking for real voices. I wasn’t as interested in parent perspectives. I tweaked David’s voice, letting go of my own preconceived notions. It’s important to remember that when you meet one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. I would never claim to have represented more than one experience.
What kinds of books do you gravitate towards in your own reading?
I read pretty much everything; I like to keep lots of things going at once. I read a lot of adult literature, YA contemporary fiction, and adult commercial fiction. I buy a lot more nonfiction than I actually read! I also listen to a ton of audiobooks. I recently read and loved When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon. I am currently reading Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 by Naoki Higashida, an own voices narrative of a man with autism who doesn’t speak. It’s part memoir, part short story and amazing because he is articulating himself on paper even though he doesn’t speak aloud.
What are you working on next?
I’m currently in revisions for my next standalone contemporary YA, which features dual narratives again. It’s a little more serious than What to Say Next.
What to Say Next by Julie Buxbaum. Delacorte, $18.99 Jul. 11 ISBN 978-0-553-53568-6
May 2019
Julie Buxbaum
A love story born from a national tragedy
Interview by Norah Piehl
We caught up with Julie Buxbaum by phone from her home in California to ask her what it was like to write a 9/11 novel for a generation that wasn’t even born when it happened.
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Julie Buxbaum’s new YA novel balances a story of first love with a look at the ripple effects of 9/11 for today’s teens.
Hope and Other Punchlines is a sweet and funny romance set at a summer camp. But its main characters—unlikely camp counselors Abbi and Noah—happen to live in a New Jersey town that lost dozens of its residents on September 11, 2001.
And even though that tragedy happened nearly 16 years before the events in Buxbaum’s novel, their community still lives in its shadow. Seventeen-year-old Abbi definitely feels like she can’t move past it. Although she can’t remember it, she became a symbol of hope after a photo of her as a baby being rescued from the World Trade Center day care became famous around the world. Abbi’s fellow camp counselor, Noah, is an aspiring journalist and political comedian, and he wants to interview all of the survivors captured in the iconic picture of Abbi—but he may have his own personal reasons linked to the tragedy for doing so.
We caught up with Buxbaum by phone from her home in California to ask her what it was like to write a 9/11 novel for a generation that wasn’t even born when it happened.
OK, I have to ask: Where were you on September 11, 2001?
I was in Boston in law school. And my husband—who was my boyfriend at the time—was in London, and he’s the one who called me and told me to turn on the television. And it was this moment when the world suddenly shifted: We were in one world that morning and a completely different world when we went to bed that night.
These memories are so vivid for those of us who were old enough. Was it strange to realize that by writing a novel about 9/11, even one that’s essentially set in the present, you were writing about something that today’s kids learn about from history books?
That was the entire purpose of writing this book. It was born out of a tweet written by a teen I really admire. She always has really smart things to say, but in this tweet, she was basically complaining about having to learn about 9/11 every year on the anniversary. When I saw her tweet, I burst into tears, and it occurred to me that although those events seem to me like they happened yesterday, my readers were babies or not yet even born. It’s ancient history to them. So I wanted to find a way to make 9/11 accessible and digestible to this generation, for whom 9/11 feels like what Pearl Harbor feels like to me.
Writing a character like Noah, who’s an aspiring comedian, is a good way to inject some
humor into what could otherwise be a bleak story. Was it hard for you to balance the funny and tragic parts of your novel?
It was hard, but one of my goals for the book was to make people laugh, not just to make them cry—and sometimes both in the same paragraph. I find that in real life, people can be funniest in their darkest moments. It’s a way that we can cope with those difficult times. So I wanted to explore that in the book. And more importantly, I wanted to make a statement about how we use comedy to endure pain.
What were you trying to explore about memory and what we remember, and why?
I lost my mom quite young, which is something I return to again and again in my fiction. But one of the things that I think about constantly is about how a big loss can feel so traumatic, but over time we lose our memories of the small moments that make up our days. Memory—what we lose and what we retain—haunts me and is a theme I return to repeatedly in my writing and in my life, especially my life as a parent.
I had heard about the pretty terrible rate of sickness and death that persists among people who were at the World Trade Center site, but I really hadn’t understood the extent of it. Why did you decide to work this health issue into the novel?
I think it’s really important for people to remember, especially since it’s not consistently covered in the media. This is one of those tragedies that has reverberated around the globe in countless political ways, but the actual explosion and its aftermath continues to perpetuate sickness and death among survivors—there are thousands of types of cancers directly linked to 9/11 exposure. And I worry that because we don’t talk about it, people just don’t know. There’s this feeling that we have moved on, but those who are still coping with the physical or emotional effects can’t move on.
Your characters model different ways of coping with trauma and grief. What do you want readers to take away from their resilience?
I think everyone processes loss and trauma differently, but it’s all hugely damaging. And it’s interesting to think how lives change course as a result of those defining moments. In some cases, they propel us forward, and in other cases, they propel us backward. Losing my mom was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but I also think it changed who I am as a person—partly in some wonderful, miraculous ways. I would trade anything to go back and have it be different, of course, but I can’t discount that I am who I am because of those experiences.
UFO’s, Misfits, and Writing Journeys: An Interview with Julie Buxbaum
Sometimes you pick up a book not knowing what to expect and find yourself absolutely sucked in—that kind of “can’t put it down” feeling that doesn’t always happen but when it does, wow! That’s how I’ve been with Julie Buxbaum’s YA novels, especially her wonderful Hope and Other Punchlines, which is moving and funny, heartwarming and thoughtful, and honestly, everything I want in a YA contemporary novel.
Now, Julie has dipped her toes in middle grade, with The Area 51 Files, which is funny, illustrated, goofy, and delightful. It’s all about Sky Patel-Baum who is sent to live with her mysterious uncle on the equally mysterious military base. I was thrilled when Julie had some time for me to chat with her about all this. Here’s what we talked about.
Joy Preble: Area 51 is a bit of a departure from your YA books like Hope and Other Punchlines (which I so very much adored). Can you tell us a little about the process and inspiration for your shift to writing a middle grade with sassy hedgehogs, aliens, and other unusual and goofy elements!
Julie Buxbaum: A few months into the pandemic, my seven year old son turned to me and said, “Mommy, I have a question.” I steeled myself, as he asked me a lot of difficult questions back then: “When will I be able to go back to school?” “Am I going to get sick?” “Why have you stopped wearing pants with buttons?” But this time, he asked, apropos of nothing, “Mommy, what do you think really happens in Area 51?”
Finally, this was a question I could handle, and I decided right then and there that I’d answer him with a book. So in stolen moments after the groceries had been wiped and we’d washed our hands to multiple rounds of Happy Birthday and my kids were in Zoom school, I started writing The Area 51 Files. Soon this secret project, my very first for middle grade readers, became my happy place.
I imagined a world full of friendly and sometimes silly aliens, where those who were different weren’t feared but welcomed. A misfit girl who finds her home where everyone is so weird that no one can feel like an outsider. Distant, better, kinder planets. All of this felt like a gift, an amazing world to escape into when the outside world felt uninviting.
JP: Well, we all need an amazing world to escape to right now, don’t we? Because I do think that Area 51, like your other books, explores our strange and wonderful universe and the sometimes grand and sometimes awful things that happen to us in it. Do you find yourself drawn to certain questions and philosophical musings and themes in your writing? Having read some of your essays (such as your one about grief for Time), I suspect that you do…
JB: I always joke that I only find out why I wrote a book years after. That I can never see what’s right there in front of me. For example, my second adult book, After You, is about a woman who steps into the life of her best friend after her best friend is murdered and is essentially about how well we truly know the people we love. Later, I realized that I wrote that book just before my husband and I got engaged. Of course that question—how we can never get inside our loved ones’ experiences of the world—was at the forefront of my mind. But there are themes I find I return to again and again—those moments in life where there is a before and an after, both the short and long term impact of grief, found family, finding our place in this jumbled world, how to heal after loss.
JP: That’s exactly what draws me to your books for sure! It’s something I explore in my own writing as well—that distinct before and after with loss and displacement. It’s such a profound and universal moment, right? Jumping topics (at least somewhat), I see that you have a Harvard law degree. What was the journey from law to writing like? Or was it not really much of a leap at all?
JB: What’s most interesting to me about the leap from law to writing was how unintentional it all was. I quit my job as a litigator at a law firm as part of a New Year’s resolution to write my first book. (It was the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever kept!) But my plan was never to become a writer. It was more about a bucket list item—I always knew I wanted to write a book before I died—and then to figure out what kind of lawyer I wanted to be. And then, I started writing and realized it felt so organic and what I was meant to be doing all along. (I should say there was a huge amount of luck along the way that meant I didn’t have to go back to the law.)
JP: Back to Area 51, do you have a particular favorite scene that you most loved writing? And in a related question, have you ever seen a UFO? Do you believe there is life on other planets? What are your favorite sci-fi books and movies? (Yeah I know I snuck in a bunch of questions here!)
JB: My favorite scenes in The Area 51 Files involve the burgeoning friendship/unrequited romance between Pickles the dog and Spike the hedgehog. Those two characters kept me laughing. And yes, I absolutely believe there is life on other planets, though I’ve never personally seen a UFO. I believe it’s impossible that we are alone in this vast and wondrous universe (or possibly multiverse.) As for favorite sci-fi books or movies, I’m going to go with ET, because I love how humane that film is and how rooted in the real world. In writing The Area 51 Files, I never once wanted the reader to feel disoriented by the strange aliens at the heart of the book; I wanted the reader to feel welcomed by them.
JP: And very welcomed indeed! As you mention with ET, your own writing is so very humane, so very welcoming. What’s coming next for Julie Buxbaum?
JB: There are two more Area 51 Files books coming out! The next one is called The Big Flush, and it’s about a giant space toilet headed toward Area 51 that poses an existential threat to the base! We don’t yet have a title for the third book in the series, but I will say it’s packed with a ton of surprises for our characters and lots and lots of puns. But no more space toilets.
JP: Puns and space toilets! Honestly, what more do you need? Thanks for a great conversation, Julie!!
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: ADMISSION BY JULIE BUXBAUM
CRUSHED ON BY CHRISTY JANE, ON FEBRUARY 12, 2021, IN AUTHOR INTERVIEW, NEW RELEASES / 0 COMMENTS
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: ADMISSION BY JULIE BUXBAUM
In 2019, the college admissions world was rocked by a 7 year admissions scandal. High profile parents had been paying to get their kids into elite schools – and now the world knows about it. What was left out were the underlying pieces, which BookCrushin fav, Julie Buxbaum, explores in her new story, Admission. Check out our interview below, and pick up Admission, out now!
Author Interview: Admission by Julie Buxbaum
Admission
by Julie Buxbaum
Published by: Delacorte Press
on December 1, 2020
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary
Pages: 304
Audible
Goodreads
From the New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Three Things comes an of-the-moment novel that peeks inside the private lives of the hypercompetitive and the hyperprivileged and takes on the college admissions bribery scandal that rocked the country.
It's good to be Chloe Wynn Berringer. She's headed off to the college of her dreams. She's going to prom with the boy she's had a crush on since middle school. Her best friend always has her back, and her mom, a B-list Hollywood celebrity, may finally be on her way to the B+ list. It's good to be Chloe Wynn Berringer--at least, it was, until the FBI came knocking on her front door, guns at the ready, and her future went up in smoke. Now her mother is under arrest in a massive college admissions bribery scandal. Chloe, too, might be facing charges, and even time behind bars. The public is furious, the press is rabid, and the US attorney is out for blood.
As she loses everything she's long taken for granted, Chloe must reckon not only with the truth of what happened, but also with the examination of her own guilt. Why did her parents think the only way for her to succeed was to cheat for her? What did she know, and when did she know it? And perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be complicit?
Interview with Julie Buxbaum
We can all remember where we were the day the admission scandal broke. At what moment after did you decide to delve into that world with Admission?
As soon as the scandal broke, I became immediately obsessed. I read everything I could get my hands on, and because I used to be a lawyer, I even read through the 500 page complaint. And no matter how much material I consumed, I still felt unsatisfied. There seemed to be a much larger story that I wanted to understand about blurred lines and ethical parenting and what it means to be complicit in a larger broken system. I wanted to know what it would be like to be one of the kids at the center—what were the messages they were getting and what did that say about how we are raising a generation? In response, I created Chloe Berringer, my main character. I was 2/3 of the way through a draft of a totally different novel, and so I called my agent and asked her, “Would it be totally bananas of me to put aside the book I’ve been working on for almost a year to write a novel about the college admissions scandal?” Once I told her my vision for the book though, she was on board. Next, we went to my editor, who luckily was also 100% in. From there, I started immediately drafting.
This isn’t the first time you’ve explored a fictional take on a real life event. What knowledge did you bring to writing Admission after writing Hope and Other Punchlines?
I hadn’t really connected the two books in my mind at all until recently when I realized that I must have some interest in the concept of people who are forced to represent something larger than themselves. Hope and Other Punchlines is a book that required a ton of research about 9/11 and 9/11 syndrome and the long term aftermath of grief. With this book, although at first I read a ton because I was fascinated, I quickly realized I needed to stop researching and instead create my own fictional world. I didn’t want Admission to be only “a ripped from the headlines” sort of story. I wanted to write a deeper examination of the questions the scandal unmasked and therefore had to separate the book from the real life events.
What do you want college hopefuls to know about their future?
We live in a culture that venerates brand names and too many people evaluate colleges based on where they rank in US News and World report, instead of focusing on what school might be best fit for them. Our self worth shouldn’t be tied to where we went to college or even if we go to college. Your value as a person, your future, the things that will end up mattering the most in your life are not going to be determined—were never going to be determined—by a couple of “We regret to inform yous,” as much as it sometimes feels otherwise. Work on becoming the best, most resilient version of yourself—which is not the same thing as the most outwardly impressive—and you’ll be just fine.
About Julie Buxbaum
Julie Buxbaum is the New York Times best selling author of Tell Me Three Things, her young adult debut, What to Say Next and most recently, Hope and Other Punchlines. She’s also the author of two critically acclaimed novels for adults: The Opposite of Love and After You. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Julie’s writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times. She is a former lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and more books than is reasonable.
Debut Club: An Interview with Julie Buxbaum, author of TELL ME THREE THINGS
Posted on April 12, 2016 by THESWANKY17SLeave a comment
Swanky Seventeen author Stephanie Elliot recently interviewed Sweet Sixteen author Julie Buxbaum about her YA contemporary debut, TELL ME THREE THINGS (Delacorte/Random House, April 5, 2016).
V23 new typeface tagline.inddAbout the Book:
What if the person you need the most is someone you’ve never met?
Everything about Jessie is wrong. At least, that’s what it feels like during her first week of junior year at her new ultra-intimidating prep school in Los Angeles. Just when she’s thinking about hightailing it back to Chicago, she gets an email from a person calling themselves Somebody/Nobody (SN for short), offering to help her navigate the wilds of Wood Valley High School. Is it an elaborate hoax? Or can she rely on SN for some much-needed help?
It’s been barely two years since her mother’s death, and because her father eloped with a woman he met online, Jessie has been forced to move across the country to live with her stepmonster and her pretentious teenage son.
In a leap of faith—or an act of complete desperation—Jessie begins to rely on SN, and SN quickly becomes her lifeline and closest ally. Jessie can’t help wanting to meet SN in person. But are some mysteries better left unsolved?
Julie Buxbaum mixes comedy and tragedy, love and loss, pain and elation, in her debut YA novel whose characters will come to feel like friends. Tell Me Three Things will appeal to fans of Rainbow Rowell, Jennifer Niven, and E. Lockhart.
Tell Me Three Things is available for purchase from Amazon, B&N, Indiebound, and Apple.
Julie Buxbaum Smiling (1)About The Author:
Julie Buxbaum is the author of the critically acclaimed The Opposite of Love and After You, and her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Tell Me Three Things is her first young adult novel. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times. She is a former lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two young children, and an immortal goldfish. Visit Julie online at www.juliebuxbaum.com and follow @juliebux on Twitter. You can also find Julie on Facebook, Instagram (@juliebux), and Goodreads.
Stephanie: Tell Me Three Things is both heartbreaking and hopeful as the main character is grieving the loss of her mother, dealing with a new move, and feeling all sorts of emotions having to leave her best friend and home and start school in a pretty upscale (dare I say snotty) L.A. high school. How did you manage to write Jessie as perfectly as you did – and get her emotions so on target?
Julie: First of all, thank you so much. Jessie definitely isn’t the teen me, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to borrowing some of my own experiences for Tell Me Three Things. Not so much the plot—my dad never married a woman he met on the internet nor did I ever have to be the “new kid” in school and let’s be honest, Jessie is WAY cooler than I ever was—still I also lost my mother at fourteen, and so I channeled much of that grief into her character. Writing this book ended up bringing out all the feels in me, for better or worse I guess, and so it was a cathartic experience channeling it onto the page. I just wish I had handled those difficult years with as much grace as Jessie manages.
Stephanie: I know Tell Me Three Things was inspired by a real-life secret admirer who sent you emails. Can you tell us about that experience/time in your life?
Julie: Ha! Yeah, it’s sort of a strange story, and I still haven’t yet figured out how to tell it properly. But in my early twenties, one day, completely out of the blue, I received an incredibly flattering, anonymous email from someone who claimed to be a former law school classmate. I never found out who he was, but the experience ended up having a bizarrely profound impact on my life. The thing is, his email arrived at EXACTLY the right time. I was in the midst of my own personal crisis—I was working long, hard hours at a job I wasn’t sure I wanted anymore, I felt unattractive and tired all the time, and looking back now I realize I was probably depressed. And then this email arrived and for reasons I still can’t quite explain, it was a turning point in how I felt about myself and my life. I wanted to capture some of that magic with Tell Me Three Things.
Stephanie: That’s amazing! It was kind of like having your own ‘Fairy Godmother’ except I’m imagining a hot law student! Your first novels were contemporary women’s fiction, which I read and loved. What made you switch to writing young adult? What do you think are the main differences in writing for these two very distinct audiences? Are there differences?
Julie: In the past few years, after adulting pretty darn hard, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I’m a full-fledged grown-up. I have two kids, a mortgage, a husband, a writing career, and this realization, which I had put off for as long as I possibly could, is what made me turn to writing YA. I missed the wonder of the teen years when all of life’s question were still open to be answered. Who will you be when you grow up? What’s going to happen? So many of my life’s questions are answered (at least for now) and so it was super fun for me to go back and revisit that magical (and sometimes terrifying) time when that wasn’t the case.
Stephanie: Without giving anything away, I LOVED how in Tell Me Three Things, you so creatively keep the reader guessing as to whom the secret admirer might be. Sometimes in books the secret admirer is so obvious, but not in TMTT. All of the “suspects” were such great candidates. Was this a challenge to keep coming up with interesting characters and how did you keep making up fun, creative teenagers!? (And PS, I have a major, major crush on one of them, and this doesn’t happen for me all that frequently, but I want to turn myself into a high school student, jump into your book and make out with him!)
Julie: OMG, I have so many inappropriate book boyfriends. Don’t tell my husband! I love writing boy characters, and spending the time to figure out who they are, what they want, what interests them. I imagine how they spend their afternoons after school, what their home life is like, I even listen to the music I think they would listen to in order to get a real feel for who they are and what makes them tick. High school is a time full of self-discovery, so it’s always fun to create people who are embarking on that journey.
Stephanie: I also happen to know you’re a very busy mom to two awesome little kids. How do you manage to balance your mom life with your writing life? What’s your writing schedule like?
Julie: I try to keep very normal working hours, as if I had a normal 9-5 office job. I don’t spend the entire eight hours writing, but I do try and spend much of that time conquering work stuff, with the occasional kid responsibility thrown in. I clock back in as Mom at around 5-6, and I try to put work out of my mind until they are in bed. After that, the last tiny bit of the day is reserved to catch up with my husband, or to watch television or read books, both of which I think are important and necessary for my creative life. To be honest, though, most days are much more jumbled than this, and all sorts of things can throw my routine off. Sometimes, I’m on deadline. Sometimes, I have a kid sick at home which means accepting not much writing is going to get done. Balance feels like an elusive, weird moving target that I’ll never reach and I’m trying to be okay with that.
Stephanie: You recently turned in your next YA. Are you able to tell us what it’s about?
Julie: It’s the story of an unexpected friendship between a socially isolated boy and a girl who has recently lost her father. And writing that last sentence makes me realize how badly I need to nail down an elevator pitch for that book! What I can say is that I think it may be my favorite thing I’ve ever written, which is kind of like picking a favorite kid, but whatever.
Stephanie: Oh my gosh, I can’t wait for the next JBYA – Julie Buxbaum Young Adult. I love your pitch for it already! Thanks for taking the time to chat Julie! Here are some quick Lightning Round questions for you:
Drink of choice:
Water. I’m so boring.
Favorite band:
Counting Crows. Yeah, I do realize it’s 2016.
Late night or early morning:
Late night!!!
How do you take your coffee?
Splash of coconut milk
Favorite color, number, letter:
Blue, 3, R or E
Favorite place on earth:
Home.
One non-electronic item you can’t live without:
My pillow.
Stranded on a deserted island with one person, famous or otherwise, who and why?
Husband. We started talking 15 years ago and haven’t stopped since. Might as well do it on an island.
Best song in the entire world:
Just can’t. TOO MANY. Tangled up in Blue. Piece of my Heart. Anna Begins? AHHH!
Writing necessities:
One cup of coffee, laptop, Freedom app, no kids around.
Buxbaum, Julie. The Opposite of Love. Dial: Random. Feb. 2008. c.320p. ISBN 9780-385-34122-6. $25. F
Buxbaum's debut is a welcome addition to the having-it-all genre. The characters are likable, and the story line moves along so amusingly that you'll want to keep reading into the night. Emily Haxby is an up-and-coming attorney at a big firm in Manhattan. From the outside, she seems to have her life tied up flawlessly with a big red bow; however, the package is coming unraveled. On the verge of becoming engaged to Andrew, the perfect guy, she freezes and breaks up with him. Other life events creep in to sidetrack Emily. She's given an assignment on a sleazy legal case defending a company that's knowingly polluting the environment, and her lecherous boss propositions her in a hotel room. Then Emily's favorite family member, Grandpa Jack, starts to exhibit the frightening symptoms of Alzheimer's. Repeatedly mourning the death of her mother (when Emily was a child) and her completely distant politician father, Emily finds that the turmoil in her life is leading her to take harsh actions. Can Emily pull it together--work, family, love life, and all? You'll be turning pages until you find out! Highly recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/07.]--Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Gibbs, Beth. "Buxbaum, Julie. The Opposite of Love." Library Journal, vol. 133, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2008, pp. 80+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175064074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=953d764c. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE Dial (Adult FICTION) $25 Feb. 5, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-385-34122-6
Associate in a blue-chip Manhattan law firm copes with blowback from self-defeatism in Buxbaum's much-hyped but disappointing debut.
Emily Haxby dumps her boyfriend Andrew on Labor Day. Why? Perhaps it's her punishing schedule at Altman, Prior and Tisch, where the 29-year-old Yale Law grad has been assigned to defend corporate octopus Synergon in a carcinogen-dumping class-action lawsuit. Perhaps it's because Andrew, a nice emergency-room doc, was trolling for her ring size and diamond preferences. Hoping to parse the enigma, she sees a shrink, Dr. Lerner, who doggedly plumbs Emily's depths only to founder, like readers, in the shallows. When things threaten to get interesting--Emily is advised to consult A Civil Action for pointers on steamrolling pollution victims; a senior partner exceeds all bounds of decency on a business trip, making Denny Crane look subtle--Buxbaum opts for the easy resolution. Emily engineers the offending partner's downfall, but quits her job anyway. After her beloved Grandpa Jack goes AWOL from his retirement home, he's diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but consequences go mostly unexplored. So does the cordial but distant relationship with Dad that Emily has endured since her mother's death when Emily was 14. When she finds Andrew newly attractive, he rebuffs all her conciliatory overtures with a harshness that belies his earlier, albeit sketchy, characterization. Grandpa Jack's death reunites all the principals by teaching them--what else?--the importance of family.
This proposed merger of literary fiction with chick lit contravenes the conventions of both genres.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Buxbaum, Julie: THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2007. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A171829908/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e6c4a960. Accessed 15 May 2023.
After You
Julie Buxbaum. Dial, $25 (352p) ISBN 978-0385-34124-0
Like her debut, The Opposite of Love, Buxbaum's second novel concerns a woman struggling with devastating loss. When American ex-pat Lucy Stafford is killed by a mugger, her lifelong best friend Ellie Lerner drops everything to fly to London. Ellie stays on after Lucy's funeral to care for her friend's eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, who witnessed her mom's violent death and has since retreated into silence. Ellie also worries about Lucy's husband, Greg, who confesses that he "can barely even look at" his daughter; her own divorced parents' on-again, off again relationship; and her long-suffering husband, waiting for her in the Boston suburbs. Ellie finds London as much a refuge as a place of mourning; she's been unable to move past the birth of a stillborn child and feels the need to "borrow" Sophie. As she uncovers more of Lucy's life, Ellie finds her own spinning out of control, and soon she's forced to reassess even her deeply held certainties. Buxbaum skillfully handles this tale of grief and growing, resonant with realistic emotional stakes and hard-won wisdom. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
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"After You." Publishers Weekly, vol. 256, no. 27, 6 July 2009, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A203335726/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c13ad3e8. Accessed 15 May 2023.
uxbaum, Julie AFTER YOU Random (Adult FICTION) $$25.00 Sep. 1, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-385-34124-0
New tragedy jars a rudderless woman out of her grief and into the life of a charming, troubled eight-year-old.
Ellie Lerner has been coasting for years since the death of her baby. Her marriage on hold, her teaching career lifeless, Ellie's only real connection seemed to be to her lifelong friend Lucy, who had moved to England, married and produced an adorable, precocious girl, Ellie's goddaughter Sophie. When Lucy is murdered, that tie seems severed also. But the connection to Sophie quickly takes its place, as Ellie drops her life in Boston to take up residence in Lucy's Notting Hill home. Sophie's father, Greg, has buried himself in work and drink; Ellie's husband, Phillip, doesn't understand. Only the troubled little girl really seems to need Ellie. Caring for her, Ellie comes to terms with her grief, and discovers some hard truths about her dear friend and about herself that help her move on. Buxbaum (The Opposite of Love, 2008) has a light touch with characterization, letting us judge the friends through Ellie's admittedly unreliable rose-colored nostalgia. But although the plotline could easily dip into formula, Buxbaum keeps the story as smart as the writing. "If our lives were a movie, this would be the scene where the music changes," Ellie observes. "We'd make eye contact--tentatively at first, then a pact--before we'd rip off each other's clothes and declare our undying love...But this is not a movie, and things are never simple." Instead, the author keeps it real and works out optimistic rather than happy endings for her sharply focused and honestly sympathetic characters.
Fresh, lightly done take on the classic tearjerker.
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"Buxbaum, Julie: AFTER YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2009. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A208117381/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=40cb33bd. Accessed 15 May 2023.
BUXBAUM, Julie. Tell Me Three Things. 336p. ebook available. Delacorte. Apr. 2016. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780553535648; lib. ed. $20.99. ISBN 9780553535655.
Gr 10 Up--A contemporary YA novel about grieving, growing up, and learning how to have confidence in yourself. Saying Jessie's new life is weird would be an understatement-after she loses her mother to cancer, her dad sells their house, moves them across the country to live with the woman he eloped with during a business trip, and enrolls her in an elite private school where everyone makes her feel even more like an outsider. Back home Jessie was comfortable: she had both her parents, a house she loved, and friends. Here she feels lost in a sea of designer clothing, expensive cars, and people who spend their summer vacations in faraway countries. When the teen gets an anonymous email from Somebody/Nobody offering to teach her to navigate this new school's territory, she registers how strange the situation may be but replies anyway. Who is this mysterious Somebody/Nobody (SN for short)? Will trusting SN lead to success--or make her even more of a target for bullies? Readers will find themselves growing with Jessie as she tries to deal with the passing of her mother and become comfortable in her own skin miles away from everything she thought of as home. Buxbaum's debut is hard to put down because of its smooth and captivating text. The addition of virtual conversations through email and chatting adds an exciting plot twist. Casual talk of drinking, drugs, and sex makes this novel more appealing to mature teens. VERDICT A definite purchase for collections where readers enjoy character-driven fiction. --DeHanza Kwong, Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Kwong, DeHanza. "Buxbaum, Julie. Tell Me Three Things." School Library Journal, vol. 62, no. 2, Feb. 2016, p. 98. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A442780630/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=854cbba5. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie TELL ME THREE THINGS Delacorte (Children's Fiction) $17.99 4, 5 ISBN: 978-0-553-53564-8
Jessie's unassimilated grief over her mother's death makes her dad's abrupt marriage to Rachel, a wealthy widow he met online, and their subsequent move from Chicago to her mansion in Los Angeles feel like betrayal. Rachel's son wants nothing to do with Jessie. Her first week at his private school is agonizing. When she gets an email from "Somebody Nobody," claiming to be a male student in the school and offering to act as her "virtual spirit guide," Jessie's suspicious, but she accepts--she needs help. SN's a smart, funny, supportive guide, advising her whom to befriend and whom to avoid while remaining stubbornly anonymous. Meanwhile, Jessie makes friends, is picked as study partner by the coolest guy in AP English, and finds a job in a bookstore, working with the owner's son, Liam. But questions abound. Why is Liam's girlfriend bullying her? What should she do about SN now that she's crushing on study-partner Ethan? Readers will have answers long before Jessie does. It's overfamiliar territory: a protagonist unaware she's gorgeous, oblivious to male admiration; a jealous, mean-girl antagonist; a secret admirer, easily identified. It's the authentic depiction of grief--how Jessie and other characters respond to loss, get stuck, struggle to break through--devoid of cliche, that will keep readers engaged. Though one of Jessie's friends has a Spanish surname, rich, beautiful, mostly white people are the order of the day. Within the standard-issue teen romance is a heartfelt, wryly perceptive account of coming to terms with irrevocable loss when life itself means inevitable change. (Fiction. 12-16)
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"Buxbaum, Julie: TELL ME THREE THINGS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A541695413/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e41cd9b1. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie. What to Say Next. Delacorte/ Penguin Random House, 2017. 304p. $17.99. 978-0-553-53568-6.
After Kit's father dies in a car accident, she has such a hard time pretending that everything is normal, she ditches her friends to sit with David in the high school cafeteria. David, a social outcast on the autism spectrum, always sits alone. Kit thinks she will be able to find peace and quiet at David's table. Instead, she finds relief in Davids unfiltered, literal honesty. The butterfly effect of Kits change in cafeteria seating seriously upsets the high school social dynamics. As her friendship with him develops, Kit asks David to help her figure out at what point her father's accident could have been prevented. Secrets, revelations, and intolerance threaten their friendship and budding romance.
David and Kit narrate the story in alternating chapters with distinct voices and perspectives. Kit is David's first friend ever, outside of family. For Kit, grief, guilt, and her friendship with David cause her to question her place on the edge of the popular clique. Kit's secret is pretty obvious from the beginning; what is not obvious is that nobody else knows it. David has secrets too, including his coping strategies for social interactions outlined in his ubiquitous notebook. For both teens, pain and humiliation provide opportunities for growth and a better understanding of each other. Though it toys around the edges of a romance, this is ultimately a story of friendship and finding one's tribe. Teens who enjoy sweet, character-driven relationship stories will find their tribe with Kit and David.--Elizabeth Matson.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
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Matson, Elizabeth. "Buxbaum, Julie. What to Say Next." Voice of Youth Advocates, vol. 40, no. 3, Aug. 2017, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A502000776/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b6c61da2. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie WHAT TO SAY NEXT Delacorte (Children's Fiction) $18.99 7, 11 ISBN: 978-0-553-53568-6
Opposites attract after tragedy strikes.Autistic white teen David Drucker spends every lunch period eating alone. When Indian-American popular girl Kit Lowell joins him one day she's just looking for a quiet place to sit. It's been one month since Kit's father, a white dentist, died in a terrible car accident, but Kit is still flailing. As the two teens get to know one another and eat lunch together each day, they find themselves bringing out their own best qualities. Slowly but surely, romance blooms. There's a warmth and ease to their relationship that the author captures effortlessly. Each chapter alternates perspective between Kit and David, and each one is fully rendered. The supporting characters are less well served, particularly Kit's first-generation-immigrant mother. There are two major complications in Kit's story, both involving her workaholic mother, and the lack of development defuses some potential fireworks. The central relationship is so charming and engaging that readers will tolerate the adequate tertiary characters. Less tolerable is a late-in-the-game reveal about Dr. Lowell's accident that shifts the novel's tone to a down note that juxtaposes poorly with everything that came before. The author pulls out in the final few pages, but it still leaves a sour taste in the mouth. A pleasant romance hindered by some curious choices. (Romance. 12-16)
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"Buxbaum, Julie: WHAT TO SAY NEXT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A495428069/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2bc762b3. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie HOPE AND OTHER PUNCHLINES Delacorte (Young Adult Fiction) $21.99 5, 7 ISBN: 978-1-5247-6678-8
The legacy of 9/11 asserts its mark on a pair of contemporary, white, Jewish teens.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Abbi Hope Goldstein was immortalized in a famous photograph taken on her first birthday, in which she was being carried out of her day care while the first World Trade Center tower collapsed in the background. Thereafter known as "Baby Hope," 17-year-old Abbi is recognized all over her suburban New Jersey town. When she starts to develop a bloody cough, her instinct is to hide her symptoms from her worrying parents so that she can enjoy one last summer before having to face the likelihood that she will succumb to 9/11 syndrome, which afflicts some of those exposed to toxins at ground zero. Working as a summer camp counselor a few towns over, she is immediately recognized by her co-worker Noah Stern, who sees in Abbi the potential to answer a life-defining question regarding his own 9/11 tragedy. Together they embark on a mission to talk to the other individuals pictured in the Baby Hope photo, an emotional journey that is tempered by a generous amount of banter between the quick-witted, endearingly awkward pair. Ultimately, their story delivers its fair share of gut punches and cathartic moments, couched in an overall light-toned narrative.
A valuable addition to the growing body of 9/11-related teen literature--one that will be especially appealing to teens today. (author's note) (Fiction. 14-18)
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"Buxbaum, Julie: HOPE AND OTHER PUNCHLINES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A575952101/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=606644c9. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Hope and Other Punchlines
Julie Buxbaum. Delacorte, $18.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-5247-6677-1
In this novel, Buxbaum (Tell Me Three Things) offers up an emotionally resonant, wryly humorous portrayal of two young adults navigating trauma and acceptance years after 9/11. Nearly 17-year-old Abbi Hope Goldstein is eager to spend the summer as an anonymous camp counselor instead of as Baby Hope, the famous toddler turned cultural artifact who was photographed being carried to safety as the first tower fell on Sept. 11, 2001 (her first birthday). She also intends to enjoy a carefree eight weeks before telling her parents about an increasingly worrying cough that she suspects is 9/11 syndrome--complications from breathing the toxins at ground zero. Immediately recognized by fellow counselor and budding comedian Noah Stern, Abbi reluctantly agrees to help interview other figures in the Baby Hope photograph, unaware that Noah has a hidden personal morivation. Told in alternating perspectives between the two teens, the novel sensitively depicts how definitively 9/11 split countless lives into before and after. Directly affected by the events but too young to remember them, Abbi and Noah provide disrinctive points of view with which teen readers, for whom 9/11 is history, will identify. Ages 12--up. (May)
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"Hope and Other Punchlines." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 10, 11 Mar. 2019, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A580472742/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=12fba58c. Accessed 15 May 2023.
BUXBAUM, Julie. Admission. 352p. Delacorte. May 2020. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9781984893628.
Gr 9 Up--Chloe's world is turned upside down when the FBI shows up at her front door to arrest her mother, a beloved sitcom actress, who is believed to have taken part in a college admissions bribery scandal. Told in chapters that take place in the present and recent past of Chloe's senior year in high school, readers are given an exclusive look at the privileged life Chloe and her family lead, and how the fallout from the scandal changes everything. Buxbaum does a solid job of crafting realistic main and secondary characters, which gives this ripped-from-the-headlines story believable insight into the scandal that took the nation by storm. Although Chloe lives a fortunate life, she is not unaware of the struggles of others: Her best friend Shola, a Nigerian American student, studies very hard in hopes of securing a scholarship for college. Cesar, the elementary student she tutors, worries daily about whether his mother, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, will be deported. When Chloe gets in to her dream college and her best friend is wait-listed, she recognizes the unfairness of the situation, but it is not until she loses her friendship with Shola that she truly begins to grasp the consequences of her and her family's actions. VERDICT This timely character-centric novel, which is a gripping, thoughtful exploration of contemporary themes, deserves a place on both school and public library shelves.--Samantha Lumetta, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Lumetta, Samantha. "BUXBAUM, Julie. Admission." School Library Journal, vol. 66, no. 5, May 2020, p. 65. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622369347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=729c0161. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Admission
Julie Buxbaum. Delacorte, $18.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-9848-9362-8
Based on the 2019 college admissions scandal, Buxbaum's ripped-from-the-headlines story gives readers a fictionalized peek into the families who saw no harm in helping their already advantaged children through bribery, cheating, and fraud. Daughter of a venture capitalist and a sitcom star, high school senior Chloe Berringer has enjoyed a relatively challenge-free existence. Though Chloe is aware of her white privilege, she refuses to see others' hardships, including those of her best friend, shola, a Nigerian-American scholarship student at the girls' private high school. Shola's SAT scores are high enough for her to get into any U.S. college, but attending one depends entirely on scholarship funds, a concept that Chloe can't wrap her head around. When her family is implicated at the center of an admissions scandal, Chloe finds her world tumbling down. Written in alternating chapters--"then" details the months leading up to the events, "now" portrays occurrences following her mother's public arrest--the novel follows Chloe as she begins to understand her narrow worldview and possible complicity. Though Buxbaum (Hope and Other Punch Lines) is heavy-handed with the moral lessons, her assessment of the entitled 1% feels spot-on, making Shola's earned success particularly satisfying. Ages 12-up. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners. (May)
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"Admission." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 12, 23 Mar. 2020, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A618927647/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=346a366c. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Year on Fire
Julie Buxbaum. Delacorte, $18.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-984893-66-6
Four 16-year-olds' emotionally tumultuous junior year is further complicated when their Los Angeles high school is targeted by an arsonist. Twins Imogen and Archer Gibson, cued white, and Paige Cohen-Chen, who is Jewish and Chinese American, have been best friends since seventh grade. But tensions rise between them after Arch kisses Paige's now ex-boyfriend, Jackson. In a desperate attempt to protect her brother, Immie claims the betrayal as her own and resolves to make it up to Paige. So after Paige expresses romantic interest in a new student from London, brown-skinned Rohan Singh, Immie steps aside. But when their school's east wing is set aflame and Immie and Ro's feelings toward each other intensify, the friends' relationships begin to implode under the weight of their combined lies and omissions, concealing acts of self-harm, domestic abuse, and further betrayal. Portrayals of healthy teen romance provide a hopeful backdrop as family trauma and insecurities come to light and the group works to rebuild their friendship. Told from four alternating perspectives, Buxbaum (Admission) employs a limited third-person narrative, illustrating often-striking differences between the teens' distinct internal monologues in this tender exploration of love and loyalty. Ages 12-up.
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"Year on Fire." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 49, 23 Nov. 2022, pp. 116+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A728494036/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3f5cc192. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie YEAR ON FIRE Delacorte (Teen None) $18.99 4, 12 ISBN: 978-1-984893-66-6
Four Los Angeles teens negotiate their relationships.
The Gibson twins and their best friend, Paige Cohen-Chen, are a trio: the inseparable, loyal Imogen and Archer balancing out Paige's alpha-girl attitude. They've fit together as a perfect unit, until Immie kissed Paige's boyfriend, Jackson. But Immie didn't actually kiss Jackson-- Arch did. Arch is gay and hiding it from their abusive father, and his sister has lied for him, straining her friendship with Paige. Now Immie and Paige have their eyes on the same guy, Rohan Singh, a charming transfer student homesick for London despite his crush on Immie keeping him grounded. On top of all that, there's an arsonist loose at school. Amid these complicated connections, the friends hide their personal pain. Immie's desire for independence, Paige's parents' neglect and her toxic struggle for absolute perfection, Arch's secret flirtation with Jackson, and Ro's anger at his father's affair may burn them all down before anything else does. The quartet of vivid characters--in particular, troubled, fierce Paige--is a strength of the book, and the romances, one straight and one queer, are sweet. But the narrative never quite gels, trying as it does to balance too many plotlines and shifting in tone between melodrama and slice of life rather than blending both into a cohesive whole. Immie, Arch, and Jackson read as White; Paige is Jewish and Chinese American, and British Ro's name implies Indian descent.
A soap opera with real issues told with earnest heart. (Fiction. 14-18)
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"Buxbaum, Julie: YEAR ON FIRE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A693214620/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03bde77a. Accessed 15 May 2023.
BUXBAUM, Julie. The Area 51 Files. illus. by Lavanya Naidu. 304p. Delacorte. Sept. 2022. Tr $14.99. ISBN 9780593429464.
Gr 5 Up--A lighthearted mystery (with delightful illustrations) about accepting everyone just as they are. Priya "Sky" Patel-Baum is an orphan, and when her grandmother has to go to an assisted living facility, the 12-year-old ends up being sent to live with an uncle she has never met. It turns out he lives in Area 51, a top secret military base that is so classified not even the president knows its true purpose. (Rule #1: What happens in Area 51 stays in Area 51). Not only does she discover that there are aliens in Area 51, but they start to disappear when she arrives. Is it a coincidence? Sky, who is Indian and white, meets unimaginably strange beings, such as the Audiotooters, who fart out of their ears and release a delightful whiff of roses. Drones that deliver pizza and secret hatches that lead to tunnels in the living room floor are just a few of the things Sky discovers as she and her friends try to solve the mystery of the disappearing aliens. The school bully turns out to be one of her partners in crime as she and Elvis the alien work to uncover the mystery and clear her uncle's reputation. Readers who like their science fiction with a touch of humor, such as Frank Cottrell Boyce's Sputnik's Guide to Life On Earth, will enjoy these sci-fic high jinks. VERDICT A solid purchase for libraries building their collection of middle grade science fiction.--Deanna McDaniel
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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McDaniel, Deanna. "BUXBAUM, Julie. The Area 51 Files." School Library Journal, vol. 68, no. 12, Dec. 2022, p. 84. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A729548033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a6d3ff82. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie THE AREA 51 FILES Delacorte (Children's None) $14.99 9, 13 ISBN: 978-0-593-42946-4
Area 51 gets its first new resident in 5 years--and a new mystery.
When her grandma moves into a kid-free retirement home, 12-year-old orphan Priya "Sky" Patel-Baum and Spike, her pet hedgehog, relocate to Area 51 to live with Sky's eccentric Uncle Anish. At 51, humans and Break Throughs (government-speak for aliens) live together off-grid in harmony. Unfortunately, several Zdstrammars (one of many Break Through species) mysteriously disappear, disrupting the base's harmony and contributing to feelings of suspicion. Despite being deputy head of the Federal Bureau of Alien Investigations, Uncle Anish becomes a prime suspect. Can Sky and Elvis, her alien classmate, prove Uncle Anish's innocence and find the missing Zdstrammars before it's too late? YA author Buxbaum's middle-grade debut is a rip-roaring series opener complete with over-the-top characters and jokes galore. Naidu's black-and-white cartoon illustrations extend the comedy with ongoing commentary that smartly interacts with the prose. The cast of Break Through species--like Audiotooters, Galzorian, and Sanitizoria--have hilariously creative on-the-nose names with illustrations to match. Sky is coded biracial, with a White dad and Indian mom. Aliens appear in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors; Elvis shape-shifts but looks like a brown-skinned boy to Sky. Though the main mystery is neatly wrapped up, the cliffhanger ending promises more laughs.
Contagiously goofy and fun. (Mystery. 8-12)
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Buxbaum, Julie: THE AREA 51 FILES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A709933113/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=744a9c53. Accessed 15 May 2023.
Buxbaum, Julie THE BIG FLUSH Delacorte (Children's None) $14.99 7, 25 ISBN: 9780593429501
A projectile toilet spells danger--and mess--for Area 51 and its residents.
Sky Patel-Baum has had a lot of firsts since moving from boring California to Area 51. The latest first: Her alien bestie's long-lost (read: assumed dead) parents come to visit via UFO with a surprise little brother in tow. Complicated family dynamics abound, and the interstellar visitors warn that the Arthogus (an exiled alien species) are in cahoots with someone on the base to exact their revenge. Their method of destruction: launching a poop-filled space toilet at Area 51. The odds of survival? 13.875%. But who could the double agent be? Sky and friends team up once again to get to the bottom of the latest mystery--and flush the intruder out. Buxbaum's second series entry one-ups its predecessor in ridiculousness, including a bounty of fart puns. The first-person narration allows Sky's infectious personality to shine. Well-placed clues and red herrings help keep the mystery fresh while expanding the setting. The pseudo "Scooby-Doo gang" welcomes a new member in talented hacker Gertie, an astronaut's daughter. Naidu's black-and-white cartoon illustrations effectively punctuate jokes and offer occasional helpful asides. Characters are drawn in a range of skin tones; Gertie reads Black. Another cliffhanger ending makes a key revelation in addition to hinting at the next installment.
Out-of-this-world potty humor with heart among the toots. (recipes) (Mystery. 8-12)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Buxbaum, Julie: THE BIG FLUSH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748974106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e02ac757. Accessed 15 May 2023.