I’m delighted to have author Cynthia Hand join us on the blog today to share about her latest release The How & The Why.
The How and the Why by Cynthia HandPublished by HarperTeen on November 5, 2019
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary
Pages: 464
Format: Hardcover
Today Melly had us writing letters to our babies…
Cassandra McMurtrey has the best parents a girl could ask for. They’ve given Cass a life she wouldn’t trade for the world. She has everything she needs—except maybe the one thing she wants. Like, to know who she is. Where she came from. Questions her adoptive parents can’t answer, no matter how much they love her.
But eighteen years ago, someone wrote Cass a series of letters. And they may just hold the answers Cass has been searching for.
Interview with Cynthia Hand
Tell us a little about yourself and how you became an author.
I starting writing stories from about the time I could hold a pencil in my tiny hand. I grew up in Idaho, and one of the first stories I remember writing was about a witch (this was around Halloween time) who is walking through the woods and happens upon two bull elk fighting, charging each other and clashing horns. Not that two elk belonged in my witch story at all, but looking back, it strikes me that I was already trying to write to capture my world, even at a young age. My teachers always told me I was going to be a writer someday, and I believed them. I kept writing. In high school I wrote fan fiction with my friends. In college I was pre-law, but I snuck in extra writing classes on the side. During my senior year I decided to scrap the idea of becoming a lawyer and study writing, instead. I got into a graduate program in creative writing, where I learned to write literary fiction. My agent read one of my early published literary short stories and offered to represent me, which was like suddenly being given a writing fairy godmother. And I have pretty much been writing professionally ever since.
What inspired you to write The How & The Why?
I’m adopted, something that my parents told me about from the time that I was little. When I was nineteen I went on a journey to discover the identity of my birth parents, not because I was seeking a new family or unhappy with the amazing parents that I had, but because I was curious, and I wanted to know, on some psychological level, anyway, who I was. It was a wild goose chase in the end, and I never did find out who my birth parents were. But the experience of that search has always stayed with me, and it felt natural to write about adoption as a way of figuring it out for myself. That said, THE HOW & THE WHY is not autobiographical.
Did you do any research for it? What surprised you the most during the writing process?
I did tons of research. I always do, for every book I write. For THE HOW & THE WHY I spent some time at the Marian Pritchett school in Boise, Idaho, which is a school for pregnant teens. It used to be called the Booth house, one of the homes around the country run by the Salvation Army that housed unwed mothers. The history of that place is fascinating—it started as a big farmhouse on the edge of town where pregnant women came to hide away, and then became a lying-in hospital, where they stayed and had their babies, transitioned into a high school where they could also live until their babies were a year or two old, and is now a school with an on-site daycare. I wrote about the very last year that girls were living at the school.
I was surprised by how emotional it was for me, even simply doing the research. My own birth mother stayed at the Booth House in the late seventies, and in some ways walking those halls felt like chasing her shadow.
If you could spend a day with any of the characters, who would it be and what would you do?
I would spend the day with Nyla, Cass’ best friend, driving around in Bernice, her big grandma car, and listening to her sing country music.
Why did you decide to tell this story through alternating perspectives? How would the story be different without one or the other?
I liked the idea that there were connections between Cass and S that neither were aware of, ways that their stories intersected and traits and experiences that they unknowingly shared. The only way to show those invisible threads was to look at it from both angles. It ended up bringing a nice balance to the story. If I’d just written about S, we would never know what happened to her baby. And if I’d only written about Cass, we wouldn’t be able to see where she came from. I was surprised, though, S’s side came way more easily to me when I was writing than Cass’s did. Maybe it was because I could draw on my own experience as a young person in the year 2000, which is when S is living out her side of the story, and I have two kids, so I know what it’s like to worry about bringing a baby into the world. I connected with Cass, too, of course, but writing from her point of view was more difficult, maybe because it made me ask myself some difficult questions about how I felt about my adoption.
What are the top five books on your reading list?
My recent favorites are A Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson, The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi, Refugee by Alan Gratz, and The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on the next book of the Jane series with my co-authors, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows, which is called MY CONTRARY MARY, about Mary, Queen of Scots, and am writing my next solo novel, which takes place in Hawaii, so that’s been a fun world to go into every day.
Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
My next solo book (after THE HOW & THE WHY) won’t be out until Spring 2021, but I do have one coming out sooner in the Jane series: MY CALAMITY JANE, which comes out June 2, 2020. It’s a wild, wild west novel about Martha Canary (AKA Calamity Jane) and Annie Oakley. So stay tuned for that!
Thank you for sharing with us, Cynthia!
Leave a Reply