The Truth About Fiction

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RM: Many of the people in your work are teenagers and young people. What about them draws your focus?

MT: I just think it comes really naturally to me to write in that voice. I feel like I only started feeling like a grown-up four months ago and I'm thirty-four-years old. So, I can really connect to a teenage voice, a teenage perspective, and a teenage aesthetic. I'm just starting to feel like a grown-up, and it's actually really exciting. But it's definitely a new thing, and it's really natural for me to write in a teenager's voice.

RM: Who inspired the characters Trisha and Rose in your newest book?

MT: Trisha honestly just kind of ended up happening. I didn't plan for Trisha to be who she is. I was going to write in the first person and have the narrator be a fourteen-year-old girl, but I didn't expect her to be Trish. I thought she was going to be more girly, not somebody who is uncomfortable with femininity. Trish just kind of came out on her own in that really cool and mysterious way that I have heard fiction writers talk about -- having their characters write themselves -- which I kind of never believed. I thought they were lying. But actually, she just came out, and it was really awesome. And Rose, Rose is kind of based on a million different people. Rose is kind of based on a girl who I knew when I was thirteen who was really mysterious and wild. She's based on my very first girlfriend. She's all these different people. I just feel like I'm really attracted to that relationship between the girl who's kind of scared, or shy, or withdrawn, or not worldly, and the girl who's really wild. I saw that movie Times Square when I was about twelve years old, and it was my favorite movie. And I think that dynamic between the two characters in that movie really marked me.

RM: Why did you choose to tell this particular coming-of-age story?

MT: I wanted to tell the story of a teenager. I wanted it to have a working-class environment that was based on and inspired by the city of Saugus in Massachusetts that neighbors the town I grew up in. ... And everything just evolved on its own in a really great way. I didn't even have a chapter outline when I sat down. I felt very much in the dark about what the plot was or even what I was doing. And it all came together. It was my first try at fiction, so I wanted to hold on to some of the themes that I know well and that I'm inspired by because I felt like I was going into totally unknown territory writing fiction. I wanted to keep something familiar, so that's why I stuck with the kind of aesthetic and characters.

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