Poised at the Edge Author Interview

Brian Mandabach

First of all, for those who have not yet read OR NOT will you please briefly describe the story and its delightful main character Cassie Sullivan?

Oh, no! That is actually hardest question of all for me to answer. I don't know which is worse, summarizing the story or describing the character. I become intellectually paralyzed.

Okay, here goes: **Lots of typing and deleting and ARGGGHH** because I started to tell about Cassie, but I couldn't begin without "Cassie is blah blah blah . . ." And I was disgusted with myself for being so boring. Then, I had an idea—I'd make a list of statements using only active verbs. I think it tells a little about the story as well as Cassie, though it's not a summary:

Cassie grows her hair.
Cassie reads LORD OF THE RINGS and listens to old records.
She writes poems and stories.
Cassie eats only vegetable foods.
Cassie believes in peace.
And love.
Cassie holds her tongue.
When people strike her, she turns the other cheek.
Cassie wears a tie-dye tank top.
Cassie loves the mountains, fears mountain lions, and hikes at night.
When she's alone, Cassie sometimes sings.
Cassie won't skinny dip with her mom, but she will with her friend Ally.
Cassie chops off her hair.
Cassie sleeps on the third floor, in the pines, and in her tipi.
Cassie watches the clouds blow free from the moon, adores the way DJ's hair falls around his face, and notices the way her teachers watch her.
Cassie kisses DJ, she hugs Ally, and she shrinks back in the crowd.
Cassie sinks into despair.
She thinks it's too hard.
She wants to give up.
But she never will.
Cassie lives in her imagination, dreams a new reality, begins to make it happen.

OR NOT tells her story, in the form of her diary and stories she writes.


Can you explain your initial inspiration for this story, and how it evolved into the story that it became?

Though I've told it before, I'm still hesitant to tell this story: Initially, the story was inspired when a 14-year-old girl in my neighborhood took her own life. I didn't know her, but maybe because I teach that age group and have a daughter of my own, I could not get her out of my head.

Also, I was feeling pretty depressed myself at the time. So, I kept brooding about what would have brought this girl to that point of no return, and I wanted to respond to the feelings that arose in me as a result.

The reason I'm uncomfortable telling the story is that I realize how precious she was to her family and friends. My sister took her own life a year before this. And the pain of any death continues, especially the death of one so young, as long as people cherish the memory. For example, I just found out that her number has been retired from her school's A-squad volleyball team. Forever.

But I want to be clear that OR NOT is fiction, it's not a suicide novel, and Cassie isn't anything like this girl. I consciously avoided learning anything more about her than what I read in her obituary.

Instead, I focused on my own feelings, and I did some research on teen suicide, especially among younger teens. As I wrote every day, filling up the pages of my notebooks, a character began to take shape. She had a family, she had places that she loved, she had a history, and she began to have a story. Over the course of the next few months, I wrote and wrote, getting to know Cassie and her life. Then I was ready to sit down and draft the novel that became OR NOT.



Most of the reviews of OR NOT compliment your ability to create an authentic fourteen-year-old girl voice. How did you do it? Did your job as a middle school teacher play a role in it? Also, did you ever consider making your main character a boy?

If I was successful in capturing Cassie's voice, it's because of the process I talked about in the last question: many hours, weeks, & months of getting to know Cassie before I sat down to write the first draft. Then, it was a couple years of writing and revising, living the story in imagination and language.

Many writers believe that having some obvious distance between yourself and your characters can actually make it easier to create real, believable fiction. But I certainly felt very close to Cassie. She is real to me, and if I've made her real for readers, that makes me feel as successful as if I'd sold a million books.

Observing and listening to my students was a great help. I love my job because, as well as working on reading and writing with teens, I also get to be a small part of their lives. It's deeply enriching, whether you're a writer or not.

My wife once suggested that it would be easier to write the book if Cassie were a boy, but I was like, "Hello!? She's NOT a boy!" ;-)


Cassie experiences a barrage of harassment at her middle school, simply for refusing to conform to the standards of some very gullible bullies. Your depiction of it is both painful and realistic. Are you basing the student's deplorable behaviors on things that you have seen as a teacher?

Yes. Though I haven't seen anything quite like what I wrote, some of the little things really did happen. One of my students, back when I taught 7th grade, was told by a classmate that she was going to hell. Another former student, who's a junior now, was told the same thing this year.

What I see at school usually falls into two categories:
1. The outsider who faces continual rejection and harassment, or
2. The shifting alliances of cliques.

The first is a long-term problem for the victim. Often he or she has some quirk that makes it difficult to respond appropriately in social situations, read social cues, or understand and conform to the unwritten law of the norm. Other kids punish the misfit relentlessly and feel justified in doing so because the misfit's behavior is seen as rude, annoying, and even cruel. Some people are kind to the misfit, but that's difficult to do, both because the behavior really is annoying and because by allying yourself to a rejected person, you also risks being rejected.

The second category is similar in that cliques also punish individuals and see this punishment as just. I remember one group of 8th graders who were very tight. Four girls sat together in the front row of class, and I kept them together—despite the fact that it was hard to get their attention because they were constantly talking. If I'd separated them, it would have been even harder because they would have had to work so hard to stay connected with notes as well as the constant looks, whispers, and sign-language kids use across the room.

Then one day, one of the girls moved to an empty spot in the back of the room. Nobody talked to her. Her BFF from another class left a big pile of the girl's stuff in my classroom because she'd been kicked out of this friend's locker. In a couple of weeks they were all BFFs again. Interestingly, at the time it happened, the "shunned one" seemed to accept her punishment. I never found out what she'd done.



OR NOT has a very interesting stylistic format. Your reasons for making it almost entirely a diary were obvious, what better way to get inside a fourteen-year-old girl's head? But there's also the story that Cassie writes inside the story. Why did you choose to reveal those certain facts, in that format?

When Cassie writes the "Three Sisters" stories, she is feeling hopeless and fatalistic. She is intrigued by the idea that no matter what particular chance events occur, a certain unavoidable conclusion must result.

Now, fatalism, in popular usage, suggests pessimism. But strictly speaking, fatalism means only that the universe is governed by fate, and one might have a very happy, very fortunate fate. In the case of Cassie, it turns out that she had in mind a tragic outcome for her character, but in the inevitability of Fictional Cassie's fate, Real Cassie finds comfort. I'll let you figure out why that is—I've probably already said too much.

Also, Cassie and I are both interested in the relationship between story and reality, how the borders between the two blur in those of us who live our imaginations deeply. Cassie's exercise in artistic freedom in creating fiction—three fictions—runs in seeming contradiction to her professed fatalism. This isn't an accident.


One of Cassie's first major experiences of social rejection came when she tried to discuss the concept of infinity with her (boy band lovin') "best friend." This is the beginning of the kids at her conservative middle school declaring her an atheist and the anti-Christ. As a teacher do you have any solutions to stopping the perpetuation of ridiculous rumors that impact student's lives? There are a lot of terrific YA books right now that deal with this prevalent, relevant subject ( a few I've been talking about lately are STORY OF A GIRL by Sara Zarr, THIRTEEN REASONS WHY by Jay Asher, and EVOLUTION, ME, AND OTHER FREAKS OF NATURE by Robin Brande.)

According to Cassie, the problem is that "people talk, people listen."
I don't see much possibility for change in this. And as a teacher, I'm usually out of the loop. If I do hear things, it's usually with somebody's spin on it.

As I said earlier, groups of people are relentless in their punishment of individuals who don't conform. Individuals also use others for their own purposes. Something like 95 percent of the drama is started by maybe 5 percent of the population. So what can the rest of us do? We try to raise kids who are strong and compassionate, we try to be kind and honest, help our friends and our enemies both, foster a literature that raises consciousness . . .

But some people function at a very low level of consciousness: emotionally, socially, and spiritually. For whatever reasons of innate personality and environmental influence, some people are disordered and sick, and we can pity or blame them or both. Many of these satisfy their psychological needs by a kind of emotional vampirism. Most of us grow strong and wise enough in adulthood to protect ourselves from these people, but when you're young you're more vulnerable.



What do you think about the use of contemporary YA books in the classroom? I think that OR NOT, and so many other books, could spark healthy conversation and debate. If you were going to add some books to your curriculum what would they be?

I agree with you, but I think that the best way to use most contemporary YA books is in literature circles. In small groups where students choose their own books, they don't have the feeling that they are being forced to read. They also get to talk more than in a big class discussion. This can be good or bad, depending on if you actually want to talk!

That said, there is nothing like a really good, full-class discussion of a great book. It takes a special book to get this going, I think, because of the fragmentation that I see even in the relatively homogeneous community where I teach.

To continue in this slightly off-topic direction, I'll say that it's essential to do a balance of independent, small group, and full-class reading. I think my students have a hard time when they go to high school because they are required to read a lot of classics and don't have the kind of choice we tend to give them in middle school. So I'd like to see high school use more YA and give more choice, and I'd like to see middle schools use more classics.

Another issue with contemporary YA—which also relates to the diversity of individuals as well as cultural fragmentation—is that some kids are very innocent for their age, while others are comfortable with very mature subject matter in literature. The trouble with using a lot of the best contemporary YA is that some kids and parents don't approve of it. I wouldn't teach my own book in middle school, and I've had complaints just because I introduced my 8th graders to the book and read a very clean passage. We've also had complaints about Laurie Halse Anderson's CATALYST, even skipping the scene in which the girl's brother is doing something involving a magazine that makes his bed bump loudly against the wall. One parent insisted that her challenge of Garth Nix’s SHADE'S CHILDREN go through even after she moved. She wanted it OUT of the library. She didn't want ANY kid exposed to that filthy book. She also hadn't read enough of it to know that it's actually a triumph of what might be called traditional family values.

What would I like to see added? I don't know. Most of the stuff I like wouldn't be approved for 8th grade. I'd like some suggestions!




Also, who are some of your favorite contemporary YA writers out there?

I really dig Aidan Chambers and want to read more of him. I'm not sure I have any favorites, but I've read and liked Kevin Brooks, Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Ned Vizzini, Rachel Cohn, and David Levithan. I should read more YA, but there is so much I want to read! If you look at my "Incomplete Reading List" for last year, (on my blog) you can see I read a lot of different stuff.

Lastly, what are we going to see from you next?

A novel set in the late 1970's about two couples, four friends, in their junior and senior years of high school. I'm working on revision right now, and hopefully I'll get it all figured out! If not, who knows what you'll see next.


Thanks so much, Melissa! I'd love to add your readers to my myspace friends, and I hope your readers come visit me at www.mandabach.com.