In all this pondering, I recently came to a revelation. I believe, having lived forty something years (and the elders among us can dispute this), that my strongest emotions, those that made me wildest with grief or most ecstatic with joy, were ones I had as a teenager or young adult. Lots of things have happened to me as an adult (I would say I became an adult after about the age of 25), the death of my mother and sister, the marriage to the man of my dreams, the birth of my child, but those were all things I somehow instinctively knew how to process. Things that happened in my youth, sexual abuse, parental violence, the divorce of my parents (twice), the radical change in my body from girl to girl with breasts, my first love, these were all things I wasn't equipped to handle.
Because I didn't have the tools to understand what was going on around me, or happening inside me, my emotions tended to be extreme and extraordinary. I think, in a way, I'm still processing the emotions I had as a young person. The events of that time will forever shape me. That is why I keep returning to young people in my books, writing from their perspective. Because, in a way, I think if I can figure it out, even a little piece of the puzzle, the truth of hormones, the savageness of young love, maybe, just maybe I can help one reader through what to me are the strongest emotions they will ever have in their lives.
Surviving sisters in glasses.