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In this exclusive essay, YA author extraordinaire David Levithan talks about how he came to write a story based on the theme of "love is love" in his latest book, Every Day--our September Best Teen Book of the Month spotlight pick.A Similar Kind of Love Song
Recently I was reading an interview
in OUT magazine with Romy Madley
Croft, the lead singer of the band the xx. Croft, talking about coming out,
told the reporter, "If I was singing about a guy, I would probably be singing a
similar kind of love song, really." And I was struck that the same thing applied
to my writing"”especially with my new book, Every
Day.
Every Day is about A, who wakes up each
morning in a different body and a different life. It's not giving anything away
to say that in the first chapter, A falls in love with a girl name Rhiannon . .
. and that their relationship is rather complicated.
So
there I was"”a gay man, writing from the point of view of a character who is
neither gay or straight, male or female. A has no inherent race, no inherent
religion. A has grown up without friends, without family. A is purely a self.
Whereas I, in my culturally and societally constructed life, am not.
It should have been hard to write as A, but it wasn't. Because I found that, no
matter which body A was in, I was singing a similar kind of love song.
Ever since Boy Meets Boy, my first novel,was published, I've received thousands of letters and emails from readers. Some of the most interesting ones have been from people who were surprised that
they, non-gay or non-male, identified so deeply with the love story. Love is love, more than one reader wrote
to me. And I thought, yes, that's it exactly. (I almost want to put it as a tip
on my website, for all those students who write to me telling me their teacher
has assigned them to identify the central theme in my work. Well, there it is.
Love is love.)
In
Every Day, I wanted to look at that
theme from a variety of angles. I wanted to test that theme, and find its
limitations. Where A starts in Every Day
is where many of my other characters"”my will grayson in Will Grayson, Will Grayson, for example"”reach at the end of my
other novels. That is, they recognize that in order to love and be loved, they
must be true to themselves. A is always true in this way. Writing A made me
realize that this is one of the more helpful questions you can ask about
love"”if I were truly myself, only myself, and not a gender, and not a sexual
orientation, and not a race, and not any other external designation . . . what
would I want? What would I do?
A
gets to live this ideal. But Rhiannon, who doesn't change bodies, is challenged
to match it. This is the great conflict in the book, and informs one of the
questions I posed to myself as I wrote it: Does love indeed conquer all? Or, in
other words, does our world always allow love to be love?
Again,
I come back to that phrase "a similar kind of love song." I like that she
doesn't make them the same. I like that they're similar. There are certainly
different challenges, at some times, in some places, with a gay love story. I
often try to illuminate that experience in my writing. But there are also the
same universal emotions. Joy is joy. Fear is fear. Vulnerability is
vulnerability. Just like music is music, writing is writing, and love is love.
