Kathleen Glasgow
speaker
166 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Kathleen Glasgow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I realized that was how I felt when I was 15, even though my mother had been, like, really helpful and supportive and loving to me when I was going through it.
these things and i realized i needed to make charlie that orphaned and alone and i needed to make her an open wound because if anyone did read it any kids if they ever read this book that was how they felt right they had no one yeah especially at that age i feel like
Yeah, you can. You just feel utterly alone. Even if you have people who are saying, I want to help you. Let's get you some therapy. What's going on? And for kids especially, it's very hard to articulate.
what is happening inside them that i think especially is causing them to self-harm they don't know how to say it and they don't want to tell their parents because then they're a disappointment to their parents because then their parents are worried about them so now they've caused a problem or some parents truthfully are not going to be supportive and what they're going to say is
What are you doing to yourself? What is going on? They're not going to say, why are you doing this? And the most important thing is when someone is struggling with something, you need to ask them, not like, why are you doing this? What's wrong with you? You have to ask them, what happened to you? That's the thing. You have to get to the very core, like, what happened to you?
Because something happened. And you have to give kids and people, especially, the place to say what happened without judgment. And sometimes, like, a book is that thing. And then it gives you a language because you see yourself in that experience in the book and you say, oh, my God, someone understands. And sometimes that gives you the language to tell someone, like...
this is me this is me and that can be the thing that helps you hold on and so with girl in pieces when i finally i that's how the book that you're reading today like when i started that draft a year after my mother died and i took everything away from charlie and i made her utterly alone that's the book that you're reading today
So I had a really fun and supportive boss, Julie Schumacher, who's also a novelist. And you should read her books because she's the funniest person I know. They're just hysterical. And she said, what are you doing? You've been like, you're working on this thing. And what is happening? Nothing is happening. What's going on? Can I read it? And I was like, OK, here's like 20 pages.
And she's like, you know, OK. you should go to a writing conference and you should like take a workshop and you should get some feedback. And I was like, well, okay, well. All right. So I went to a writing workshop, the Taos Writers Workshop in New Mexico. And I had this great workshop with these people and the teacher there, Antonia Nelson, was really, they were supportive.
But while I was there, I paid the $50 or whatever so you could have a 20-minute conference with a literary agent. And the agent would have read like your 20 pages and then said, oh, I think this is really great or this is what you need to work on and whatnot. But I ended up getting signed by that agent.
And I didn't know anything about like what it means to sign with a literary agent for a novel because I was a poet and no one cares about us.
It got carried into the next step. Okay. And it was emails. And I was with that agent for three years, and I was continuing to revise the book. And this sometimes happens. Like, the agent was really supportive and nice, but also wanted, I think, to move the book in a different direction that I wasn't comfortable with, like more of,
an adult book and maybe sort of a thriller type of book and to amp up some aspects of the book that I was not comfortable with, like the sexual aspects. And we eventually, you know, my boss again, Julie said, wait, you've been with this agent for three years. What is going on? Is your book being sent out? What is happening? And I was like, no. And she's like, I think it's okay.
And I didn't know this at the time. And I would tell writers this now. So you don't have to stay with an agent for your entire career. Like some people, they move to different agents because maybe you want to write fantasy, but your current agent is like, I don't, I don't do fantasy. Right. Right. It just happens like you evolve and your relationship with your agent evolves.
So I parted ways with that agent and everything was very amicable. And so I went I went on the Internet and I looked up literary agents based on the books that I liked because everyone thanks their agents in the acknowledgements. And I thought, well, if they like that book, they might like mine because it's similar.
And I got, you know, you send it to them and you send like a little excerpt and you describe your book. And I got mostly rejections. Some people never responded at all. Some people responded with, this book is a beautiful book. No one is going to publish this book. They're not going to think this is a suitable subject matter. I don't know where I would place this, like teen or adult. I can't.
Writing is beautiful. I'm sorry. I wish you the best of luck. And then I got this really great email from Julie Stevenson, who is my agent now. And it was really long. And she had notes in the email about small changes she wanted to make to the book. But she also wrote about the book and how she felt reading the book. And she got the book. She understood the book.
And we talked on the phone and we got along right away because I really like people who have kind of a dark sense of humor. And I thought, well, this is the person. And she was the champion for the book. And she had a plan and she knew who to send it to. And she had a timeline. And we worked on it for, I think, maybe two months. And then she sent it out.
And then a week later, we had multiple offers. And some of them were, they were from adult editors and some were from YA editors. And I ended up going with Krista Marino at Delacorte because, again, when I talked to her on the phone, she got the book. Right. Like other editors had said, we're going to, we would probably edit out some of these more graphic descriptions of self-harm.
And I was like, I think those have to be in there because I think that if anyone reads this book and this is happening to them, they need to see those parts. They need to know that like the person who's writing it understands and gets it. And then, you know, the rest is history.
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