Jessica Leader has gone where few adults would dare to go: back to seventh grade.
If diving into the emotional lives of 13-year-old girls sounds as dangerous as swimming with sharks, Leader is living proof that you can go home again and emerge unscathed.
Her debut novel, “Nice and Mean,” published by Simon & Schuster's Alladin MIX imprint, is aimed at tweens who may be more tech-savvy than previous generations, but who still have to deal with the social minefields of the middle-school cafeteria.
“Adults either say, ‘I would love to read that' or they say ‘I don't know if I could read that because I'm still there,'” said Leader, a 34-year-old New York City native who has lived in Louisville's Clifton neighborhood since 2004. “There's a way in which many people still feel that 12- or 13-year-old side of themselves.”
“Nice and Mean” tells the story of two very different students in a competitive New York City public high school who are forced to team up for a school video project.
Marina is a well-styled popular girl, glib and self-confident, both feared and loved. Sachi, the daughter of Indian immigrants, is smart, frumpy and invisible at school. Sachi is nice; Marina is mean.
Marina feels abandoned by her friends, who all joined the cast of the school production of “Grease” without her, and Sachi told a big fat lie to her overprotective parents to skip prep sessions for a high school admissions test in order to take the video class. Each has her own agenda for the project — Marina wants to humiliate her best friend/enemy with a fashion victim exposé, while Sachi hopes to spread multicultural understanding and probe the philosophical and intellectual underpinnings of popularity.
Needless to say, they don't get along.
Fans of the glitzy “Gossip Girl” books and television series and the 2004 film “Mean Girls” might look forward to this book for Marina alone, but Leader wants to ensure that the “nice” half of the book gets as much attention.
“It could be easy to see this book as being about mean girls, but niceness is something that deserves to be interrogated, too,” she said. “While it can be a wonderful thing for people on the receiving end, it can be a double-edged sword for the nice person. They could be sacrificing a lot in order to smooth the way for others.”
The book is told from the point of view of both characters, in alternating chapters that are introduced with pages from Marina's snarky diary and Sachi's imaginary screenplays. Sachi seems to have the more complex family problems and pressures, but Leader felt a special affinity for her mean queen bee.
“There's an extra delight in writing Marina,” confessed Leader, who will read from “Nice and Mean” at 7 p.m. Friday at the Hurstbourne Borders. “She says the things you think in your nastiest moments but would never say. I kind of enjoyed channeling that onto the page.”
The breakfast club
Leader's years as a middle school English and drama teacher (she taught at St. Francis of Goshen as well as in New York), with all the angst and drama she witnessed, gave her plenty of emotional material to write for an age level for which she feels a great tenderness.
“Your subject matter is out in front of you every day,” she said. “You're always seeing the little heartbreaks and the little moments that are leveraged into something so big.”
Leader's editor knew she was falling in love with “Nice and Mean” when she found herself reading manuscript passages aloud to other people.
“‘Nice and Mean' was so organically funny, and extremely authentic to the way a 12- or 13-year-old thinks without being didactic or cliché,” said Kate Angelella of Simon & Schuster. “Jessica brings the drama to her characters' lives, and readers will relate.”
Though Angelella was convinced by Marina's believable voice that Leader had been a mean girl in a previous life, Leader claims she was neither all nice nor all mean as a middle schooler. As an adult, however, both experiences felt real enough to her to write authentically in both girls' voices.
“I've felt all of those things keenly,” Leader said “I've felt the annoyance when things don't go my way, and I've felt the insecurity of being around people who feel entitled to run things their way and struggled to figure out what to do about it.
“Adults are much better able to cope with the slings and arrows of social interactions, but I think that many of us at times feel an insane desire for vengeance. Many of us sometimes feel like hiding in the corner. I don't feel like any of those mindsets were too much of a stretch.”
A graduate of the writing for children and young adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Leader now teaches playwriting for middle and high schoolers via Actors Theatre of Louisville. Leader, whose first play was produced while she was still in high school, said writing novels for middle schoolers was a surprisingly natural switch.
“The conversations are what drive it,” she said. “In novels for adult readers, there's more internal reflection and description. As a playwright, you're not doing so much of that. (Tween fiction) felt like a parallel art form, one in which the conversations are the action.”
Wait, no vampires?
The American Booksellers Association recently included “Nice and Mean” on its 2010 Children's IndieNext List of recommended books, which is distributed to independent booksellers across the nation. If you're out of braces, “Nice and Mean” might not make your summer reading list, but for the coveted tween set, books that focus more on the social lives of their peers than on historical fiction or family stories are increasingly relevant.
“It's more a book about kids and their peers, not about their parents,” Leader said. “I don't think parents figure prominently or subtly in a tween's or a teenager's emotional landscape. On the peer level, they're constantly renegotiating things, forming new identities and learning new skills. They're not only thinking about their friends, they're thinking, what do people think about my friendships? Do they make me look good or bad? It's this bird's-eye view of the world, and they're seeing everyone in their class and their place in it.”
Leader pinpoints her readers as a little younger than the protagonists, with fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders being the main audience.
With the explosion of titles like “Gossip Girl” and genre fiction like “Twilight” aimed at tweens, it seems almost quaint to come across new work that doesn't include an undead boyfriend or a suite at the Four Seasons. But when Leader started writing “Nice and Mean” in 2004, she didn't know what was on the horizon. Adding a werewolf sidekick might have put “Nice and Mean” on the cutting edge, but Leader wanted to stay true to her original vision.
“Following trends can backfire, and sometimes it shows,” she said.
Nor did she set out to change the world in which these girls would live. Even when the story is resolved, there's no evidence that Marina and Sachi will overcome their personal differences and social ranks to become best friends.
“I wasn't trying to make it a manual for girl empowerment,” Leader said. “I really wanted to write something that felt real. The characters aren't going to start integrating their lunch tables in the end. That just wouldn't happen.”
