In this Q&A series, SLJ poses five questions and a request for a book recommendation to a debut YA author. In the latest installment, Wen-yi Lee shares about The Dark We Know. 

1. Congrats on your YA debut! How would you describe your book to readers?
Thank you! The Dark We Know is a lyrical, somewhat gothic horror inspired by the musical Spring Awakening. It's about an art student who ran away from her haunted mining hometown two years ago after two friends' suicides, but must now reluctantly return for her abusive father's funeral. There, she's reunited with her fraught family as well as her one surviving childhood friend, who claims he needs her help to stop the entity that's actually responsible for the deaths of their friends and other kids in town.

2. What drew you to YA to tell this story?
YA is about coming-of-age, burgeoning identities, starting to envision your future and fighting to start getting there, straddling that tense in-between of childhood trappings and full agency. The age of it also allows such raw and volatile emotions that deserve to be given grace. All of that speaks to where the characters are. I also specifically wanted to be writing to youth mental health and holding them, and my younger self, in that way. 

I was also 21 when I started writing this book, and grew up with the rise of YA, so I was very much still thinking in and influenced by other YAs. I didn’t even consider it anything else until there were some adult publishers who were interested in the book, and there was a lot of talk about it as a crossover title. It’s definitely on the upper end of YA, but it was actually having those conversations that I realized I wanted it to be positioned as a YA title for sure, because that was who I had written it for. On the contrary, my next book actually has a main character younger than the ones in The Dark We Know, but it’s firmly adult—it’s so much about how I handle the themes and who I want the story to be speaking to, and I think if you’re writing YA without specifically having teens in mind then it’s a disservice. As I’m writing both age categories I’ve started considering a lot more carefully what my voice is in each!

3. What, if anything, surprised you while writing it?
Honestly, probably what the process of writing unearthed for myself. There's a lot of undercurrents I didn't realize I was drawing on until I found it pouring out, and I think that's the incredible (vulnerable, painful, cathartic) thing about writing—and writing YA in particular, because a lot of it was old wounds and me writing to and unpicking the tangle  of past experiences. I never share exactly what's personal and what isn't, but there's a lot going on in the book: religious alienation, grappling with queerness, returning to a suffocating childhood home and the old self it represents, grief, trauma, mental health, tense families. The characters and emotional landscape are incredibly messy by necessity, and I think it surprised me how much of it there was.

4. Tell us more about the characters. Which character do you most identify with and why?
The main character is Isadora Chang, a prickly, hyper-independent bisexual girl who comes from a fraught home, has a habit of running away, and has always only been able to rely on her art. She’s very strong but closed-off and haunted, and has repressed a lot of things in order to survive. 

Isa comes back to town and reluctantly reunites with Mason Kane, the pretty boy atheist rebel who sees ghosts. They were in the same group of childhood best friends until the romantic entanglements, external pressures from the small religious town, and queer awakenings of growing up started complicating the group's relationships, culminating in the death of their other two friends. Unlike Isa, Mason has been stuck in town with his guilt and grief all this time, and it's dragged him to a somewhat dark and desperate place.

There's a bit of myself in most of the characters; I think that's how I anchor them and understand them. But I wrote the book from Isa's perspective because I was most drawn to her voice and position in the story. She shares a lot of my own turbulence from the time I wrote the book, and her working it out through the rawness simmering in her art is pretty self-referential; there's a whole other book about art as a conduit for the self, I think.

But also, Trish, Isa's older sister, is my eldest daughter representation. I always have an eldest daughter character somewhere. 

5. What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
That they’re not alone, hopefully, and that there can be better things to come, and that wounds can heal if you give them the space and time and kindness, and that hurt kids still deserve love. That seasons change. 

The Rec: Finally, we love YA and recommendations—what’s your favorite YA book you've read recently?
I got an early look at Zoe Hana Mikuta's The Coven Tendency and it's just the wildest, most unique thing coming out of YA next year. Necromantic witches killing and resurrecting their crushes meets sharp dystopian commentary on spectacle and loss of authenticity. Mikuta has a one-of-a-kind voice and this is the second horror-fantasy from her I've loved.