Pamela Erens’ three works of literary fiction for adults share a delicious gravity, a patient attention to the protagonist’s inner world. The surrounding life circumstances form a controlled chaos that Erens carefully orchestrates with crisp pacing and a fierce, lyrical eye. My eyebrows shot up when I learned that Erens had devoted her unmistakable narrative voice to the story of a sixth grader in her debut middle-grade novel, Matasha (IgKids).

Erens writes with compassion for her characters, but that doesn’t stop her from taking a cold, hard look at what’s happening to them. How would a child’s world look when filtered through Erens’ meticulous lens? The result is the best kind of middle-grade novel. Erens pushes the reader to pump imagination between and beyond the story lines. Matasha’s adventures, both inner and outer, make for an “all-ages show,” an invitation to step up and go deep at the same time.

Matasha chronicles a challenging year—1975-1976-- in the life of eleven-year-old Matasha Wax, who suffers from a growth hormone deficiency. “She was no bigger than most of the third graders at her school,” writes Erens in her first novel for young people.  The diagnosis and treatment of this condition are central in the story arc but layered by Matasha’s parents’ consideration of adopting a child from Vietnam.  

And then there are friend problems. What middle schooler escapes these? Matasha both understands and is utterly bewildered by the actions of the people she loves. She stands in the hallway, turning doorknobs: what she wants to know, what she doesn’t know, and the saddest part, what she wishes she didn’t know. –Boo Trundle

Trundle, a writer and artist as well as a longtime friend of Erens, interviewed her about writing Matasha, setting a novel for young adults in Chicago and the challenges of writing for a new audience for The National Book Review.

Q: How did you land on Matasha as the central character of this story? Did you set out to write for younger readers or did your imagination take you there by surprise?

A: I originally wrote Matasha for National Novel Writing Month—you know, where you challenge yourself to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I thought it would be fun to write a children’s novel, since I hadn’t ever tried that and didn’t have any preconceptions about it. I decided to set it during the Seventies, when I was a kid, so it would be easier to be accurate about the kid details. I wanted my protagonist to be eleven or twelve—any younger would have limited her perceptions and vocabulary too much—and that age, in my life, had been the time when the Vietnam War ended. I had the idea of a girl whose mother wants to adopt a refugee orphan from Vietnam and that was about it. I didn’t even have a name for the girl—it popped into my head as I wrote the brief scene where strangers wonder why she has an odd name and Matasha has to explain it. Everything about the book came about like that, on the fly.

Q: How fantastic (and fascinating) that this project grew out of NaNoWriMo. I hope you let the organization know, so they can add it to the growing list of published novels that start out this way. Did the fast-paced, no-turning-back process inspire any new craft strategies or surprises?

A: Matasha was my first major experience of discovering plot as I wrote. With my previous novels, I’ve always known the end before I start, at least its basic parameters. With Matasha, I had no idea. That unknowingness was invigorating, actually.

Q: Maybe that explains the fresh and concrete energy on every page. I can feel Matasha leading you along. My impression is that you like to park yourself in the center of your character’s head and translate the world for the benefit of the reader and maybe yourself. Do you get relief from transferring your intense focus onto an imaginary life? How was it different to inhabit the consciousness of an eleven-year-old?

A: Definitely part of the pull of writing fiction is the chance for me to get inside the brain of a different person and see how the world unfolds for him or her. When it happens successfully, it is a wonderful vacation from self.

That said, writing any character paradoxically requires a kind of double consciousness. There’s the consciousness you’re channeling, that of the character, and then there’s your own consciousness, which can see more than the character can. With Matasha, there was a special kind of gap between the two consciousnesses, given that one belonged to a child and one belonged to an adult (me). It’s very easy to condescend to children, both in life and in writing. I wanted to take Matasha’s thoughts and feelings absolutely seriously. But I also needed to stay outside her enough to show what she can’t possibly (yet) understand. 

Q: I’ve noticed in your other novels that you don’t make it easy on your protagonists. Matasha is no exception. She has a deep fear (like many people I know) of getting shots, and it looks like shots might be a part of her unavoidable destiny. The alternative is getting trapped in a child’s body when the girls around her are catapulting into puberty, long legs, and the great beyond. This is a dark quandary for a kid this age. How did you settle on Matasha’s condition and how did it affect the choices you made with the other characters?

A: I don’t remember how I came up with it, but it was very early on, and it just felt right. I remember my own late tween and early teen years as being the time when I began to worry about how I measured up against other kids and to fear being found unsatisfactory. Becoming a teen is so much about that: the comparing, the competition. Matasha having a growth hormone deficiency concretized that reality; she literally is “lower” than her classmates. This became a way to explore that fear of being not quite right somehow. And once that was on the page it opened up lots of possibilities for scenes—Matasha fighting with her parents about whether or not she has to have treatment, the somewhat slapstick visit to the doctor’s office (which I had fun with), classmates being nasty to her for being different.

Q: I could tell you were having fun. In fact, this book is the funniest of your novels so far, at least by my reckoning. I chuckled at Matasha’s mishaps with the advice columnist, her tortured relationship with her bunny, and the way she reaches to establish her intellectual heft. For example, when she mentions that she and her friend are trading Studs Terkel books in the seventh grade. Is Matasha based on anyone you knew or know? Did you feel looser writing from a child’s point of view?

A: I think the book is funny, so thank you for thinking so too! For me the humor is in that gap I talked about before, between Matasha’s consciousness and an adult consciousness. It’s a very fond humor, and I hope that comes off. Matasha borrows certain qualities from me but she is really totally her own person and different than I was as a kid. She’s tougher than I was.

So, about Studs Terkel— I had two different friends in middle school who were much more sophisticated readers than I was. They would be reading or talking about some book or other, so I would go read it too. And one of those books was Studs Terkel’s Working, which is simply scores of people Terkel interviewed talking about the jobs they did. Mostly Chicago-area people, by the way. It fascinated me as much as any novel did. I still have my battered red-and-black mass market copy.

Q:  Your friends were way ahead of mine. We passed around horror and romance paperbacks. But Matasha is not your average pre-teen. She lives in a rarified and wealthy atmosphere in a big city, Chicago. I gather from the passionate and intimate descriptions of her bus rides and outings that you grew up there. How is this book a love letter to that city? What do you hope your readers will gain from getting this closer look at Chicago through your (young) eyes?

A: I did grow up in Chicago. I have mostly lived elsewhere since my mid-teens, so my memories have been pretty vividly preserved and are now draped with nostalgia. The Chicago I see when I go to visit family isn’t the same Chicago that exists in my mind. That Chicago is all about expanses: a very large, spread-out, flat, almost empty place. Long, wide streets. Lots of gray—gray buildings, gray sidewalks, gray sky. There’s something in that sensory memory, however unreal, that is very pleasurable. Being a city kid, and a city kid during a less parentally protective time, was very freeing.

You mentioned the buses—by a certain age, nine or ten, we kids got around by ourselves, our parents weren’t always driving us places. If you wanted to go somewhere you could figure out how to get there yourself on the bus. Among the things I’d like readers to enjoy in the book is this liberty, this feeling of being a kid back before helicoptering and social media. There were dangers to that type of childhood, of course. And there are dangers to today’s dominant form of childhood. Kids are much more anxious now, it seems, because their parents (I include myself) teach them to be so, and because via the Internet they know even more about the world than the very inquisitive Matasha does.

Q: You do capture the reality of life before the “information highway,” when we relied on maps, letter-writing, reference books, and brochures by mail. Your historical details are intrinsic and dimensional. Is this a result of experience or research, or a combination of the two? I am specifically curious about the boy who goes missing and the process of adopting a child from Vietnam. But also, I would love to hear about any other research adventures that were particularly inspiring.

A: Thank goodness, no kid ever disappeared from my neighborhood when I was growing up. Not that I knew of. But it was the kind of thing that as a city kid you thought about as a possibility from time to time. When I was only eight or nine, I was in the park one afternoon with our housekeeper and my little brother. I got mad about something and told the housekeeper I was walking home by myself. And I stalked off! I knew the way back to our apartment; it was about twenty minutes from the park. And I swear to God that as I was waiting for a streetlight to change, a creepy woman walked up to me and asked if I wanted to come away with her. I am not making this up! I was spooked, but not as much as you might think. I knew I wasn’t going with her and I knew I was going to get myself home. Of course, my mother was extremely upset when she found out from the housekeeper what I’d done. That was the last time I tried that.

I did do research about the end of the Vietnam War and the refugee crisis. I have a friend, exactly my age, who was on one of those boats fleeing with her family from Saigon while I was comfortably reading Studs Terkel in my bedroom. Maybe that’s where I got the original idea for Matasha’s plot. I spoke to her about her experiences and got some ideas from her for further research. Another thing I did was go to the Paley Center for Media in New York City and watch some TV programming from 1975 and 1976 about the Vietnam War. I also watched commercials and shows to bring back the feel of that time. It was amazing! The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was a great resource. I watched an episode in which Joan Rivers was a guest. She made some joke, which everyone found hilarious, the point of which was the crazy idea of women doctors. (I think it had something to do with turkey thermometers.) I mean, wow. The seventies really were a long time ago.

Q: Yes, “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.” Advertising is less of a side note now, and more the main attraction. I bet it was soothing to immerse yourself in the “media of yore.” What happens next? Both in Matasha’s life and yours?

A. Well, I don’t want to give away the end of the book, but we both know she’s off on a new adventure just now. As for me, I’ve finished a new book on George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, for Ig Publishing’s Bookmarked series. It’s a meditation on my all-time favorite novel and an exploration of how it shaped me as a person and a writer. It comes out next February. In the meantime, I’m noodling with some new fiction and praying that in-person yoga classes resume soon.

Boo Trundle’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Prairie Schooner, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Nervous Breakdown, Atticus Review, and other publications. Her e-book, Seventies Gold, is available on Amazon. Her stories have taken her to many stages including The Nantucket Project, The ConnectFour Ideas Festival, Listen to Your Mother, and the Jersey Storytellers Project. Her visual art and writings can be found at bootrundle.com.