Peter Rock’s My Abandonment was one of the winners of the 2010 Alex Award. The novel tells the story of Caroline and her father who live more than off the grid in Portland Oregon’s Forest Park.
Congratulations on receiving the Alex Award for My Abandonment. This awards recognizes books published for adults which are appealing to teens. Did you consider a teen audience while you were writing it?
I’m delighted if a teen audience is drawn to the book and can sympathize with its narrator, Caroline. That said, I wrote the book because I was very curious about where it would go; I don’t really think about “audience,” I just try to get inside and follow. The kind of storytelling that appeals to me, I think—full of adventure and mystery, not so worried about demonstrating how “smart” the author is—is a kind that would hopefully include teen readers. I believe that younger readers are more willing to engage, to go deep inside a book, and that fascinates me; I remember the wonder I felt, reading when I was younger. Sometimes now I can get back to it. That’s why I read, and why I write.
Several of your novels feature teen characters; what do you think draws you to characters in this age group?
Because I am really immature? Honestly, I think this fact about my books is less by choice than by chance. Which is to say that this focus has chosen me? One thing that has drawn me is that I see adolescence as this very important time—we’re at once free of our parents’ control in many ways, trying to figure out how to understand the world on our own, and we’re also generally free of some of the adult responsibilities (such as employment). So it’s a period of great testing of boundaries, of finding identity, of wondering. Also, I liked being that age and remember how invigorated and confused I was.
In your acknowledgments, you thank three young women from whose lives you drew inspiration. How do you manage the balance of honoring their stories while creating your fiction? (By the way, I’m not going to name the women since I made the mistake of looking at the acknowledgements before I finished reading, and it gave away something of the story.)
Writing fiction based on or inspired by actual people or events is not something I’ve often done. Not until recently. It’s tricky. Whether or not I’ve “honored” them is probably up to them to determine, not me. It is a concern, however; I guess my hope is that what comes through is that I have a great fascination and curiosity and wonder about these stories, and that I’m pursuing them out of a desire to exhaust that curiosity, to exercise and exorcise it? For instance, in My Abandonment, the “true” story of Caroline and her father is very limited, there is very little known, and then they simply disappeared (one reason I wrote the book—to “figure out” where they’d gone, what had happened to them, and also who they were). So the great majority of the novel departs in almost every particular and detail, every twist and turn from what happens. Did this actual girl (her name was Ruth) have a toy horse, a blue ribbon, did she love libraries? Probably not. People have often asked me what I would do if I encountered this girl, what I would say. I thi
