Words matter. These are the best Becky Albertalli Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I read, I don’t need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don’t need to have my heart broken. I don’t need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don’t need to swoon.
It’s so easy as a teen to feel like everybody is having this normal experience – except you. You’re on the outside.
‘Simon’ was always a word-of-mouth book. When it came out in 2015, I don’t know that anybody thought that ‘Simon’ could be mainstream. Publisher Harper Collins loved it in-house, but it wasn’t a lead title. Nobody is more surprised than me that it’s a film. It’s the little book that could.
Fat has a range of experiences.
There are so many kinds of normal.
Love is bumping along together with the people in your life and making mistakes and trying to make them right by virtue of the fact that these are people you actually love; you care about them enough to muddle through it with them.
There are so many different environmental factors for just how safe it is for a kid to come out.
One of the things that ‘Love, Simon’ is doing that hasn’t been done before is it’s a gay teen rom-com with a mainstream wide release and the backing of a studio that previous gay rom-coms have not had. I’m really excited by that.
As a psychologist, I’m painstakingly careful not to borrow my clients’ stories for my fiction – but in a general sense, I’m very much inspired by all the teenagers I’ve been lucky enough to know and work with.
My book, ‘Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda,’ is a gay love story. It’s also a story about friendship. Quite honestly, it’s also probably a 320-page product placement for Oreos.
I’m very much a people-pleaser, and with a book out, I had to learn that you can’t please everybody with your book.
I’ve been fat since fourth grade and bullied for it, but I still knew I couldn’t represent every kids’ experience.
There is no universal gay experience. All stories are relevant, and all stories are needed.
It’s really important to me to follow the kinds of conversations that happen around diversity and representation and writing inclusive books.
What I need, as a reader, is a character with a heart and a voice and a pulse. I need a character so vivid and so specific that she doesn’t feel like fiction.
I am a psychologist. That’s my training.
I don’t set up screenings. I can barely plan my kid’s birthday party.
From a plot perspective, what I finally found for my touchstone was that I consider ‘Upside’ to be a loose telling of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma,’ or ‘Clueless.’
I’ve worked a lot with kids who identify as LGBTQ or gender nonconforming, and they are unquestionably some of the bravest people I’ve ever met.
The Internet and social media can really be life-saving for some kids.
‘Simon’ was such a charmed experience.
I lived in the D.C. area for eight years.
