Author Kathleen Glasgow Reveals Her Secret

Stay Permanent

by Kathleen Glasgow

Hey! I’m going to tell you a secret. Are you ready? Because this is a very special moment between you, the reader, and me, the writer. Here goes. Brace yourself.

I’ve written four books that run the gamut from self-harm to addiction to depression to domestic abuse to parentification to parental death . . . you name it. Readers tell me they sob violently after finishing a book like Girl in Pieces or had to stare at the ceiling for seven hours after closing You’d Be Home Now. I’ve watched countless videos on TikTok of readers with tears streaming down their faces, holding up How to Make Friends with the Dark.

Are you ready for my secret now?

I don’t know if I find my books all that sad. And here’s why.

I was an early and voracious reader who found solace and respite from my real life inside books. I read religiously and beyond my age-level and my mother was a bookworm who sought her own sort of solace in history books and mysteries and together we trudged from the library several times a week, our arms loaded with promise. Quite quickly, I started writing my own stories and poems. It didn’t occur to me that I shouldn’t or couldn’t. I just simply did. Later, in a creative writing class, a very nice fiction professor said, “Start by writing what you know.”

And because I always tried to be a good student and follow the rules (even though I failed much of the time), I did write what I knew. And I guess I’ve never stopped.

I suppose I don’t see my books as sad because the subjects seem, well, normal to me. Some of the things that happen in my books have happened to me in real life. The things that happen in my books happen to people in real life. To my mind, I’m just writing about people and their struggle to live, because I know those people. I’m one of those people. There’s a whole army of us, and we speak the same language of struggle and difficult early lives, and I try to put that language and those experiences as honestly as I can into my books, because you know what?

A lot of people—especially younger people—haven’t found their army, yet. They don’t know that a whole host of people share their struggles; they don’t quite have the language or the courage (yet) to speak their truth. And until they can find their people in real life, well, I’m going to give it to them in a book. So they can have that solace and respite, too. A raft of possibility on choppy water until they spot land.

I keep thinking of a phrase I heard last year in the context of trauma and recovery and why it’s important to keep trying no matter how many times you fall: “You haven’t met everyone who’s going to love you yet.”

I think that’s so beautiful and not the least bit sad, don’t you?

Maybe you haven’t met the book that’s going to understand you, yet. The book that’s going to love you back. The book that’s going to crack your heart and life wide open and whisper to you, I understand. I get it. Whatever that book is, it’s going to tide you over until you meet the people you need to know and love, people who maybe are trying valiantly, like I always have, to stay afloat, stay permanent, not let ourselves get washed away. My books aren’t sad to me because I make sure that by the end, every character who needs it is in a better place, one they’ve worked hard to reach, and they’ve met their army, or at least the beginnings of their army, and they aren’t alone, and they can stay permanent.

P.S. While I might not find my own books sad, this doesn’t mean that I don’t cry when writing them. I cried when Riley did that thing to Charlie with Wendy in Girl in Pieces. I cried when Tiger had to identify her mother in the hospital in How to Make Friends with the Dark. I sobbed when Joey said “I don’t want to live this life anymore” in You’d Be Home Now, and I didn’t want to write for two days after writing the scene with Holly and Bella and Gideon in the shower at Sonoran Sunrise in The Glass Girl. Oh, and page 330 in The Glass Girl. Yeah, that was a breaking point for me and Bella.