He tells me to pick the music. Iām not sure if he knows that handing me his iPod is like handing me the window to his soul.
You can't just like Harry Potter. You have to be balls-out obsessed with it.
And the rain makes a kind of curtain, which is probably for the best. Because all of a sudden, I'm leaning over the gear stick, and my hands are on his shoulders, and I'm trying to keep breathing.
And sometimes that's just what happens. People grow apart.
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.
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.
The Internet and social media can really be life-saving for some kids.
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.
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.
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.'
'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.
