SOURCE CITATION
"Laurie Halse Anderson." Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 39. Gale Group, 2001.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photo provided by Penguin Young Readers Group.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Laurie Halse Anderson became a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award with her first work of fiction for young adults, Speak. That 1999 novel won an array of honors for Anderson, the author of three earlier picture books for younger readers, for its searing portrayal of a fourteen-year-old girl who becomes mute after a sexual assault. Nancy Matson, writing for CNN.com, hailed Anderson as "a gifted new writer whose novel shows that she understands (and remembers) the raw emotion and tumult that marks the lives of teenagers."
Anderson was born October 23, 1961, in the northern New York town of Potsdam. Her father was a Methodist minister who wrote poetry on the side, and as a girl Anderson loved to play with his typewriter. She once commented, "I decided to become a writer in second grade. My teacher, Mrs. Sheedy-Shea, taught us how to write haiku. The giant light bulb clicked on over my head: `Oh, my goodness! I can do this!' I hope every second grader learns how to write haiku. After Mrs. Sheedy-Shea got me writing poetry, I spent hours and hours and hours reading every book in my school library." Anderson added: "The books took me everywhere--ripping through time barriers, across cultures, experiencing all the magic an elementary school library can hold."
One book in particular that Anderson loved as a girl was Heidi, Johanna Spyri's classic tale about a little Swiss girl who is taken from her grandfather's mountain home and sent to live in the city as companion to a wealthy, disabled girl. In later years, Anderson was strongly influenced by James Joyce's classic 1939 novel Finnegan's Wake. "I read this as I was struggling to find my own writing voice. It cracked open the sky above my head. I won't pretend to understand all of it, but I return to it over and over, hungry for Joyce's words," she noted in a submission to the "The Book That Changed My Life" page of the Publishers Weekly Web site.
In Speak, the narrator finds herself viciously ostracized by her peers, and Anderson recalled enduring her own traumatic experiences with high school cliques in Syracuse, New York. "I started ninth grade as a 'dirt bag,'" Anderson said in an interview for The Book Bag that is posted on the bookreport.com Web site. "We moved to a new school district, and the dirt bags/wastecases were the people willing to forgive my unfashionable clothes and relative poverty." But Anderson joined the swim team and ran track, and her high-school experience eventually became more enjoyable. For her senior year, she took part in an exchange program with Denmark, where she lived on a pig farm and learned to speak Danish. After attending Onondaga County Community College in 1981, Anderson began studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., earning a degree in languages and linguistics in 1984. By this point in her life, she had married Gregory H. Anderson, and would spend the rest of the decade as a wife and mother to two young daughters. While raising her family, Anderson also worked as reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and as a freelance magazine writer and editor.
Anderson's first picture book was Ndito Runs. Illustrated by Anita Van der Merwe, it was published in 1996. The story depicts a typical morning's journey for Ndito, a Kenyan girl whose path to school traverses some of her country's characteristically stunning landscape. Ndito imagines herself as the various animals she encounters, such as the crane and the dik-dik. Anderson also wrote a second picture book that appeared in 1996. Turkey Pox is illustrated by Dorothy Donohue. The story follows Charity, a youngster girl who looks forward to spending the Thanksgiving holiday with her beloved grandmother. But in their haste to depart Charity's harried family does not take notice of her face. It is only when they are in the car that they realize she has awoken that day with a case of chicken pox. The discovery forces them to return home, and a snowstorm further complicates matters. The disconsolate Charity is cheered when her intrepid Nana arrives, having hitched a ride with snowplowers and bringing along her roasted turkey. The family then decorates the bird with cherries to resemble poor Charity's face.
Anderson has also written another story about Charity and her busy family. No Time for Mother's Day, published in 1999, finds the girl confounded by the holiday and what she might give her mother as a present. After following her parent around on a very busy Saturday, Charity realizes what her mom really needs is a day of peace and quiet. "[T]he message about modern life and how to make it just a bit simpler should hit close to home," wrote Ilene Cooper in Booklist.
Speak Inspired by a Dream
Speak, Anderson's first book aimed at teenage readers, was also published in 1999. Its inspiration came from a bad dream that woke the author one night in the summer of 1996. She had been plagued by nightmares all of her life, Anderson explained in an article for the ALAN Review. "Since I can't afford extensive psychotherapy, I write down my nightmares. . . . After an hour of scribbling in my journal or pounding the keyboard, the most horrific night-vision is reduced to a pile of sentences. And I can go back to sleep." On that night in 1996, Anderson was roused by the sound of a girl crying. Upon checking on her daughters and finding them undisturbed, she realized it had all been a dream. Wide-awake by then, she went to her desk to write, but could still hear the girl's sobbing in her head. "Once the word processor blinked awake, she stopped," Anderson wrote in the ALAN Review. "She made a tapping noise and blew into a microphone. `Is this thing on?' she asked. 'I have a story to tell you.' That is how I met Melinda Sordino, the protagonist of Speak."
Melinda recounts her tale in short chapters, and Speak is divided into the four marking periods of a school year. As it opens, Melinda's first day of high school is off to a disastrous start. No one will sit next to her on the bus, and the other students make derisive remarks about her when they are not shunning her completely. As the story unfolds, Melinda reveals the reason behind the ostracism: at an end-of-summer drinking party hosted by a group of older students, she drank too much and was sexually assaulted by a popular senior. A call made to 911 from the house brought the police, and the party was broken up. Some kids were arrested, and Melinda's "odd" behavior that night reveals to others that she was the caller.
As the weeks of her freshman year wear on, Melinda has no friends. When she sees her rapist in the halls, the young man continues to taunt her by winking at her; Melinda can only refer to him as "IT." She has told no one about the crime, and finds it increasingly difficult to communicate. She bites her lip incessantly, and her busy parents do not seem to notice the scabs or even that anything wrong. At times, Melinda's narrative recounts dialogue, which takes the form of an exchange between someone else, and Melinda's "Me," which is rarely followed by any lines. She feels stifled. "All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie," Melinda scoffs. "Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say."
"While Melinda's smart and savvy interior narrative slowly reveals the searing pain of that 911 night. It also nails the high-school experience cold," a Horn Book Magazine reviewer noted. Melinda's friends from middle school have dispersed into different cliques, and her former best friend changes her name from Rachel to Rachelle and hangs out only with the foreign exchange students. Everyone else is hostile to her. "I stand in the center aisle of the auditorium, a wounded zebra in a National Geographic special," she describes a moment at a pep rally where she can't find a seat. Despite the trauma, Melinda emerges as a wry observer of high school life. As narrator she analyzes the various school cliques, which she tags by various names: Eurotrash, Country Clubbers, Jocks, Future Fascists of American, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, and Marthas, among others. As Speak progresses, Melinda makes one friend, Heather, who recently moved to town, and thus knows nothing about the party or the 911 call. But Melinda is only nominally interested in being friends with the girl, who wants to be a Martha, one of the "the do-gooder bunch who collect food cans for the less fortunate and decorates the teachers' lounge," as Nancy Matson explained in CNN.com. The Marthas, however "are not a whit less brutal than any of the other high school cliques," Matson observed.
Melinda finds some solace in her art class, where her sympathetic teacher seems to be the only one who realizes that something is amiss in her life. As Melinda's grades decline over the marking periods, she grows increasingly withdrawn and even begins to find refuge by hiding in a closet at school. Her voice manages to assert itself in other ways besides her internal narrative: through her tree project for art class, for instance, or a piece of graffiti she begins on the wall of a bathroom stall, "Ten Guys to Stay Away From." When her ex-best friend begins dating "IT," Melinda finally begins to realize what the real cost of her silence may be. In a nightmarish denouement, she finds herself in danger again, and at last finds the voice to scream.
Reviewers of Speak were generous in their praise. "In a stunning first novel, Anderson uses keen observations and vivid imagery to pull readers into the head of an isolated teenager," a Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote. Paula Rohrlick of Kliatt noted that "Melinda's voice is bitter, sardonic and always believable," and predicted that the heroine's "bleak, scathingly honest depiction of the world of high school will ring true for many." A reviewer writing in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books observed that "Anderson doesn't overburden Melinda with insight or with artistic metaphors," and concluded by calling the novel "a gripping account of personal wounding and recovery." Writing for School Library Journal, Dina Sherman stated that Speak "is a compelling book, with sharp, crisp writing that draws readers in, engulfing them in the story." Horn Book predicted that the novel "will hold readers from first word to last." A Kirkus Reviews assessment commended Anderson for her engaging story and strong characters, but pointed out that "it is its raw and unvarnished look at the dynamics" among the teenagers portrayed in Speak "that makes this a novel that will be hard for readers to forget."
Numerous Accolades
In addition to becoming a finalist for a National Book Award in the Young People's Literature category, Speak earned high marks from several other sources. It was cited as one of the best books for teens published in 1999 by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, School Library Journal, the American Library Association, Booklist, Horn Book Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. The novel's themes of ostracism and personal conviction resonated with readers of all ages. Anderson has said that in writing Speak, she was compelled to address issues that are universal. Melinda's act of calling the police, for instance, and the reason why no one else ever bothered to find out why she did it, seems characteristic of teen behavior. Her peers assume that she simply wanted to get everyone else in trouble. "People grab the fast, easy answer," Anderson told The Book Bag. "Especially in a situation like this, where Melinda's actions got everyone in trouble, her friends aren't going to explore her motives. Then there is that added twist--by being angry at Melinda (the scapegoat), they don't have to take responsibility for their own actions."
At the time that she had the nightmare that brought Melinda alive, Anderson had been reading Reviving Ophelia, a best-selling study from Nebraska psychologist Mary Pipher about preteen girls and the difficulties they face. "I had been processing all this information about adolescence and girls, and remembered all too vividly what it was like," Anderson told Jennifer M. Brown in a Publishers Weekly interview. "Speak is the least deliberately written book I've ever done." As the author wrote in the ALAN Review, she grew very attached to her heroine, whom she refers to as "Mellie," over the course of writing her story. "The ending of the book was the hardest. In fact, I had to do it three times to get it right. My patient, very smart editor, Elizabeth Mikesell, gently pushed me to do it over until I found the right ending. I was not happy about it at the time, but she was right. I was too protective of Mellie. I didn't want her to get hurt again. I couldn't stand the thought of leaving her unprotected." In fact, as Anderson told The Book Bag, she felt so close to her character that it was sometimes hard to remember that she existed only on paper. "When my editor called me to say she wanted to publish the book, I was really bummed because I wanted to call Melinda and tell her, she was so real to me!"
Anderson rises each day at 4:30 a.m. to write, and she keeps at it until noon--after the house empties of her daughters and husband. She researches in the afternoons. "I have two kids who do a great job of keeping me grounded, and a cat who gnaws my ankles if I don't feed her," the author told Brown in the Publishers Weekly interview. Anderson has also written a historical novel for teens, Fever 1793, which appeared in 2000. The work is set in post-revolutionary times during a yellow fever outbreak. Matilda Cook is fourteen that summer, and her family owns a coffeehouse in Philadelphia, which was also the capital of the United States at the time. When Matilda is separated from her mother and her grandfather succumbs to the epidemic, she is saved by the freed slave who works at the coffeehouse. Through her, the teen becomes involved in the Free African Society, and by the end of the novel Matilda has emerged as the almost-adult proprietor of the coffeehouse. "Readers will be drawn in by the characters and will emerge with a sharp and graphic picture of another world," opined School Library Journal reviewer Kathleen Isaacs.
Despite the popularity of her other books, it has been Speak's Melinda who has proved to be Anderson's most enduring, likable heroine. Anderson is a popular author on the school-and-library lecture circuit, and students often ask her if she will write another book featuring Melinda. Anderson admits that she is tempted, but will have to let any follow-up happen by itself. "Writing [Speak] was a bizarre experience," the author told The Book Bag. "I feel like Melinda dictated it to me. I would love to write another book with her so I could have her hanging out in my head again. But it's up to her. If I try to resurrect her just to hammer out a sequel, it will be awful. You have to respect your characters as much as you do your friends."
UPDATES
September 5, 2005: Anderson's novel Speak was adapted for a television movie written and directed by Jessica Sharzer. The film premiered in September on Lifetime Television and Showtime. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, September 5, 2005.
PERSONAL INFORMATION
"Halse" rhymes with "waltz"; born October 23, 1961, in Potsdam, NY; daughter of Frank A., Jr. (a Methodist minister) and Joyce (in management) Halse; married Gregory H. Anderson (chief executive officer of Anderson Financial Systems), June 19, 1983; children: Stephanie, Meredith. Education: Onondaga County Community College, A.A., 1981; Georgetown University, B.S.L.L., 1984. Politics: Independent. Religion: Quaker. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, running, skiing, hiking, basketball, history, travel, genealogy.
AWARDS
"Pick of the Lists," American Booksellers Association, 1996, for Ndito Runs; Turkey Pox was on recommended reading lists of Kansas State Librarians, Nevada Department of Education, Top of Texas Literature Review Center; National Book Award finalist in Young People's Literature, 1999, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Printz Honor Medal Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Golden Kite award from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, all for Speak; Speak was named a Best Book of 1999 by School Library Journal, and appeared on the American Library Association's (ALA) Honor List for excellence in literature for young adults in 2000, Booklist's Top 10 First Novels of 1999, and Horn Book's Fanfare Honor List; ALA Best Books for Young Adults selection, Junior Library Guild selection, Children's Book-of-the-Month selection, Parent's Guide to Children's Media Award, "Pick of the Lists," American Booksellers Association, and 100 Best Books of Fall selection, New York Public Library, all 2000, all for Fever 1793.
