Wherefore Diva?

        Diva is about Caitlin, who goes to a performing arts high school to study singing.  This is something I actually did myself.  My junior and senior years of high school, I was in a unique program called PAVAC (Performing And Visual Arts Center), where I took regular classes at my district school, then went to a local college with other "gifted" kids to take performing arts classes.  I also majored in music in college.  I had long wanted to write about this experience.  However, I really didn't want the main character to be me.  I'm not into autobiography, even fictionalized autobiography.  I like my characters to be different from me (Usually, there is a character in each book who represents how I wish I’d been and sometimes was in high school – Binky in Breaking Point, Karpe in Nothing to Lose, and Gigi in Diva, a sort of geeky-cool teen who’s just above it all.  But it’s never the main character).  So the few attempts I made at thinking this through ended up really stalled.  Instead, I wrote about stuff that never happened to me, like dating violence, in my book, Breathing Underwater, which was inspired by my work with domestic violence victims, but was still firmly not my personal story. 

From the time Breathing Underwater was published, I got lots of requests for a sequel.  Initially, I couldn’t envision a sequel or companion to Breathing Underwater.  When teens asked me about a sequel, I basically told them, “Sorry, but I don’t really think anything interesting is going to happen to Nick” because that was how I felt – Now that Nick was succeeding in his counseling, he was going to lead an ordinary life, and I don’t write books about that.   Readers were free to imagine him taking the SATs, going to college, meeting a new girl, etc.  That’s what books are for – feeding the imagination.

Then, I visited a school in small-town New York where the whole class had read Breathing Underwater and at least two girls had broken up with their abusive boyfriends after reading the book.  One had actually recommended that the rest of the class read it due to her perception that there was a lot of dating violence at the school.  Over lunch, I talked with girls and some faculty members about the dating violence problem there.  One girl said, “It’s such a small school.  There’s only a hundred fifty people in the class.  So if you broke up with your boyfriend, there’d be no one to date.” 

At first, this idea really floored me – the idea that it’s better to be with a guy who hits you than no one at all.  But then, I started thinking about other women I’ve known, a college friend who dated a loser who seriously lied to her about some very important things, and when I asked her why she stuck with him, she said, “Well, I don’t want to be alone” (My response at the time:  “I’d rather be alone”), another college friend who kept going back to a guy who treated her like a girlfriend of convenience, girls who stayed with guys for years even though the guys obviously weren’t serious . . . the list goes on.  There’s a definite feeling among women that to be alone is to lose, and that feeling starts in high school, or earlier. 

I thought of my own high school days.  I always wanted a boyfriend, but definitely didn’t have one.  A big part of the reason for this was that I went to a performing arts program that was approximately seventy percent girls, so there weren’t a whole lot of dating opportunities.   However, I was tremendously absorbed in performing – I acted and sang musical theater and opera – so I still had a lot of fun.  I actually think this was a very healthy way to go through high school, because it allowed me to concentrate on what was really important to me – friendships and my music.  I ended up getting a voice scholarship to college, which I wouldn’t have done if I’d been all absorbed in some guy.

Thinking about my high school experience made me think about Caitlin.  One day, it just occurred to me that I could write about performing arts school, and the main character could be Caitlin instead of me.  Caitlin was going to performing arts school at the end of Breathing Underwater, so this made perfect sense.

And I knew that the theme of the book would be about women and relationships with men.  About that same time, I was at a bookstore and ran into a book called, Be Honest--You're Not That Into Him Either : Raise Your Standards and Reach for the Love You Deserve by Ian Kerner (which was sort of a response to another book, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys by Greg Behrendt).  Basically, the theme was that women are sticking it out with jerks because they think they had to have someone.  It was a brilliant book.  As part of my research for Diva, I also read quite a few dating guides for women including, The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider and Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School by Rachel Greenwald.  I thought it was interesting seeing the attitudes women had about men and dating, and Caitlin’s mother ended up reading the latter book (I’d guess she read The Rules too, though she didn’t always follow them!). 

Caitlin’s mother was a big part of the reason I wrote Diva.  She was one of my favorite characters in Breathing Underwater.  Although at the end of BU, I said that Caitlin moved in with her father, my first order of business in writing Diva was to come up with a plausible reason why she didn’t – because I just loved Mrs. McCourt and wanted to explore that relationship.  Also, I thought that Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn and an older book, Unfinished Portrait of Jessica by Richard Peck, were both excellent stories of girls exploring relationships with absent fathers, and I had nothing to add.

Valerie McCourt (She never had a first name in BU, but in Diva, I got her name, Valerie, from Violetta Valery, a character in the opera, La Traviata, which figures prominently into Diva’s plot) was a character who, like the plot of Diva, came to me due to a one-liner from a high school girl.  While researching Breathing Underwater, I was standing outside a local high school at dismissal time, watching students being picked up by parents (Okay, I was spying on them).  A woman pulled up to pick up a girl who was standing with a group of her friends.  The woman had on a belly shirt, white hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans, platform shoes, and all these little barrettes that were in style at the time -- for 16-year-olds.  As she pulled away, one of the girls who’d been standing with her daughter remarked, “Who does she think she is – one of the Spice Girls?”  Although for obvious reasons (Who are the Spice Girls?), I eventually changed the line to, “Who does she think she is – Madonna?” in the book, the image of a mother who wanted to dress like her daughter remained intact.  I wanted to write about a mom who wanted to be a contemporary to her daughter when the daughter really needed a mother . . . and I wanted to write about how the mother’s attitudes about dating and beauty affected her daughter.  Caitlin is a former fat girl, and even now that she’s thin, it’s hard for her, having a mom who’s physically perfect.  But Caitlin is going to learn a lot about her mom in the course of Diva. 

Finally, I really wanted to write about opera.  Most people think opera is about the geekiest thing in the world, and before I started singing it (at around age 15) I probably would have agreed with them.  I never went to an opera as a kid, and my parents weren’t into opera.  I was a musical theater person.  The only reason I started singing opera is because I liked to sing, and that is just the kind of voice I have – everything I sing comes out sounding like opera.  But once I got into it, I really liked the stories of the operas.  They’re sort of like YA novels on acid – love, death, murder, sex, insanity, suicide (Some of Caitlin’s blogs talk about all the mad scenes in operas, while another entry talks about how many people in opera kill their cheating lovers and/or themselves).  The word, diva, comes from opera and has been adopted by the rest of the world.  I thought it would be fun to write about a girl who wanted to be a real diva.  Opera and weight are a fairly common connection too, so that just fed into (pun intended) Caitlin's body issues.

In answer to the question on everyone’s mind, yes, Nick will be in the book.  No, he won’t be in every scene, or even most of them.  That’s why this really isn't a true sequel, just a story of another character from Breathing Underwater.  Diva but tells a whole different story.  If people haven’t read Breathing Underwater, they can still read Diva.  But still, I hope the book will provide some closure for Breathing Underwater fans, and I hope a new audience will enjoy it too.  It doesn’t deal with the type of life or death issues that Breathing Underwater did, but a lot of things in it are really important to “average” teen girls.

Oh, and I should mention that even though Diva is fiction, I took little "color" things from my own high school experience.  I was terrible in dance class, and I did work hard not to have to sing on the side of the stage.  I did have a wild crush on a very perfect male  friend.  There was a boy who forgot his . . . in dance class, and the drama teacher did comment on the visibility of his . . . and I did have two really special friends in high school, to whom I dedicated the book.  I never took the train to my performing arts school (There was a bus), but when I used to work downtown, I'd see the students from Miami's New World School of the Arts (which is the new version of the program I attended) singing and dancing on the Metrorail, and I remembered what it was like when all of life was a performance.

I hope you like Diva.  It's a little different from my books, a little more humorous, but very special to me.