by Jesse Sposato
Jesse: Where do you get ideas for your characters; are they based on you and your friends?
Sherman: You know, the original influence is always this particular person, but by the time you end up writing ten or twelve drafts, they [the characters] change completely. But the original inspiration is usually a person.
Jesse: Yeah, it seems like a lot of writers do that. In particular, the friendship between Rowdy and Arnold in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a rich and interesting one filled with such pure love. Is this friendship based on one you know or one that you had?
Sherman: Yeah, it’s based on two of my friendships growing up on the reservation with the[se] two guys. True Diary is really a love story between two boys, [it’s about] their friendship. It really interested me to write an emotional book about young males’ friendships. We always think about girls being devoted to each other that way, but boys are too.
Jesse: Do you plan on sticking with young adult novels for a while, or just continuing to do kind of whatever you feel like?
Sherman: I just added another genre! (laughing) Yeah, it’s been so fun to be in the young adult world. I’m gonna stay there definitely, and I’ll keep writing my other stuff too.
Jesse: How did you make the transition in the first place?; what was the motivation behind starting to enter the young adult world?
Sherman: They just kept asking! Well, that was part of it, and also, young people are so excited about books and so anxious and eager. I just looked back to myself as a sixteen-year-old and how much I loved reading and how a book could completely change my life…so I just like the idea of trying to write for all those versions of me out there, wherever they are.
Jesse: Right, totally. That’s sort of the way I explain starting Sadie, like the idea is trying to speak to sixteen-year-old me.
Sherman: There you go, exactly! And that was just confirmed when I went on a book tour and I visited all these high schools. [There are] just all these amazing kids out there, so it’s fun! And it’s fun in a way that…I certainly love my adult audiences, but, I don’t know, I just end up feeling like I matter more to the teenagers.
by Rick Margolis
You were born with hydrocephalus (water on the brain), and you grew up poor on the Spokane Indian Reservation with alcoholic parents. How did you learn to read by the time you were three?
Partly it was because my dad was a major genre reader. He read a lot of, like, The Executioner and The Punisher and a lot of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. He was way into the John F. Kennedy assassination; so there were dozens of those books around the house. Even though my dad was a randomly employed, blue-collar alcoholic, he was also very much into reading. And then the other thing was, ironically, because I was so sick and because Indian health service has such great contracts with major health-care providers, I ended up in a lot of therapy—physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy. Because they thought I was going to be mentally disabled, they had me in a lot of educational therapies. So my brain disease and my brain surgery got me the kind of early childhood education that I never would have gotten otherwise.
When you were five, you read The Grapes of Wrath, which remains one of your favorites. Back then, what appealed to you about the story?
Fleeing poverty. Getting in the car and going and trying to find a way, and being stopped at nearly every turn—the struggle against poverty.
You understood that concept at such a young age?
One of the things that I’ve always said is that you measure the quality of a person’s life by the age at which they had their first political thought. I was about four, standing in line to get government food on the reservation. And it struck me that all over the news I was watching Russians standing in line to get government food—and they were the enemy.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is the tale of a 14-year-old Native American who transfers to an all-white school in hopes of finding a better life. Essentially, it’s your real-life story. Why not just write a memoir?
The material in True Diary was actually first part of a memoir. I’ve been working on a family memoir about my family’s history with war. So I wrote this entire huge section about the first year I spent at the white high school, and it didn’t fit whatsoever, thematically. So I put it aside. I had 450 manuscript pages that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Then a YA editor called me, as she had been calling me over the years, about every six months: “So where’s that YA novel?” She called me on this day that I had printed out those pages, and as I was talking to her, I was looking at my desktop and there was the manuscript, sitting there, and I thought, “Wow! I think that’s a novel.” So it was really sort of a coincidence. And then partly I made it a novel simply because—this is weird to say—nobody would actually believe it as a memoir.
