"What a Man Do": Coe Booth and the Genesis of Tyrell

ALAN Review, Winter 2007 by Blasingame, James Jr

Growing up in my neighborhood, I did hear this vernacular/dialect from some people. I did not grow up cursing or using nonstandard English, but I was around it a lot. David Levithan, my editor, thought the language was great, but when he was in editorial meetings, it would come up at times, in regard to how it might affect sales, but it never went beyond that.

I wrote it for teenagers and I wanted it to be real. I read lots of books where there is street lingo but no cursing, and I believe that appeals to schools and teachers, and that's fine, but in my book, I was going for a different thing. This is how he speaks.

If anything, it is the language that makes Tyrell, the character, so real, and helps make Tyrell, the book, stand alone among books with similar content.

Coe's association with David Levithan has proven to be mutually beneficial. David was one of Coe's teachers at The New School and chair of her master's project, the manuscript that would turn out to be Tyrell. He was supportive, he was instructive, and he kept a big secret the whole time she was working on the book, a secret that is a testimony to his integrity as an editor, and as a professor. The secret, which he waited patiently to divulge to Coe after she graduated with her MFA, was that he was interested in publishing the book through his Scholastic imprint, PUSH. This imprint and David Levithan are well known for discovering new talent and encouraging authors who push the envelope of good literature.

Like many of today's best authors, and many of the authors under the PUSH banner, Coe had experienced something of a hole in the literature available to young adults when she was a teen:

When I was growing up, most of the characters in books who looked like me were either slaves, or growing up during the Depression, or sharecroppers, or something. I appreciated those books as I got older, but when I was a teen, although these characters may have looked like me, their lives were nothing like mine and I couldn't make any connection to them. I could relate better to the Judy Blume type books because they dealt with what I was experiencing, like the regular insecurities of being a teenaged girl, just coming into adolescence.

I couldn't get those two kinds of books in one; you know, like, a story about a little black girl who was getting her first bra. But I didn't find that, and so I read what was available. A lot of kids are turned off to reading because they don't find themselves. The stories that I was writing in grade school and middle school were about girls like me and my friends who were living everyday lives and facing those problems. I also want to write middle grade novels one day.

Coe maintains a beautiful website at http://www.coebooth.com/, complete with a blog, links, a biography, her schedule of appearances, and information about her publications. She also has a personal site at MySpace.com/coebooth and has found that:

Kids think you're cool if you have a MySpace account. I did a library author visit recently, and the kids were on the computer looking at my MySpace site before I even left, starting to write me messages.