The Art of Pissing off People You Don't Even Know

     So you say you want to learn how to alienate total strangers whom you actually admire?  Really, when you think about it, who wouldn't?  Well, you've come to the right place.  Come sit at the feet of the master.
     Remember how, on April 20th, I published a post describing my admiration for YA novelist A.S. King and her novels, "Please Ignore Vera Dietz" and "Everybody Sees the Ants?"  Sure you do.  In fact, I've been really looking forward to reading her next release, "Ask the Passengers," due out in October, and wondering whether I could summon the courage to ask her for an interview afterward.  All good so far, right?  And, of course, I've been following her blog because I like the off-kilter way she thinks and the values she novelistically espouses.  I mean, you can tell when an author is anti-bullying, or anti-crushing-weight-of-conformity, or anti-stupid-prejudices, right?  She's clearly all of those things, and more.  And here is where the plot thickens.
     Yesterday morning I read her latest blog post, "A Week In My Cave," in which she asserted that she "doesn't give a shit about politics," and it started to eat at me.  And it kept eating at me all day.  Now, here's where the instructional part comes in: what did I choose to do in response?  Why, I chose to post a condescending, self-righteous comment on her blog (my very FIRST comment on someone else's blog, no less), advising her that it would behoove her to give a shit about politics, because whom we citizens choose to elect to public office actually affects our lives and those of others we care about.   To which she responded with a politeness I did not deserve, explaining that I had taken her offhand remark out of context and that she does, indeed, read newspapers, vote, write often to her congresspersons, and act in many other socially conscious ways which I might have known something about if I had cared to do my homework before blasting her on her blog.  And then I apologized.  And here's what we would have said in New York when I was growing up about the value of my apology: "that and a token will get you on the subway."
     So there you have it.  I've publicly called out an author whom I respect, and I was wrong.  And here's a little quiz: what would you now say are the odds that she would agree to my interviewing her after "Passengers" comes out?  Zero?  Far too generous.  The odds, my friends, are now deep into the negative numbers, and likely to remain there throughout eternity.
     End of tutorial.  Additional pointers are available upon request.  You know who should be banished to a cave and not allowed out to interact with other humans until she can learn some rules about courteous discourse?  Here's a hint: it's not A.S. King.

     Wanna know a YA author whose books I really, really like?  You do?  Cool.  I was recently at my library and stumbled across two novels by A.S. King: Please Ignore Vera Dietz, and Everybody Sees the Ants.  They both really got me.  One, I'm a sucker for twisted humor.  Two, I like books about teens who are struggling not only to figure themselves out, but also to figure out their own weird, flawed parents, and the unique mix of loving/damaging their kids that each one of them brings to the table.  Because, let's face it: I don't know one parent (and I'm totally including myself) who doesn't fit somewhere on the loving/damaging spectrum, and where each one falls on that spectrum can change from day to day, or even hour to hour.  Depends how much sleep we've had, what the traffic was like on the way home from work, how we're feeling about ourselves at the moment, whether something our kids said reminds us of something that somebody we don't like once said...  The list goes on and on.  Vera Dietz's mother took off for Las Vegas with her podiatrist six years ago, when Vera was twelve, and hasn't been seen since, unless you count the card and check that arrive from her each year on Vera's birthday.  So it's Vera and her dad, a recovering alcoholic who believes that high school students should hold full-time jobs in their spare time.  Lucky Linderman, the 15-year-old boy who thinks he's the only one who sees the ants, will tell you that his mother is a squid and his father is a turtle, and that's only the beginning of what's wrong with them.  Vera and Lucky both have complex relationships with other kids too, but the ways they handle those relationships are informed by the way they handle their relationships with the adults they have to learn to live with - or without.  And vice versa.  Lucky's most complex relationship of all is with someone he never met: his Granddad Harry, MIA in Vietnam before Lucky's father was even born, but who has been showing up in Lucky's dreams since Lucky was seven, and the bullying he was enduring became unbearable.   The dreams focus on Lucky's attempts to rescue his grandfather from jungle imprisonment, but through them Lucky begins to realize that Harry is not the only one in need of rescue.  I found both Vera and Lucky to be irresistible, and now I can't wait for King's next novel, "Ask the Passengers," which is about a girl who's focused on sending her love to the passengers flying in airplanes overhead.  A.S. King rocks, but don't take my word for it.  Read her books yourself.