Check out our interview with Jeanne Thornton, who wrote the book, "A/S/L."

What was your inspiration behind your most recent book, "A/S/L?"

As you know from reading the book, it’s the story of three teenagers in the 1990s — close friends online, but who’ve never met in person —who strive to make the greatest video game in the world. Something happens and the three split, but in the shadow of the first Trump presidency, unfinished business begins to draw them back together in complicated ways. I also grew up on the 1990s Internet making crude video games with my friends, and I wanted to build a little monument to the ways that online community has shaped to me over time, as well as the ways the friendships I formed through it have formed me in turn.

What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?

I think if you’re queer and at least some part of your socializing is with other queers, you do yourself a disservice by cutting yourself off from books written by souls who are struggling with some of the same things you are. I’ll give an example: Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, which was a major revelation to me and many other trans women contemporaries, is a book narrated by a trans woman whose inner experience felt close to mine, who worried about things I worried about. There are things Imogen gave voice to in that book that became part of my language for understanding myself, schemas I could start to build from.

I don’t think this is some special thing marginalized readers have to do. Middle-class white cishet people read John Updike novels about adultery or whatever — those subjects are interesting to those readers — because that’s the world they’re in, one riven by the contradictions of heterosexual relationship politics and gender roles. If that’s the soup you’re boiling in, it’ll help you to read about it. We trans readers are boiling in our own soups; it does us a service to see how others are learning to swim, salt, stir those soups. I don’t know why this became a soup metaphor.

Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?

A key manifestation of violence is erasure, making a way of life impossible to imagine. We’re seeing this now in America: the Trump administration and the Republican party are leveraging people’s unwillingness to imagine trans people’s inner worlds in order to try to remove us from public life, just as they’re trying to erase our sense that immigrants to this country have interiority, that disabled people have interiority, that Palestinians have interiority, that people who think differently from a dominant tech-bro paradigm have interiority. It’s an aggressive, deliberate ignorance; it’s the root of any mechanism of control.

I believe there’s a not deliberate ignorance, too, which the deliberate kind exploits. So many of the systems by which we organize our society are like the Buddha’s family, trying to conceal all knowledge of death and sadness from him so he never has to grow. Books should be little containers for knowledge of the things societies want to suppress. When authors don’t try to reduce our complexity to make a clean narrative, a satisfying story, commercial appeal, we add grit to the oyster, which is how you get the pearl.

Which brings me to John Steinbeck, who talked about the novel East of Eden as a box to put things in: maybe I mean that too.

What can fans expect from your book?

I think all my books have presented a certain kind of sadness about how we can be good to other people who are difficult; readers who like that kind of thing will find plenty of it here. If you’re a fan of my previous book "Summer Fun," you will, I hope also find a lot to like. I’m fascinated with stories about creative practices, which "Summer Fun" explored through a narrative about a musical genius. In "A/S/L," I wanted to talk about creativity without burdening the story with ideas about geniuses or creative success. A creative life is still important if it doesn’t have a return on the investment; the characters in this book are on one level failed artists, but their artistry still shapes their lives.

Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.

What more do you want to know? Maybe writing is just a sickness; maybe we shouldn’t.

What’s up next for you in the bookish world?

The next one will be a full on graphic novel about therapy and space travel, although it’ll have long prose parts too (for those who are scared of comics). I hope you all like it one day 20, 30 years from now when I somehow finish it.