The "HappyHead" duology came to Josh Silver from his time working in a mental health system as a nurse. Check out his interview below.
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
I was inspired to write the "HappyHead" duology while working in an inadequate mental health system as a nurse. I loved the job, but saw many issues with the care being given and felt complicit in a system that was failing the teen patients. I wanted to create a dystopian projection of what I was seeing. I definitely struggled with myself as a teenager — accepting who I was did not come naturally to me — and that has played out throughout my life. I’m interested in how we can outsource our sense of self to please others — particularly authority. I wanted to write a gay teenager and have it not be the focus of the book. Many people, regardless of sexuality, often feel they must hide parts of themselves to be accepted. It’s a brutal way to live. On a personal level, I often find our world so confusing and baffling and am not sure how we are supposed to fit into it. I’m still figuring it out, and I like being able to process anger through my writing.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
It means keeping stories that tell real life experiences of people who have not always had their stories told. Reminding the world that there might be opinions about these people, but their existence is a reality that is as valid as anyone else’s. Putting those people in narratives that might have, once, gone to someone with a more widely accepted identity. Finding people I relate to through books.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
When I was younger, I struggled to find people like me in my school year — and we didn’t have loads of TV shows back then — so I went to the library to find something that met my internal experience in books. Finding people you see yourself in, particularly at that age, is vital. We live in a world where a version of happiness is broadcast in so many ways — and often we can feel like we don’t measure up to that standard. For me, at a younger age — not only was it important to meet people who identified as LGBTQ, but also to find people who struggled with the idea of having to strive to appear a certain way.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
The story continues following gay teenager Seb, who was certain that surviving the experimental health center of HappyHead would be enough to send him home. But now he joins the top 10 contestants in the next stage of the testing, which will take place on a remote island, under the watchful eye of a mysterious couple. Seb is once again forced to compete in a series of increasingly strange trials to get his life back. Unsure if his friend and fellow HappyHead participant Finn is dead or alive, Seb is determined to find him, flee from the island, and expose the sinister truth behind HappyHead once and for all.
As a mental health nurse, I saw the realities of what teenagers face, and the incredible pressures placed on them to be successful, academic, good, kind, physically “attractive,” and wealthy, and the expectations around relationships and what they should look like. Also, emotionally — particularly for boys. Men are expected to be responsible, put together, unemotional beings who are driven to work and provide. It is an incredibly dangerous and outdated expectation. Men are emotional beings who are taught not to be. "Dead Happy" gains inspiration from the national crisis surrounding teen mental health and just how far society will go to “fix” those they see as broken.
What can fans expect from your book?
Lots of trials and challenges. Some love. I hope!
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
My next YA psychological thriller, "Erase Me," will be released this coming year.
Seventeen-year-old Eli has been in a near-fatal car crash. As the anniversary looms, his therapist and family struggle to help him deal with the fall out. The accident has left him emotionally numb, with no memory of the months following the crash.
Desperate to feel something again, Eli winds up at an underground club called Traumaland. But this is no ordinary nightclub. Here he joins crowds of other emotionally numb people, all seeking to experience a new thrill by entering virtual reality simulations of nightmarish scenarios through the points of view of various characters.
When he enters the story of a boy called Jack, he discovers a darker truth to the club. A truth that sets Eli on a dangerous journey to find the source of his own trauma.
