We had the pleasure of chatting to author Iva-Marie Palmer about her new novel, Gimme Everything You Got, including its setting and sex positivity, along with book recommendations, writing, snacks, and more!
You like to defy the norms of the “about me” pages, so what is one thing about yourself that you would love to share?
Oh wow, I set myself up for this a bit with my website’s About Me page, didn’t I? But, it’s true, I struggle with the “personal branding” thing. For the readers of The Nerd Daily, I’d like to state that I write books that I hope are fun and funny, but that also capture what often feels like the hugeness of growing up.
If you were seeking more of a personal tidbit about me, hmm, let’s go with the fact that in high school, I regularly appeared on a local teen dance TV show, U Dance with B96, filmed in Chicago across from Oprah’s studio. My friends and I would ask not to work Saturday mornings at our mall jobs so we could go downtown to dance for about six hours straight – enough for the following week’s shows. We did not get paid anything for this, which in retrospect seems like a problem.
What led you to want to write middle school and young adult books?
I loved to read them, for one, both now and when I was a teenager and younger adult, and I always felt like books were a respite from my day-to-day life, whether the day in question felt boring beyond measure or too dramatic to process. (I remember being in my teens and everything seemed to exist at one of these extremes – “everything’s dull/I’m dull” or “everything’s out of control/I will never have my sh*t together!” Okay, I still have these days.) And, as I began writing fiction, I realized I was much more in touch with that former version of myself than I knew, and the work I was doing was tapping into those coming-of-age feelings.
Your new novel Gimme Everything You Got is out now! What can readers expect?
Well, the book is about Susan Klintock, a high school junior who is brimming with sexual fantasies and curiosity but has practically zero sexual experience. She’s basically counted out every regular guy in her high school – and maybe for good reasons – until Bobby McMann walks through the cafeteria one day and she’s blown away by him. The problem is, ’s Bobby’s not a student; he’s the coach for the newly formed girls’ soccer team. It’s 1979 and via Title IX, more opportunities are being created for girls’ sports to literally level the playing field with boys. So even though she’s never played a sport, and even if she knows he’s off-limits, Susan decides to try out for the team in an attempt to get closer to him.
From there, we see all the casual sexism the new girls’ team has to experience, and watch the team come together on and off the field. And, in trying to get better at soccer, Susan forms a friendship with a guy who used to play soccer, and offers to teach her the game.
I hope readers have a lot of fun with this book, and that they enjoy the book’s escape to a different era, which I think I’ve balanced with a modern voice and a contemporary feel.
If you had to summarise Gimme Everything You Got in five words, what would they be?
Funny. Badass. Candid. Foxy. Triumphant.
Why did you want to set Gimme Everything You Got in the 1970s?
Once I knew the book was about a girl who crushed on the new coach, I wanted to up the ante. What if the coach was at her school to introduce a new sport? What if the girl’s experience was one of never really playing a sport? That didn’t make as much sense in modern times, and it absolutely did work in the 1970s, when more womens’ athletic opportunities were being offered as one part of the federal civil rights law Title IX, passed as part of the Educational Amendments of 1972.
As I began learning more Title IX, I learned that, like so much legislation, it wasn’t implemented with ease. It wasn’t like one day you had no women’s teams and the next you walked into a high school totally outfitted for a number of women’s sports. So that made the idea that this coach would be starting a girls’ soccer team – at a school that really didn’t offer much in the way of women’s athletics – really ripe with possibilities to show the sexism of the times. Like, even though you had a team, it didn’t mean you had respect, nor did it mean you even had all the equipment and facilities you needed. I learned there were a number of schools where – for example – girls’ teams had to wait to practice until the boys’ teams were done. A friend told me her boyfriend’s mother coached a tennis team in the 1970s and had to drive the team to matches herself.
The other layer was setting the book in a 1970s town like the one I grew up in – a more working and middle class, midwestern suburb, rather than a coastal region where maybe a school would be more progressive. Powell Park is based on Oak Lawn, Illinois, where I grew up, but it’s a mix of several Chicago suburbs. Soccer wasn’t a sport a lot of people played or followed there. It was probably considered too European, where the sports people in my hometown loved were football, baseball, basketball: meat and potatoes of sports. So I found there were so many layers I could explore if I set the book in the 1970s, plus there were so many opportunities to write about the fashion and movies and music of the era. I love to delve into that sort of stuff, as it feels like I get to make a period movie in my head.
What is one question you wish you would be asked in an author Q&A?
This was a very specific question from my friend Kate who grew up in Oak Lawn, Illinois with me, which is the town on which Powell Park is loosely based. She asked why do I use some real names and not others? (As an example, in GEYG, the school St. Ignatius really exists, but St. Mark’s does not; readers from the area will assume it’s either based on one of the Catholic high schools, Brother Rice or Marist.) So, my answer to her was that it’s sort of an instinct to create this hybrid world of real and made-up places.
But, as I pondered it more, I think that there might be more intent to it than I realized: When I’m writing something like GEYG that’s set somewhere I’ve actually lived, I get into the mood of the place by thinking of its real landmarks and streets and geography but I think because it it’s my fictional world, I also want to create non-existent institutions to build from the ground up. If I were to only use real places, first, I think I’d fear people would assume my works are autobiographical, but also I have a journalist’s attention to detail, so when I do use real places, I can go a little crazy trying to capture them exactly as they are or were. (For example, in GEYG, O’Banion’s was a real punk club that wasn’t around by the time I was a teen, and I almost changed it because I worried I didn’t have quite enough real details about it. I kept it in the end, though, because I thought it was a nice tribute to Chicago’s punk rock scene.) So, making up fake locations also gives me liberties to not have to be painstakingly accurate to the real places, and to build parts of my book’s world, if not the whole world.
What is the importance to you of making Gimme Everything You Got sex positive?
I’m writing for young adults and sex and sexuality are part of young adulthood. And while I know it can be a fraught time for many teens, and worse than fraught for teens who’ve endured sexual trauma, I wanted to write about the aspects of learning about your sexuality and desire that were about pleasure, and positivity.
That’s not to say I think sex-positive means a book has to be packed with actual sex scenes. When people read Gimme Everything You Got, they’ll see that – when she introduces herself – Susan admits she’s got just about no real sexual experience. But she does have a lot of sexual fantasies, and a lot of curiosity, and a lot of agency to pleasure herself.
I think when we say sex-positive it should be encompassing of all sexuality, whether it’s about wanting to have sex, or not wanting to have sex, or existing anywhere between those two poles. I think sex-positivity is about not feeling ashamed whether you’re having a lot of sex or no sex, nor about who you’re having it with, so long as you’re having it consensually. And it’s also not about having the main question be whether it’s moral or right to want to have sex.
Right now, I think sex-positive books are very important because there is a movement out there asking for books that can be labelled Clean Teen. And, you know, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with someone who’s not into books containing sex or swearing, but it’s the idea that the ones that do are somehow dirty or wrong that gives me pause. I want to believe we’ve come farther than that kind of shaming and knowing we haven’t makes it seem even more imperative that sex-positive books exist to counter would-be scolds.
Finally, I’d like to cap this question by giving a nod to former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who I wanted to include in the acknowledgements but didn’t have room to include. Elders was fired by President Bill Clinton for being outspoken in ways that didn’t jibe with conservative critics at a time when Clinton was trying to get them on his side. Elders advocated for, among other things, condoms in schools and drug legalization. When I was writing Susan’s fantasy scenes, wondering how far I should go, I thought of Elders. The last straw before her dismissal was her statement that masturbation is “something that is part of human sexuality and …perhaps should be taught.” Her desire for a shameless, truthful approach to sex education bolstered me in writing this book from an honest place.
What led you to taking a feminist approach to your writing?
I don’t know that I took a feminist approach, as much as – because I am a feminist – feminist beliefs show up in my work. I will clarify here that my feminism is intersectional, whereas Susan in Gimme Everything You Got is embracing the feminism of her era – the idea that women should have access to whatever men have. It was more of the woman-power feminism that we’ve rightly broadened to go beyond the ERA and such as society’s many other inequities become harder to ignore. Susan by now, I would hope, is fighting not to achieve the same power as a white guy in charge, but is seeking to dismantle the old power structures, to build a fair society not solely for women but for everyone.
I’m sorry, as I think I got away from the question, but really, my book is one character growing in her feminist awareness, and it’s not covering all the bases. But I do think readers will see some of the challenges of being a middle-class suburban young woman in a 1970s; how Susan could accept the rather narrow set of options of her mother’s generation or strike out in search of a bigger life and more opportunities. That was really important for me to explore. So many of a woman’s early feminist challenges come from sizing up her upbringing and surroundings and what they seem to be telling her is expected of her and figuring out which of those expectations just isn’t going to work for her as she becomes more herself.
How do you define fun?
I mean, it’s relative, of course. But for me, when I am writing, I definitely will tread into emotional territory and I got teary-eyed on a few scenes of this book, but I am not delving into darker, heavier stuff. Some writers do, and they do it so well. Their books are crucial and cathartic but I won’t lie: I Iove comedy, I love a happy ending, I love finding the humor in the worst situations. Or, more accurately, I have some kind of biological imperative to do so.
That’s not to say my books are devoid of angst. Angst and confusion are hallmarks of the coming-of-age experience. And, it’s a privilege to know now that the situations – with friends, with guys, with adults – that felt so huge to me at the time, like big conundrums and my teen angst, was actually kind of fun. In retrospect. Because fun is the lens I can now put on that angst as I look back and realize how lucky I was to consider those daily dramas as my hardest problems.
Do you have any words of advice for young readers?
To remember that – when they feel their most awkward, when they think everyone is noticing their every shortcoming – almost everyone else is not paying attention. Everyone else is also worrying about how they’re being judged or seen, too.
I know they have probably heard that before, but it’s something I figured out way after middle and high school and I wish I’d taken it to heart sooner. We have different ways of dealing with it, but humans for the most part are all big nervous weirdos internally. I look back now at how I thought everyone had everything under control but me and realize how wrong I was, and feel a little sad to have missed out on connections I could have made if I hadn’t assumed other people had it too together to get me.
What three candies could you not live without?
I have to declare this question patently unanswerable, because candies are like moods to me, and I don’t think I could ever choose only three moods to have for the rest of my life.
The way to pick would likely be to choose one candy from each type, like a chocolate, a gummy, and a hard candy but even within those divisions, you have moods. Like in the licorice family: A few weeks ago, I went through a black licorice kick, which is kind of contemplative and serious, but lately I’ve wanted a Rip Rolls – these strawberry licorice strips that are a completely different mood, more playful and comic.
I am sorry, I am stumped here.
And lastly, do you have any book recommendations for us?
How long do you have? I think if people like my book they should check out the Sloppy Firsts series by Megan McCafferty. I’m not saying I have even half her genius, but I’ve been really inspired by her work. I cannot wait to read her book, The Mall.
I loved Mary McCoy’s Printz honor winner I, Claudia. She’s another genius, and I recommend that book to everyone, and her next one, Indestructible Object, promises to be awesome as well. Brandy Colbert’s whole oeuvre is amazing, and her latest The Voting Booth is so timely and perfect. Katie Cotugno’s newest book, You Say It First, is another great one for this election year, and her characters are always so real. I loved Lilliam Rivera’s The Education of Margo Sanchez; just a great coming-of-age book with really excellent familial drama.
I can’t wait to read Anna Carey’s This Is Not the Jess Show, and Julie Buxbaum’s Admission.
Branching out from YA, I recently read Real Life by Brandon Taylor and am still thinking about it. I loved Circe by Madeline Miller, Severance by Ling Ma, and Fleishman is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose also writes pieces in the New York Times that I positively scream over, they’re so good. In terms of way backlist books, I also love to recommend Middlemarch by George Eliot. It was a book I never even thought to pick up – I’m ashamed to admit that my reticence was based on the title and copies I saw with bad cover design – and then when I did, I just devoured it.
