An emotional novel about mental health, and dealing with grief and growing up, The Tragedy of Dane Riley is the story of a teenager looking to make sense of his feelings in the wake of tragedy, and finding the strength he needs to make life worth living.
We chat with author Kat Spears about The Tragedy of Dane Riley, including its inspiration and challenges, along with writing, book recommendations, and more.
Hi, Kat! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi, I’m Katarina but everyone calls me Kat (technically pronounced like “cot” but “cat” is fine, too). I grew up moving around a lot so I don’t really consider anywhere a hometown. I was born in Sweden, hence the Swedish name, but I’m not Swedish, though I would welcome the opportunity to be Swedish if anyone from the Swedish government is reading this and wants to grant me honorary citizenship. I am one of, I assume, very few Americans who goes to IKEA just to buy skorpor and knackebrod. I have three kids and four dogs and one hamster and I spend all of my free time and money on dog treats and plants for my garden that feed caterpillars and butterflies and bees. I’ve done just about all of the jobs but I have been a bartender part-time for over 20 years at the same hole-in-the-wall bar in DC. I am also a librarian.
How is your 2021 going in comparison to that other year?
I’ve missed the company of a lot of friends that the pandemic has robbed me of this past year and I’m looking forward to seeing many of them this summer now that the vaccine is opening up for younger people. I’m also eager to get back to visiting with students in classrooms and libraries as the world returns to normal. Other than not working behind the bar, my world didn’t change a lot during 2020, for which I have learned to be grateful every day of my life.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
Pierre: A Cautionary Tale by Maurice Sendak, Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I started writing stories when I was about nine. By the time I was a teenager I was writing the books that I wanted to read. We didn’t have the wealth of young adult fiction when I was a teenager that we do these days, which is probably a good thing because I might never have started writing novels with such commitment.
Your new novel The Tragedy of Dane Riley is out June 22nd 2021! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Hamlet without the murders.
What can readers expect?
Dane Riley talks about his depression, sense of hopelessness, and grief in very real and raw first-person terms, but he’ll make you laugh a few times as well. He routinely questions whether he has the ability to move forward with his life, and not just because of the death of his father. All the while he’s navigating friends and school and his crush on the girl next door. He is experiencing what many of us do in adolescence at that moment when you are standing on the cliff of childhood waiting to fall or jump into adulthood. The question of suicide, in Dane’s mind, is both literal and metaphorical. As we step into adulthood, we have to leave some long-held beliefs behind–beliefs like our parents aren’t just actual people with the same struggles we have, that life isn’t something we can plan or control, and that our toys might not be neatly and safely stored away in the attic to preserve our childhood as we want to remember it. Dane’s point of view can be tough to read at times, or so I am told, but I think it’s such a necessary book to allow young people who experience depression or anxiety to know that they are not alone.
Where did the inspiration for The Tragedy of Dane Riley come from?
Dane Riley started out as a very different book but the bones are the same. One day I was reading through the early manuscript and realized elements of the story very much resembled Hamlet, at least the part about grieving for a lost father and struggling to come to terms with the rest of the world moving on while Dane (and Hamlet) were spiraling down a hole of depression. I became fascinated (read: obsessed) with the history of Hamlet, which for hundreds of years was already a well-known play throughout Europe before Shakespeare ever committed his version to paper. The themes in Hamlet are eternal human questions (“to be, or not to be”) that we still struggle to answer today. And Dane’s soliloquies are 21st-century expressions of Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing the novel and how you were able to overcome them?
Once, during a school visit, I had a young man ask me if I thought the reason why I wrote from a male teen perspective was because I try to hide who I really am from my readers and not feel so vulnerable when I put my own feelings into a book. My answer was, I didn’t think that…until exactly that moment. He was absolutely correct. One thing I did not anticipate about publishing books is that knowing other people would be reading my words really inhibited me creatively. It felt suddenly not okay to open a vein and bleed onto the page (as someone far more eloquent than I once put it). And if you can’t really plumb the depths of your own soul, you can’t really write the books that I want to write. It took a lot of energy to cast off fears of how readers would react to a truly naked portrayal of depression such as Dane is experiencing. That was my biggest challenge—overcoming the fear of sharing my own feelings in the hope that they resonate with some young person who is experiencing the same.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
One of my favorite parts to write (and read) in The Tragedy of Dane Riley is the scene in which Dane and his mother finally seem to reach a point of understanding. They are trading stories about childhood and Dane’s mother is explaining how parents will sometimes lie to spare the feelings of their children–the dog that goes to live on the farm in the country, or the promise that unused toys are packed away neatly in the attic to be preserved forever, that parents love each other and are happy together, etc. It’s a moment when Dane realizes, finally, that our perceptions we develop in childhood are sometimes incorrect and, at the same time, his mother is realizing that Dane isn’t perhaps quite ready to accept that. It’s a poignant moment and these are stories from my own childhood and coming of age so I felt them acutely.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
I once had an early reader of one of my manuscripts tell me that I didn’t give enough physical description of the characters and surroundings. I’m glad I ignored that feedback because I like for readers to have the freedom to imagine the people and the world in which they live any way they please. As a reader, I have a tendency to skip or skim those parts of a book that give itemized descriptions of characters or settings anyway. I want to be so immersed in the experiences and dialogue of the characters that the setting and characters just appear in my mind without effort. I would say Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing includes the best advice I have ever had as a writer and I repeat much of it when I’m giving a writing workshop for young people. My own rule is that if I am editing a draft of one of my manuscripts and I find myself skimming the text instead of really reading it, I just cut that part out. It hurts, sometimes, but I think it makes the story flow much better. I sometimes see reviews posted in which people will say a book is an easy read, or they read it in one sitting. In my opinion, that means an author has done their job. A book that is easy to read is not easy to write.
What’s next for you?
I don’t know! I’ve got three YA manuscripts in varying stages of completion. I’ve also been working on an adult manuscript if I can ever get the voice perfect. One thing for sure I know I won’t be doing is writing a pandemic into any manuscript. I’ll leave that to the young people who have lived through it. It’s been a much tougher year on them than anyone else. Social interaction with peers is one of the most important parts of being a teenager and the teens of 2020-21 have missed out on so much. I really worried about the mental health of young people this past year. I hope in the coming year I’ll be connecting with the young people who have found a kindred spirit in Dane Riley.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
I discovered Ruta Sepetys through a class I took last fall and am so ashamed of myself for not knowing about her before that. I’ve since read Salt to the Sea and Out of the Easy—both great (the Salt to the Sea audiobook with multiple voice actors will particularly appeal to younger readers, I think). My middle child is 12 and she’s reading Out of the Easy right now and says she loves it (slightly mature themes for some 12-year-olds). Also, five stars from all of my kids for Revolution is Not a Dinner Party by Ying Chang Compestine. If you haven’t read it, drop whatever you are doing and read it now. Twentieth-century Chinese history is so fascinating and Compestine’s first-person experience as a child of the Cultural Revolution in China will blow you away. My kids loved it and my mom and I loved it, too. A book for all ages.
