Set to be released on June 16th, You Say It First is a gripping tale on the importance of voting and being true to your ideals, while still remaining open to other points of view in order to grow and become a better individual.
We had the opportunity to chat with Katie Cotugno, the lovely author of this brand new novel, about the most refreshing topics the novel has to offer and her writing process. Are politics important to you? Will you identify with Meg or Colby more? Don’t miss the opportunity of learning more about You Say It First through the interesting insight the author herself offers in this interview!
Hi, Katie! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Sure! I’m the New York Times Bestselling author of seven messy, complicated, feminist YA love stories—most recently Rules for Being a Girl, co-written with Candace Bushnell, and You Say It First. I live in Boston with my family and our very anxious pit bull, and make a very nice risotto if I do say so myself.
You Say It First will be out on June 16th, what can readers expect?
I originally pitched this book as “Sleepless in Seattle for Donald Trump’s America.” Meg and Colby live eight hours apart—Meg in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Colby in rural Ohio—but they may as well have grown up in completely different dimensions. Meg’s headed for the Ivy League; Colby barely graduated high school. Meg’s laptop is covered with campaign stickers, while Colby is less than convinced by cheery idealism. They “meet” when she dials his parents’ landline from her job at a voter registration call center: they bicker, they banter, he bests her, she calls him back. They fall in love—or something like it—over the course of long, meandering, sometimes tough conversations that challenge them both to rethink certain inalienable truths about themselves and what they believe. But in the end, are they just too different to make it work?
Politics and the importance of voting have a great role in the development of You Say It First, but they are not as central to the story as one would expect them to be at first glance. What was your approach when deciding on the weight these topics would have on the novel?
I knew from the beginning that if I was going to write a book that dealt with politics, I needed to do it with an extremely light touch. I mean, can you think of anything more excruciating than three hundred pages of like, a Stock Republican and a Stock Democrat arguing about The Issues? That’s what Twitter is for.
Meg and Colby’s positions towards politics are completely polarizing and true to the reality of young people’s political opinions. Both of them seem to level each other’s perspectives out, but how did you find that equilibrium while shaping the narration?
Meg and Colby felt real to me from the very beginning, and part of that was doing a lot of thinking about the particular circumstances that would logically have informed the way they each view the world. Both of them have major blind spots and prejudices, which is part of what makes their relationship so explosive and ultimately rewarding. Also, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with my social media knows exactly what my politics are, but it was really important to me that Colby not turn into some kind of straw man to stand in for everything I find infuriating about political apathy. Meg is earnest as heck, but she messes up constantly. And so do I.
On a lighter note, if Meg and Colby ran their own political campaigns, what would their respective slogans be?
Meg is probably still conducting market research on a carefully curated short list, but Colby’s would definitely be Moran 2020: Do Whatever You Want.
Deciding your future after high school is a decisive topic in You Say It First. What would your advice be for people who don’t really know what path to follow, especially in the field of writing?
You do not have to go to college for writing to be a successful writer! You do not have to go to college at all to be successful at a lot of things, actually, and I think we sell teenagers a false bill of goods in this country when we convince them to blindly take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of school debt without any guarantee they’re going to be able to make that money back. I loved college, and it’s great for a lot of things, but I would urge anyone who isn’t sure what the future holds to take some time to think about it before they rush into something just because they feel like that’s what they’re supposed to do.
You have said multiple times that you are a big fan of complicated love stories, but in You Say It First, this characteristic is not limited to romance: from friendships, to mother-daughter and brotherly bonds, to awkward friendliness with exes and casual crushes, what is your course of action when shaping these “messy”, complex bonds? And which one has the most difficult to build?
Messy relationships are my favorite relationships! In fiction, anyway. I’m very interested in the ways in which we misunderstand and miscommunicate with the people we love the most—the fear that keeps us from being completely honest with each other, the old hurt that we’ve been carrying around for years and years. The relationship that I fussed with the most in You Say It First was definitely the one between Meg and her best friend Emily—they care about each other so deeply, and they’ve been so close for so long, but both of them are sort of operating with an outdated view of one another that makes it hard for them to have the kinds of conversations they need to be having.
It was very much appreciated that Colby is the one to constantly mush over Meg and carry the emotional side of the relationship. It is certainly refreshing to learn about the feelings of the male romantic interest, because they tend to be overlooked, but it also adds a great contrast with his colder stand towards life. Did you settle on the alternating focalization of the narration because you wanted to show that side of the character or was it the other way around?
I LOVE writing books with a dual point of view! As soon as I first did it in Top Ten I knew it was a narrative technique I was going to want to return to. I think it works particularly well in You Say It First because so much of the conflict lies in the gulf between what Meg and Colby feel and what they’re able to say to each other, and the difference between how they perceive each other and how they each perceive themselves. It’s such a fun technique to play around with.
Finally, what are your plans for the future? Are you working on anything at the moment that you could give us a hint about?
I’m working on a few different things right now—my next YA, which is about three lifelong best friends and what happens when they all have to learn to survive without each other, and an adult romcom about a pair of washed-up child stars behaving badly. Stay tuned!
