In What Happened to Rachel Riley?, Claire Swinarski’s latest middle grade book, new kid Anna notices that titular Rachel Riley was popular in seventh grade and now, in eighth grade, is ostracized. When Anna decides to investigate, she realizes the story is tied up with the way that some of the boys have been slapping girls on their rear end. PW talked with Swinarski about the “urgent and timeless” problem of sexual harassment, what it was like writing her first adult novel, and how her faith comes into her writing.
What Happened to Rachel Riley? is written as an investigation for a podcast that main character Anna, a fan of Serial, wants to do. What did presenting it this way let you do?
I’ve always loved books that aren’t told just in straight prose. When I was a kid, I loved books that had interviews and notes and other aspects of storytelling. And I thought with a mystery, so often it’s solved by more than just conversations between people. And by telling it through a podcast format, I thought I’d be able to show a lot of different perspectives, inject a lot more of characters’ personalities into the book. It makes the mystery a little more twisty turny, a little harder to figure out. I tried to use a wide variety of materials—police reports, hacked emails, texts—to tell the story. It was really fun, and it helped me stretch my creative muscles to write in a different way and think through how to get information to Anna and how she would come across these different things. At the end, readers find out how she had access to all these things. I’m also a diehard podcast fan, and Serial was my gateway.
The book digs into the issue of sexual harassment in middle school. What made this feel urgent to write about?
On the one hand, it feels urgent, but on the other hand, it feels timeless. When I started thinking about the book, the first thing that came to me was an ostracized girl, a girl who had been popular and now wasn’t, and the mystery of what happened. I was thinking about what happens in the hallways, at lunch. I do school visits, I talk to middle schoolers, I have an army of babysitters to help run my life, and in talking [with them] about their experiences it became clear that this was still a really big issue. In my school, butt slapping was the thing; it was constant. Back in the early 2000s when everyone wore sweatpants with Hollister or Juicy written across the back, it was a whole thing for a boy to slap your butt and yell out the word on the pants. I was talking about it with a friend I grew up with, and we said, ‘Wow, that is so inappropriate.’ At the time, we felt weird about it, but we never talked about it. We all just laughed it off. We had teachers who saw it and did nothing. Now that I’m an adult, if that happened to my daughter, I would be irate; I’d be calling the school. It’s such a common thing, but we don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I think books are a great place to have these heavy conversations in a safe way.
We see something of that in the book, when initially the girls themselves and then later the adults in the school try to downplay the fact that boys are touching girls without their consent. Why was this important to depict?
I think that when I was a kid, it very much felt like you were supposed to laugh everything off. The way you showed that you were cool and aloof and confident was that you took nothing seriously; everything was funny. I think if I had said anything back in middle school, everyone would have said, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re so dramatic!’ One teacher reacted correctly and sent the boy to the principal’s office and all us girls were angry with her. “He was just kidding,” we told her.
God bless middle school teachers; it’s a big job. I get how this might feel like just one more thing I have to solve, but this is actually more important than pre-algebra. Raising boys and girls to respect each other, to understand autonomy and boundaries, is so important. It’s one of the most crucial things we can be teaching them. It’s so important that teachers have an awareness of what’s going on and of what to do about it. In the book, there are two versions of the school handbook, and you see how it gets upgraded. The first is so vague and broad that teachers wouldn’t even know what to do. And at the end I try to show the administration now having a policy and a plan and knowing to take it seriously. Because it is serious. We remember these things for years. As much as I try to end the book on a note of hope, I do think these things can affect you forever.
Another thread has to do with the boys’ roles in the events, which range from perpetrator to complicit witness to tentative ally. What were you hoping to show here?
I have a son, and when I write it’s important to me to show that you can change what you’ve been doing. Even if you made bad choices yesterday and the day before and the day before that, you can wake up today and do something different. I tried to show that through some of the boys. There’s no such thing in my opinion as an evil 12-year-old. Twelve-year-olds are learning, they’re figuring it out. It’s rough out there. It was so important to me to show that the boys have the capacity to change their minds, to decide to do something differently.
The pressure of being a 12- to 13-year-old boy is just as strong as the pressure of being a 12- to 13-year-old girl. The peer pressure and social pressure are very intense. I have a lot of compassion for boys like Cody who are torn. Does he do the right thing 100% of the time? No. But he tries to do the right thing, even though he doesn’t always hit the mark. He’s learning, he’s growing, and that was important for me to portray. I actually got some pushback about the end of the book—some people thought I was a little too soft on the boys. But I wanted to show that redemption is possible, that changing your mind is possible. No one is doomed to be a sexual harasser for the rest of their life. If we tell 12-year-olds that, we’re in for a world of trouble.
Anna and her family speak Polish and you say in the acknowledgments that this is your husband’s family background. Why did you decide to make Anna Polish?
She just felt Polish to me. My husband is from Poland; I’m surrounded by Polish culture, which is so vibrant. I was also thinking about the idea of overcoming hard things. Communism is still very much talked about in my husband’s family; my in-laws grew up speaking Russian in communist Poland, and the idea of communism ending was such a pipe dream. But some people had to have that hope. Some people had to put themselves out there and fight against it. That’s obviously a larger-scale issue than girls getting their butts slapped in middle school, but is it really that different? They’re connected by the question of how can we ever make a movement, how can this ever change? Someone has to be the person who says, well, I guess I’m going to try. And I love the idea of Anna writing letters to her grandmother because I was very close to my grandmother growing up.
You also write adult books for women who consider themselves Catholic and feminist. Does your faith come into the middle grade books you write?
My faith comes into everything I do. It comes into the way I go to the grocery store. I believe that God is a god of truth and love and justice. Justice is all throughout the Bible, and I’m very passionate about it. The Catholic history around justice movements—Catholics are always there. We were marching with Martin Luther King Jr. Anna’s family is interested in the question of what good accountability is. There’s an accountability that doesn’t make room for forgiveness and an accountability that does. There’s a constant need for forgiveness and the idea that no one is too far gone for forgiveness.
Your next book, just announced by William Morrow, is your adult fiction debut. Can you talk a bit about that and what it’s like to write fiction for adults?
It’s a lot different writing for adults. With middle grade, I’m always worried about the voice, the references. With adult fiction, I am an adult, which makes it a lot easier. But there are similarities, too: both books take place in Wisconsin where I’m from, both have scenes of forgiveness and redemption. I’ve never had a book come so easily; I just had a blast writing it. It’s a multi-perspective book, which kept me from getting bored. And the characters came really clearly to me. One of my characters was a 31-year-old woman; hello, that’s me.
I’ve been writing middle grade nonstop for four years, so it was nice to have that change, but I have two middle grade books that we’re going to announce probably in March. They’ll be out in 2024 and 2025. One is a friendship summer camp story, and the other is historical fiction set in World War II Paris. After that, I don’t know. But there’s not much middle grade fiction about Communism, and that’d be an avenue I’d love to explore. I think a lot of kids have no idea about that history.
What Happened to Rachel Riley? by Claire Swinarski. Quill Tree, $16.99 Jan. 10 ISBN 978-0-06-321309-8
