Following the picture book My Parents Won’t Stop Talking—her children’s debut in collaboration with her wife, graphic novelist Tillie Walden—Emma Hunsinger is publishing her solo debut middle grade graphic novel, How It All Ends. When 13-year-old Tara Gimmel skips eighth grade and is promoted straight to high school, she faces a new and terrifying reality she doesn’t feel prepared for. Tara quickly learns that high school is nothing like the teen dramas she’s watched with her older sister Isla, who seemingly adopts a different persona when they cross paths in the halls. Then, for a class project, Tara is partnered with classmate Libby, who becomes a bright spot in Tara’s tumultuous freshman year. In a conversation with PW, Hunsinger spoke about coping with feeling unprepared for big life changes, and likened tried and true storytelling techniques to a pair of pants.
How It All Ends is the story of a kid being thrust into something she doesn’t feel ready for. What inspired this angle?
I felt so unprepared to start high school despite everything that my middle school did to try and make us ready for it. They set up all this stuff to help with the transition, but I was still so terrified of going. I had no idea what to expect.
Imagination is a huge theme in How It All Ends. You can’t control what you imagine, especially when you’re a kid. You don’t have a ton of experience with these sorts of giant shifts, so you can really run away with what you think is going to happen. It doesn’t help that TV shows set in high school have wild plots. Riverdale is about teenagers, but there’s a storyline where a kid gets kidnapped by nuns. A lot of media doesn’t really consider the very banal realities of high school.
What’s interesting is that I started writing the book in 2018–2019. Then, about a year later, the pandemic started. And so this story about a 13-year-old skipping a grade and going straight to high school ended up being the reality for a lot of kids. So many of them were in middle school when the pandemic started, and then suddenly, they were high schoolers.
How did developing How It All Ends compare to your previous experience working on short comics and My Parents Won’t Stop Talking?
How It All Ends is a culmination of everything I was doing beforehand. With all my previous works—my short comics, the picture book, and even “How to Draw a Horse” an autobiographical comic published in the New Yorker—I was still finding my footing in terms of what kind of storyteller I wanted to be.
When I look back at all the work I made before How It All Ends, I see a lot of similarities and overlapping imagery in each of them that end up in the book: the body language I use for the main character in My Parents Won’t Stop Talking, the motif of lying in bed from my short comic She Would Feel the Same.
I think of themes and images as a pair of pants. You don’t wear a pair of pants once and then throw it away. You try it on with different shirts and different shoes. Everything I was trying out in my earlier works informed this book. And I got to take those ideas even further, to a point of satisfaction.
Can you talk about collaborating with your wife Tillie, who also did the colors for How It All Ends?
I love working with Tillie. Whenever we talk about making a book together, people like to say that they could never work with their partner in a creative way. They always ask, “How do you do it?” But the thing is, Tillie and I are just really good at becoming a super-organism. We’re really good at bringing out the best in each other. It’s like our two brains become one big brain.
We wrote My Parents Won’t Stop Talking together. Then when it came to start drawing, I was like, “I don’t like drawing backgrounds,” and she said, “I don’t like drawing characters.” So we decided I would do the characters and she would do the backgrounds. It was a dream project; we were only doing what we wanted to do.
I pitched How It All Ends with the color palette already in place, so it was a known thing that one section would be red, the other section would be blue, and yellow would appear throughout the whole book. It ended up being a business decision to have Tillie color it. We knew it would take me much longer to do it myself. She was pregnant, and the baby was due right around the time I finished the first part of the project, so I said to Tillie, “For the sake of the book and for the sake of our family, you should color it so that it can be done faster and so the payment can be in this tax year instead of the next one.” It was the right decision. She did an amazing job. She would color while we were watching TV, and I would take care of the baby while she did it. It was really fun for her.
Do you have any advice for how students can survive the next school year and the new experiences it might bring?
My advice for any young person about to embark on a journey like starting high school or going to college is to eat a lot of protein in the morning. Which is not totally related to the book.
I feel like the message of How It All Ends is to be patient with yourself. You don’t have to change to fit in because you’re going to change anyway. Don’t try to force it. I know it’s hard, though. One of the most painful things about growing up is that you’re trying on all these different personalities and different ways to be and when they fail, it hurts.
I want you to know that all the actors in Riverdale are 25 years old and you don’t have to look like them yet. You have to remember that you’re playing the long game. You’re going to become who you’re meant to be. You’re going to know yourself in the future. But you’re just getting to know yourself now. So be patient. You don’t have to rush.
How It All Ends by Emma Hunsinger, colors by Tillie Walden. Greenwillow, $25.99 Aug. 6 ISBN 978-0-06-315815-3; $15.99 paper ISBN 978-0-06-315814-6