Authors Interviewing Characters:  Barbara Bottner

I AN HERE NOW

Barbara Bottner has written (and sometimes illustrated) 45 titles for children, from wordless picture books to young adult novels. Her work has been translated, animated and adopted into musicals.  The New York Times bestseller, Miss Brooks Loves Books, as well as Bootsie Barker Bites, Wallace’s Lists (with Gerald Kruglik) and Pricilla Gorilla are some of her favorites. At 77 years-old, Bottner will have three books released this year, including her first YA free verse novel, I AM HERE NOW, a beautiful, heart wrenching story of one artist’s coming of age in the 1960s.

Inspired by Bottner’s own adolescence, I AM HERE NOW is set in New York in 1960, when Maisie’s first day of High School should be exciting, but all she wants is to escape her lonely and chaotic world, with an abusive mother and a father who’s rarely there. Maisie says, “You can’t trust life to give you decent parents, or beautiful eyes, a fine French accent or an outstanding flair for fashion. No, life does what it wants. It’s sneaky as a thief.” 

Barbara Bottner Interviews Maisie

The Bronx, 1960

As she returns to high school, Maisie Meyer is trying to survive her angry, volatile mother, her father’s frequent disappearances, her parents’ almost certain divorce, her brother Davy’s struggle with his sexual identity and her own wild passions and insecurities not to mention her friend Richie’s who deals with his own troubled, violent home. When Maisie makes a new friend and enters a new world full of helpful, artistic adults, life begins to seem promising. But desperate, she invades Rachel’s world, stealing Rachel’s boyfriend and cozying up to Rachel’s painter-mother. Rachel feels sidelined and discarded. When Richie disappears, Maisie’s mother becomes a loose cannon and explodes at Davy for the first time. Maisie runs away, unsuccessfully. It will take all she has to find a way forward.

Maisie, how do you feel about your portrayal in the novel? Did BB miss anything you want to add?

I’m pretty happy with it. I think it shows that even though I’m in trouble inside my home, I have spirit and resources. I’m glad I have dimensions as well so I’m not only a ‘problem’ character. There is a lot about my love of art, the painters who inspire me. And I’m also portrayed as someone who betrays her best friend, but I think it’s clear that my situation is desperate and what I do is mostly in the interest of surviving difficult circumstances. Until I meet my best friend’s mother, I have no advocate at all. That’s very difficult for a teenager. 

Do you think Kiki, Rachel’s mother, really loves you?

That’s a good question. Kiki is based on a real person. Maisie is based on a real person, too, me. All through my life I questioned if the real Kiki loved me. I felt if she did, she would have done more. At least that’s what I thought when I was a teenager. I see it differently now. I wished I could live with her at one point. But it probably would have been a disaster as there are aspects of the ‘real’ Kiki that would have troubled me. She was incredibly frank. No window dressing. Blunt. Confrontive.

She was not easy on my actual friend, based on Rachel. She was, indeed, struggling with alcoholism. I didn’t have to explore that deeply in the novel but it was very real in life. She cheated on her husband. And she did love to talk about her life, so that would have been overwhelming for me. So, it was a fantasy. Having said all of that, I think she felt for my situation, wanted to help and, also, we did bond over art. Later on she became a therapist. Some of her clients were famous and she told us lots about them she shouldn’t have. That, also, would have been very troubling, so I guess I’m saying she gave me enough and she gave me vital support that I needed.

What is the biggest fiction in the novel as it concerns you?

Well, I never had to protect my brother from my mother. In fact, he dealt with her much better than I did. I never had to call my father to yank us out of there. I did go live with him in Manhattan and eventually so did my brother. He was very narcissistic and very involved in his business, as it portrayed in the novel. He didn’t really concern himself that much with either one of us. I also had a stepbrother who was also pretty ignored by his mother, my stepmother.

He and I would drive back to Long Island to go to our last year of high school together. We were in the same grade. He had a Corvette. We were not in the same circle of friends and he tried to glom onto me to climb, socially, but I didn’t encourage that. I didn’t respect or like him. He’s not in the book at all. I have no idea where he is now. Our two families were scotch taped together for decades. It was all pretty phony. Even writing this makes me very sad.

Can you look into the future for Maisie and tell us what you see?

I see my life, basically. This means her life was hard and challenging but also very exciting. It also required her to deeply inquire into herself and work hard to become whole. I can share some bits here:

I did study painting, including an almost fantasy year in Paris at an atelier. But I also had a nervous breakdown after dropping acid and had to spend a year in a mental hospital. I had to be in therapy off and on, study and practice Buddhism. After the hospital I was lucky enough to land in a theater company and tour the USA and Europe with some fantastically talented people. But what is true both for Maisie and for me is that the arts saved my life. I tried to communicate that in the book.

That connection to people who see other worlds and can bring those unseen worlds into view through craft and talent made all the difference for me. This did not matter what form it took, whether it was through dance, my first love, theater, writing, animation, lyrics, comedy or literary fiction. I was able to express myself through all of those forms. Simply being fascinated by the arts and inspired kept me going no matter what traumas I may have gone through, memories that haunted me or adjustments, rejections, disappointments I had to endure.    

In closing, I think this book is a great guidepost to would-be artists, who often have demons to overcome and the families that begat them as well as any teen who has dings and warts and is facing the unknown. The book also resonates with adult readers reflecting on their own childhoods.

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Find out more about her on her website http://barbarabottnerbooks.com/

I AM HERE NOW

“Rife with teen-appealing domestic and relationship drama…Heartbreakingly rendered.” –Horn Book, starred review

Set in the 1960s, Barbara Bottner’s I Am Here Now is a beautiful novel in verse about one artist’s coming of age. It’s a heartbreaking, powerful and inspiring depiction of what it’s like to shatter your life―and piece it all back together.

You can’t trust Life to give you decent parents, or beautiful eyes, a fine French accent or an outstanding flair for fashion. No, Life does what it wants. It’s sneaky as a thief.

Maisie’s first day of High school should be exciting, but all she wants is to escape.

Her world is lonely and chaotic, with an abusive mother and a father who’s rarely there to help.

So when Maisie, who finds refuge in her art, meets the spirited Rachel and her mother, a painter, she catches a glimpse of a very different world―one full of life, creativity, and love―and latches on.

But as she discovers her strengths through Rachel’s family, Maisie, increasingly desperate, finds herself risking new friendships, and the very future she’s searching for.

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Category: On Writing