Her Story: Ladies In Literature is a special, month-long series on Pop! Goes The Reader in which we celebrate the literary female role models whose stories have inspired and empowered us since time immemorial. From Harriet M. Welsch to Anne Shirley, Becky Bloomwood to Hermione Granger, Her Story: Ladies In Literature is a series created for women, by women as twenty authors answer the question: “Who’s your heroine?” You can find a complete list of the participants and their scheduled guest post dates Here!
About Kelly Quindlen
Kelly Quindlen writes about queer teens and their journey to understanding themselves. Her self-published novel, Her Name in the Sky, was featured on BuzzFeed, AfterEllen, and Bustle. Her traditional debut, Late to the Party, releases in April 2020. Kelly is on the leadership team of Fortunate & Faithful Families, which supports and affirms Catholic parents with LGBT children. She has spoken at PFLAG meetings, high school GSA meetings, and Catholic retreats. She lives in Atlanta with her sweet girlfriend and not-so-sweet chihuahua.
Growing up, the only time I fought with my mom was when she tried to wrestle me into dresses. I despised those pretty prisons and the expectations that came with them: Barbies and teacups and the color pink. I preferred to run wild in overalls and baseball caps, scaling boulders and rolling down hills and digging in the dirt. People said this made me a tomboy. I lit up like they’d called me a princess.
Still, I often worried there weren’t other girls like me. I didn’t know many tomboys in real life. I felt different. Defective. Lonely.
Then I met Caddie Woodlawn.
I was probably 11 years old the first time I picked up Carol Ryrie Brink’s novel about a spunky frontier girl and her loving family. I read the opening chapter about Caddie and her two brothers crossing a dangerous river beneath a summer prairie sky, and it felt like Caddie — and her story — had been breathed into life for me and me alone.
Caddie climbs trees, wrangles snakes, and beats up the classroom bully. She lives beyond the domestic sphere associated with femininity and embraces the great outdoors as her kingdom. It’s Caddie’s father who encourages her to become a rough-and-tumble tomboy, hoping it will relieve her of the frail health she knew as a toddler. “I want you to let Caddie run wild with the boys,” Mr. Woodlawn tells his wife. “Don’t keep her in the house learning to be a lady. I would rather see her learn to plow than make samplers, if she can get her health by doing so… Bring the other girls up as you like, but let me have Caddie.”
Learning to be a lady. How I felt the sting of that expectation! I can remember standing in line in the third grade, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my navy uniform shorts, and feeling a great rush of unfairness when the teacher scolded me to leave my hands by my sides. She didn’t scold the boys for putting their hands in their pockets, so why was she chiding me? The implication was clear even though I hadn’t yet learned about gender constructs and feminism and socialization. You are a girl, and therefore you are expected to act a certain way.
There’s a peculiar kind of shame we develop as children when we realize that something about our intrinsic essence doesn’t line up with how adults expect us to be. But if we find our reflections in the lives of fictional characters, we learn that we are okay exactly as we are. Caddie, with her unruly red hair and thirst for adventure, was one of the first reflections I found in literature. She reached across a century to assure me that being my authentic self would always lead me home. And isn’t that at the heart of why we read stories?
Title Late To The Party
Author Kelly Quindlen
Intended Target Audience Young Adult
Genre Contemporary, Realistic Fiction
Publication Date April 21st 2020 by Roaring Brook Press
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon ● Chapters ● The Book Depository
Seventeen is nothing like Codi Teller imagined.
She’s never crashed a party, never stayed out too late. She’s never even been kissed. And it’s not just because she’s gay. It’s because she and her two best friends, Maritza and JaKory, spend more time in her basement watching Netflix than engaging with the outside world.
So when Maritza and JaKory suggest crashing a party, Codi is highly skeptical. Those parties aren’t for kids like them. They’re for cool kids. Straight kids.
But then Codi stumbles upon one of those cool kids, Ricky, kissing another boy in the dark, and an unexpected friendship is formed. In return for never talking about that kiss, Ricky takes Codi under his wing and draws her into a wild summer filled with late nights, new experiences, and one really cute girl named Lydia. The only problem? Codi never tells Maritza or JaKory about any of it.
From author Kelly Quindlen comes a poignant and deeply relatable story about friendship, self-acceptance, what it means to be a Real Teenager. Late to the Party is an ode to late bloomers and wallflowers everywhere.
One Response
This is a great guest post and I am looking forward to Kelly’s next novel! I always felt unseen in literature (and life) until I found some characters I really connected to.
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