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The Penguin Employee Book Club will be meeting this month to discuss Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is the second "interactive" employee book club, where Penguin employees submit questions to the author and the author provides the answers. View last month's Q&A with Marlon James here. 

Penguin employees who are interested in joining the next interactive book club should look out for the HR announcement of the the next book club pick in early April!

1. In the additional material at the end of the Anniversary Edition you wrote that the idea of the book came to you in a nightmare.  Did you then do any research on teenage depression/trauma before writing the book? 

Honestly? Not much at all. 

The emotional landscape of SPEAK is very close to what ninth grade felt like for me. After the early draft was in shape I did some research to see if my depression had been unusual and found that, sadly, it hadn't been. When I wrote Speak my oldest child was in sixth grade. At the time, I thought that put me at a disadvantage because she wasn't quite an adolescent. Looking back, I am so grateful I didn't lean on her life's experience. I pulled from my own pain, observations of teens hanging out at the mall, and that magic that always sneaks into the writing process.