You can't just be in that space relentlessly for too long.' It helped to have somebody to pull me out of it." I started getting overwhelmed and my wife Kate, who shares an office with me, was like, 'Are you listening to sad music? Stop listening to that. There was one point where I was listening to - this is comically sad - Smells Like Teen Spirit, the cover, by Tori Amos, on loop. I found out later from Laurie that she also listened to a lot of Tori Amos when she wrote the original book. "I was listening to a lot of Tori Amos because I listened to Tori Amos when I was 13. But I also wanted to be able to choose, for my own mental and emotional health, what I was going to work on every day." Tori Amos, then and now I didn't want to start at the beginning and then draw straight to the end and have my art improve over the course of the book. "It's a dark head space to be in for so long. There'd be times when I'd have to stop and get up and leave the room or go for a walk because I was so focused on how to render Melinda's pain accurately. I related to the point where Melinda's physical appearance looks like me when I was 12 or 13." Dark head spaces
When I was 13 - the main character Melinda's age - I went through a period of really bad depression and art helped me at that time. Even though the book is almost 20 years old, teenagers still relate to it and I related to it too. What struck me about it was that it felt very honest. "I was not familiar with the book, its readership or how pivotal the book was in the history of YA novels and what it meant for sexual assault survivors. Below, Carroll describes the emotional and creative process behind Speak.
Halse Anderson, who is a survivor of sexual violence, entrusted Stratford, Ont.-based artist Emily Carroll to illustrate the graphic novel version of this powerful book. What her classmates don't know (and refuse to hear) is that Melinda was raped by a popular upperclassman at the party. The novel follows a school year in the life of Grade 9 student Melinda, who is ostracized from day one for calling the cops and shutting down an end-of-summer party. Published in 1999, Laurie Halse Anderson's Speakwas a groundbreaking work of young adult fiction.
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