Alice Oseman is in her bedroom and I am in my bedroom. Our Skype interview, which ran to slightly under two hours, unwound as a long, blissfully casual ramble. We skated over the most arbitrary of topics - YouTubing culture, Artemis Fowl, trans visibility in the media, the author James Patterson - before, eventually, we had to prise ourselves away from our laptops. It was informal to the point where 10 minutes passed without any prepared questions being asked.
Alice Oseman is, if you don’t know, the author of Solitaire and - as of now - Radio Silence. She had her first novel, Solitaire published when she was 19 (“I hate using my age when talking about Solitaire,” she says) and contemporary teen fiction was very much on the rise. Had Solitaire been published a year later it could have been swallowed up in a now-saturated genre but Oseman’s remarkable honesty, engrossing characters and bone-dry humour earned her plenty of fans from the off and marked her as one to watch.
Radio Silence isn’t a dramatic departure tonally or thematically from Solitaire but it’s just as strong. Oseman’s first book was a breathtakingly accurate portrayal of teenage ennui - The Times called it “The Catcher in the Rye for the digital age” - and Radio Silence ventures into darker territory, featuring characters a little older than Solitaire’s protagonists. It is, predictably, a more mature piece of work; a bold, confident and, above all, important book (but not in the way you’d expect) with Oseman’s wit and insight shining throughout.
But the road to this point was not easy. Oseman is in her final year of studying English literature at the University of Durham and she had to fit the writing of Radio Silence around her studies (or, conversely, her studies had to fit around her writing). The finished product went through dozens of drafts.
“It was very stressful. Any author who’s written their second book will tell you that it’s the worst book to write in your career just because you wrote the first one from your passion for writing, you just wanted to do it, and there were no deadlines,” she says. “With book two you’ve get deadlines, there’s the pressure of it being as good as the first one. So I started coming up with plans for it before Solitaire came out - a few months before it came out - but I didn’t finalise the plot for almost two years after that. I’ve got a folder of so many different plans.”
So the final draft wasn’t dramatically different from Oseman’s original idea? “Yeah, it wasn’t like I came up with a story and went ?I don’t want to do this’. I had this idea that I wanted to write a book about going from school to university and the idea that you don’t have to go to university. That’s the essential concept that I had at the start. And then I kept trying to turn it into a plot and it was the plotting that I found really hard so I didn’t actually start writing it until a few months after Solitaire came out,” she says. “But, like the plans, I just kept restarting. I didn’t start writing what became the real thing until like a year after that.”
At the heart of Solitaire was a mystery, which, as I tell Oseman, was the initial hook for me. But after one chapter, anyone will soon discover that it’s the characters that keep you there. The mystery becomes increasingly peripheral but it gave Oseman a structure to work with. Radio Silence is more of a straight-up contemporary coming-of-age novel. Was it more difficult to write because she didn’t have that ready-made framework?
“Yeah, I think that’s why I found plotting it so hard because obviously again I wanted it to be character focussed but I didn’t want there to be this action plot happening like in Solitaire because that would make it too similar to Solitaire,” she says. “So, the challenge was trying to figure out what I could put in the story that would make people want to turn the page. Particularly at the start of contemporary books, no matter how great your character development is later on, at the start, people have no reason to care about your characters because they don’t know them and if there’s no initial intrigue - no question, “oooh, what’s going on? I don’t know” - there’s no reason why they’d want to read on. They might but they also might just cast it aside. You don’t know so that was the challenge for this one.”
Oseman’s strong suit is, undoubtedly, her characters. Rich, engaging and impeccably written, Solitaire has a fascinating range of characters you can’t resist getting behind. Radio Silence boasts just as good a cast and what’s instantly noticeable is that it’s significantly more culturally diverse than Solitaire. Alice Oseman is entirely aware of this.
“That’s like my biggest regret with Solitaire, there not being any obviously people of colour in the main cast”. She hesitates to clarify that “I have no excuses” but she wants to explain her reasoning behind it. “It is just privilege; white privilege, straight privilege. And unless you’ve been educated otherwise, which I have, you have, we know about these issues now. It’s not that you are racist or anything like that, you don’t even think about it so… I hate using my age when talking about Solitaire but I was only like 17 when I wrote it.”
“All my friends were white, every kind of TV show that I watched, the books I read, the characters were always white. It didn’t occur to me that it would be important but now I know better. And that’s one of the things I was interested in combatting with Radio Silence.”
The two central relationships in both of Oseman’s novels are platonic and while it may not seem particularly groundbreaking written down like that, it truly is and as a reader who is constantly fed passionate teenage romance, Oseman’s books are a breath of fresh air. “With YA books in general, romance is always a very big focus. In all kinds of really popular YA books - Twilight, The Hunger Games, John Green - romance is the most important thing in those books. It’s just so untrue to real life,” she says. “Romance to me and everyone I know… it’s not the centre of your world. I think it’s almost damaging to teenagers to tell them they should be looking for their soul mate at this age, it makes them feel bad for being single. It’s really terrible to be honest.”
The main romance in Solitaire is between the brother of the heroine and his long-term boyfriend. Nick and Charlie have an incredibly compelling relationship because they’re written with such unflinching honesty. The fact they’re a same-sex male couple isn’t something Oseman comments on or even draws attention to; they’re just a couple. But pop culture, I note, has a strange relationship with gay couples, particularly male couples. Male friendships are constantly skewed to have sexual undertones, and I cite Poe and Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as a recent example.
Oseman nods her head. “It’s shipping culture,” she says. “Contemporary authors know about it now and they’ll put gay, male side characters in their books just so that people can read it and be like ?oh, this is a cute gay couple’. And I do feel people do that with Nick and Charlie whereas that’s not why I put them in there.”
Without going into detail, there’s a similar relationship in Radio Silence and there are intentional parallels to Nick and Charlie, Oseman says: “I almost wanted to combat that in Radio Silence with a couple who were nothing like Nick and Charlie. They aren’t perfect.”
With the publication of Radio Silence, Alice Oseman’s two-book deal with HarperCollins comes to an end but she fully intends to continue writing. I ask her what her plans are now that Radio Silence is in the wild.
“Got to get a new book deal, that’s the first thing. I’ve got an idea for book three, which I’m sure you’ve seen a few things about on Tumblr.” Oseman’s Tumblr gives little away but everything suggests it’s something to do with fame and being in the spotlight. “I haven’t planned much of book three and even if I had stuff to say I wouldn’t really be able to reveal it anyway but I can say that I’m hoping for it to be very different to Solitaire and Radio Silence in terms of setting, time frame and even themes. It’ll still be in my style, very character heavy, but I have ideas about how different it’ll be.”
In the summer and autumn of 2015 Oseman published two e-book spin-offs of Solitaire. Both are well worth checking out and the short format really highlights Oseman’s knack for dialogue and characterisation. I ask if we can expect any Radio Silence novellas? “I don’t know. I don’t want to say yes because there hasn’t been any talk of that but depending on how long there is between Radio Silence and book 3, I would be up for writing some novellas.”
Solitaire was so warmly received, has Oseman considered a sequel? “Yes, and it would probably be set a year after Solitaire. It would be about Michael and Tori’s relationship and where it goes. The thing is in Solitaire they’ve only known each other for a month and they do very quickly become close but it’s still the very start of this incredible friendship and I just want to see where that went.”
Oseman is vocal online about her dislike of her university course. I ask what it’s like being an author who writes books but hates studying books. “Recently, this year and a lot of last year, I’ve found reading books very difficult. It’s not been the case before that. I’ve not been a very fast reader, I don’t read as much as many other people. As a child, growing up in my teens, I’ve always had a book on the go. In my first year of university - I chose English lit because I liked books. If you enjoy reading, you usually enjoy studying them. I’ve never really enjoyed academic things, I’ve always felt that’s what I have to do - but that’s a different thing entirely…”
“I read a lot of books in my first year at uni outside the course so as well as my course reading I read a lot of YA books. I read a lot of YA books because Solitaire came out and I wanted to know what else was out there. But then I got into my second year at uni, I hadn’t enjoyed my first year, and trying to write book two was taking so long I was getting so stressed about it. Reading other books, my author peers, was making me stressed because ?oh God these people are writing these really good books, how am I supposed to compare?’”
So who was Oseman’s childhood hero? “Mine is probably Artemis Fowl because it was my favourite book series when I was younger. I just wanted to be Artemis Fowl. I thought he was the coolest person ever.”
What character could you fall in love with? “I don’t think I could fall in love with any of my characters to be honest. They just feel like my children and that’s a bit weird. It’s a no from me.”
Finally, I ask her, rather insincerely: why did you want to write for children?
“I am a children!”
Alice Oseman’s Radio Silence is published on Thursday 25 February. You can order it at the Guardian bookshop. And under 18s: don’t forget to enter of Radio Silence signed and dedicated copy giveaway here!
Under 18, love reading and NOT a member of the Guardian children’s books site? Come on in, the water’s fine, and you could be on these pages interviewing your favourite author!
