I talked about Reasons to Hate Me with bookseller Mara Luther for the American Booksellers Association BookED podcast on September 3, 2025. You can listen to the interview here: https://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-susan-metallo-1632189

What follows is an excerpt of the transcript:

. . .

Mara Luther: I think for drama nerds, that part of the book [the theatre references] really does come out. It’s a great one for kids who are in theater or speech and debate, all of those kind of groups where you do — you collect all of us who don’t belong anywhere else. Readers often fall into those categories, too. So, I appreciated that about this book.

SM: I wanted it to be a book for the theater nerds and the misfits. I pushed really hard — and my editor was really supportive of this — to make sure that the references to theater terminology and plays were not treated like a foreign language that we stopped and explained constantly. I didn’t want this to be a book where theater kids were just rolling their eyes the whole time, like, “This old lady is old lady-splaining to me what I clearly know.” I tried to make that part of it extremely authentic for the kids.

ML: Yeah. Very cool. That’s definitely going to come through. And then the parts of the book that you wrote as a script, too, I really appreciated.

You write it as a blog, and there’s script in there, and there are parts that are not necessarily the blog. They’re more in the moment — in the moment writing. How did you choose those moments when you didn’t want to be looking backward necessarily — where you wanted it to be more action driven?

SM: That’s a great question. I started out thinking it was going to be all looking back, and all or these little funny anecdotes, and I realized that that wasn’t giving enough room for Jess to grow and change throughout the book, which is so critical in YA, giving the main character a chance to be this dynamic figure that the kids can read along with.

And frankly, I keep saying it’s for the kids, but it’s for me too. I read so much YA. Maybe you do, too.

ML: Totally!

SM: I need to process through these moments with teenagers, I think possibly in part because when I was a teenager, we did not have books about neurodivergent protagonists that felt respectful and authentic. We did not have books about queer protagonists that were nuanced, just normal books about kids going through their normal lives — not these sort of intense “issue books.” So I think for me now, reading books with representation is so important to me as a reader. And I think I’m stuck in that YA phase where I need to process all this stuff I didn’t get to process as a teenager.

So that was really the motivation for having some blog chapters where it reads as though it’s happening right now, even though that was a little bit of a suspension of disbelief — because if she’s, say, describing today’s creative writing class and having dialogue from today, it requires the reader to take a little bit of a leap, and say, “Okay. I know she’s framing this as a blog. Would a kid actually write down their entire day with dialogue in a blog post? Maybe not, but I’ll accept it from Jess because she’s a little weird, and writerly, and out there.”

The moments that felt like something pivotal was going to happen in Jess’ life in that day needed to be in the present tense. And then a lot of the interior exploration could happen from past events, or you as the reader could come to understand something that was happening in Jess’ life from past events. But it was really important for me to show her going actually through her day, through her year, and changing in real time, rather than looking back on it. . . . Keep reading →