I Can’t Tell You
“Dear Miss Hillary,” wrote another in September. “First I want to thank you for opening my eyes in a whole new way. Your book . . . was so shoking and theres no words 4 it, it has become my favorite book, exept 4 the wanderer, but i think your book is winning by a lot. . . . I never thought this book was going 2 be about sex . . . it shocked me at first but then i got so into the book. I finished it the day i rented it. At some points i really wanted 2 be Ellie. It opened my eyes in a way no other book could.” She signed her e-mail “Love and Hope, The Changed One.”
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“I did relate to Jake,” says Frank, who grew up in Brooklyn. “As a little kid I didn’t talk a lot. That kind of freaked out adults, and kids tended not to talk to me or even look at me or say hello, because I really didn’t fit in. I had a hard time asking for anything I needed. I was so quiet.”
Frank, who’s 28, stumbled into YA publishing shortly after she graduated from Tufts in 1997. She’d enrolled in a dual degree program in English and studio art, but she soon became frustrated with the school’s conceptual-art emphasis and found herself more engaged by writing. When she graduated, she thought she might be able to combine the two by writing and illustrating books, so a teacher sent her to a friend who made children’s books. The friend read Frank’s short stories, plucked out one she thought particularly promising, and told Frank to send it to Eden Edwards, an editor at Houghton Mifflin.
Her DIY piece about apocalypse angst never made it on the air, but Glass commissioned another from her in the same style, and in 2000 Frank wound up in Chicago as a This American Life intern. Since then she’s been living on the north side, patching together a living writing, teaching, and producing work for public radio. Two weeks ago she won an honorable mention from the Third Coast Audio Festival for a piece coproduced (with Amy Dorn) for WBEZ’s “Chicago Matters” series. Titled All My Stuff in Bags, it’s an eight-minute documentary about an 18-year-old boy whose father kicked him out of the house on his birthday for being gay.
