Why I chose to set my teen romcom at Jesus school
TW: Religious trauma, homophobia, etc
It’s about a month until the release of my third book, I Kissed Shara Wheeler. It’s my first book for young adults, and it’s also the most personal thing I’ve ever written.
The closer it gets, the more I feel compelled to explain what went into creating it. I wrote it back in 2020, way before Don’t Say Gay, the latest attacks on trans kids in Texas, or the recent rash of book bans (one of my books is currently under investigation for obscenity in at least one state, which is hilarious to me because it’s an adult romance, so like, are you gonna ban all adult romance novels for sexual content, or just the gay ones?). While it feels a bit morbidly timely for this book to be coming out right now, it wasn’t written as a response to the last several months of news.
Yeah, a lot of this book is about coming of age queer in the religious South. It is first and foremost a romantic comedy, but I wrote Shara for the kids who act and sound and live like the kids in it. And, to be completely honest, I wrote Shara for me.
You know those things you get at the Dollar Tree? The brittle little bricks shaped like dinosaurs or trucks that seem like they’re made of paper, until you drop one into a warm bath and it unfurls into a washcloth? I feel like that’s what I did with my thirteen years of Evangelical Christian school. I dehydrated them and packed them down into a silly and harmless shape then shrink-wrapped it and left it in the back of a cabinet like an unused birthday party favor.
It’s the weirdest thing when you’re in it. By which I mean, it sucked for me, but it also seemed normal. Absurd and often shitty, but unremarkable. At no point did I think it was an unusual thing about my life, even though I had to educate myself on sexual reproduction from the internet because we literally were not allowed to discuss that part of the biology textbook. After I graduated, I couldn’t imagine going back without feeling a pit in my stomach, but I didn’t think that was the same thing as damage.
For a long time, I thought I was insulated from a certain amount of harm, because I was both Catholic and closeted to everyone including myself during that part of my life. Being Catholic at home and on the weekends protected me, because Baptists told me I was going to hell for worshipping the Virgin Mary, which I knew to be inaccurate in a lot of ways, so it was hard to get me intellectually on board with the rest of their logic. And believing I was cis and straight—even though I had millions of fruity and gender-y thoughts and behaviors, even though I felt out of place on such an innate, molecular level that it should have been obvious—meant I didn’t think I was experiencing the bigotry around me as anything more than an invested ally.
So, even after coming out as many times as I have, even after becoming an author of queer books whose job involves being queer in public, I never gave a lot of thought to how much of my upbringing I had internalized as directionless self-hatred and shame.
I knew I had been successfully indoctrinated in some ways, because it had taken a lot of work for me to begin to undo what had been done. I didn’t learn about evolution in an academic setting until college. I had been fed a diet of misinformation about everything from abortion to dinosaurs. I didn’t know it was unusual to be a tween and get on a bus with a group of strange adults for a weekend beach retreat that included sermons about sin nature and middle schoolers sobbing in tongues on the floor in front of the altar. I mean, I didn’t even know that every other kid in America was not also being led in prayer over Man Of God President Bush several times a week. I may not have bought into all of it, may have even made fun of some of it as I got into my teens, but I was marinated in it. I didn’t fully register the cause inside of me, only the sick, lonely feeling that was the effect. Everything was just so normalized. It’s hard to know you’re being traumatized when you don’t know anything else.
And yes, I had a much harder time reading my own sexuality and gender signs than I should have. It took years to conceptualize either beyond dreaming about people I wished I was having the kinds of relationships I wanted to have. It took even longer to come out to my family, because I was terrified it would change the way they thought of me. I didn’t fear being disowned by them, but I was afraid of being pitied. I was afraid they would start looking at me like I was a three-legged dog in an ASPCA commercial. And in some mangled part of me, I thought I would deserve it, because I was defective. An embarrassment, something not to have around polite company.
But I was pretty sure I didn’t think of myself as an abomination, not the way I had been taught to think of myself. So I didn’t think these feelings were the result of internalized homophobia. In short, I didn’t think Christian school had fucked me up that badly. I mean, was it even that bad? So many people I knew seemed to come out of it just fine. I had good memories, too. We all grow up around stuff that leaves marks. My marks just happened to be in the shape of a cross.
There was this deep, deep shame in me though. There still is, sometimes. And for the longest time, I couldn’t figure out where it started.
It wasn’t until after I had published my first book and turned in a draft of my second that it really came into focus. I was, by a lot of metrics, successful as a queer writer. I had a movie option and a New York Times Bestseller burst on the cover. My wikipedia page (which has by now outed me more than once in various ways, including to my own family) described me as “openly bisexual.” And still, my throat would start closing up any time I thought of going back to my hometown.
I couldn’t bear to think about any of the old neighbors reading my books or knowing me as queer. When I was home, I was embarrassed by my own career, because it nuked every bit of plausible deniability I had. I was afraid families I had babysat for would feel weird about having left me alone with their kids, or that someone would tell me they were praying for me. I was afraid it would be high school all over again, where everyone smiles to your face and laughs when you leave the room. I was thankful that I was only book famous, and that authoring is not a get-recognized-on-the-street type of gig, because at least I didn’t often have to worry about physical harm. But it was a fucking trip: the most secret, carefully-guarded part of me had become the most public, notable thing about my life.
I remember talking to my therapist at the time about this, because I was preparing to visit home for the first time since my book debuted, and I was nervous. And I remember telling her, “You know, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I did attend a conservative evangelical Christian school for thirteen years. Maybe that has something to do with these feelings.” And she was like, uh, run that back one more time? Because I had not, in all our sessions examining my anxiety and depression and grief and identity, mentioned it at all. Turns out, the environment of your formative years is relevant to your adult psyche, and you can’t just never unpack that? Fucked up but true.
So I took my little dehydrated dinosaur trauma towel out of the cabinet and out of its shrinkwrap, and my therapist and I dropped it into the bathtub of my adult life, and the work began.
One of the first things I began to understand is that, with religious trauma, it’s not only about what is said. I was Catholic and curious and hard-headed as a kid, so I was capable of disagreeing with and dismissing some things I was told. I remember several specific incidents in my teens of sitting through explicitly hateful, homophobic sermons in weekly chapel and thinking to myself that it was bullshit. Those sermons were painful on a level I didn’t precisely understand yet, but they also felt dismissable, because I knew I didn’t believe them.
But there’s also the way that it’s said. It was the implication of it being the sermon in chapel at all: according to every person on this campus responsible for your wellbeing, this is not only allowed to be said to you, but it’s mandatory for you to hear it. It’s good for you, like medicine. It was the fact that sometimes the person delivering that message was one of your own teachers, and then you’d go to class and he’d make inside jokes with you and teach a lesson you actually enjoyed, and you had to hold in your mind the idea that someone who seemed to love you would hate you if they actually knew anything about you.
And it wasn’t just homophobia, either. It wasn’t even always explicit. It was the way “sin” had such a broad definition that you came to internalize it as “anything that feels good, or expands you, or makes you feel ownership of yourself, or creates any bond greater than your bond with God, or gives you the confidence to live independently of these teachings.” And then, once you understood sin as most of the parts of you that you actually liked, you were also told that you needed to repent and correct yourself. And if you didn’t scrape out the sin, if you didn’t make yourself smaller than the presence of God in your life, you were bad and wrong and doomed. It was a culture of shame and guilt and performance, shrinking and hiding and purging and having every intimate part of you picked apart and assessed on a morality scale you didn’t even understand.
So, yeah. Once I began to map out the schematic of life in that place, I could see the ways my own brain was still following the same routes. I learned all these things in the same place and at the same time that I was learning long division and participles, often from the same teachers. Of course those neural pathways were carved in stone. How could they not be? For the first time, it made sense how I could know intellectually that I wasn’t created wrong, and feel pride and love for all the parts of myself that I was supposed to hate, and still shrink away in shame so often.
I remember the walk home from one of these therapy sessions. I was living in Fort Collins at the time, renting half of a house close enough to Old Town that I could walk to and from my therapist’s office and usually pick up a coffee from Little Bird on the way. I was passing through the alley between two red brick buildings, under strings of white lights, when I decided I would set my next book at a school inspired by the ones I had known growing up.
I already had the core idea of the book, inspired by a lot of early ‘00s teen soaps and two books I loved: Where’d You Go Bernadette (mysterious titular woman vanishes leaving a confusing trail of secrets behind) and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (mysterious titular woman has multiple suitors and also a trail of secrets). Disappearing prom queen, three possible love interests, trail of clues, wacky romcom hijinks, et cetera. I hadn’t narrowed down the setting yet, though, until that moment. I called my editor and pitched the idea apologetically, knowing that we were already working with a lot of moving parts, but she was game. So, I invented Willowgrove Christian Academy.
Willowgrove is by no means an exact replica of any of the schools I’ve encountered in the South, but an amalgamation of many of them. I wanted to explore what that environment does to teens, how it might fare against a bunch of zoomers with way more access to outside information than we had back in the 2000s, and what it would look like to discover yourself and still find a way to thrive there. Selfishly, I knew it would be therapeutic. And, to be honest, I also knew it was a goldmine of jokes. I love Saved. You really do have to laugh when you’re in it.
Since then, a lot of things have helped me work through all this stuff. Therapy, of course. The documentary Jesus Camp. Podcasts about escaping fundamentalist Christianity like Leaving Eden and I Pray You Put This Journal Away (both of which deal with the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church, which was way more extreme than the form of Christianity I grew up around but still follows much of the same general doctrine). Telling stories about it to people who grew up in secular environments, or even differently religious environments, and letting their reactions confirm that what had seemed normal was not, in fact, normal for everyone. Allowing space for the fact that it fucked me up in big and small ways, even though I didn’t always realize it.
And, of course, writing I Kissed Shara Wheeler helped most of all. I remember getting about 25,000 words into the first draft and realizing the tone of the narration was all wrong. There was a subtextual eyeroll to the entire thing, a palpable sense of impatience and annoyance, not just for the other characters but for my protagonist herself. I’d spent so much of my adult life refusing to look back at those years, like doing so would turn my queer adulthood to a pillar of salt. I had no love for my teenage self, who was small and irritating and hysterical and foolish and intensely insecure and often terrible, who had padlocked the door of her own closet so completely. I had to sit down with her and understand that she was that way because she was being crammed through a machine that wasn’t made for her. I couldn’t write teenage characters well without empathy, and I couldn’t have that without remembering what it was like to be a teenager, which meant I had to cultivate empathy for that kid first.
So, I did. Shara is a book about loving the place that made you and also sometimes hating the person it made you into. It’s about hating the place and loving the person, too, because both sides of that particular communion wafer are important. I wrote it because I needed to work some stuff out, but also as some kind of reparenting of myself. What if I had had a book like this back then? What if a teenager in a similar situation could have this book now? Would it be able to reach them as deeply as their teachers do? Would it help, if it existed in counterpoint to what they heard at school?
What if I could tell them that kids in their world could not only be queer and happy, but that they could have ridiculous, over-the-top, campy love stories where anything could happen?
I hope this book can help a young person who reads it. I really do believe it would have helped me. I’m new to writing for young adults, but I think the best I can hope for is to create something that eases the passage of those years, even a tiny bit.
I hope that I wrote something that feels empathetic to them. I love the kids so much. They’re trying so hard. I know it well.