Natasha Friend
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Bio
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;)
Hi. I’m Natasha (a.k.a. Tash, Tasha, Tashi, TK, and a dozen or so other monikers I’ve accumulated over the years). And yes; Friend really is my last name.
I was born in 1972 in a small college town in upstate New York, to an English professor dad and a poet/actress mom. Growing up in a house without a television (which, of course, my brother and I thought was the worst possible kind of abuse) I spent much of my childhood in the library. I wasn’t just a reader; I was an inhaler of books. By the age of 9, I could be found skulking around the corner of the library deemed “inappropriate for my age.” The infamous “Teen Readers Only” section. This was my mecca: home to the Sweet Dreams romances, Go Ask Alice, The Catcher in the Rye, and anything and everything by Judy Blume. I still remember reading Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret for the first time and thinking, “Judy gets me.”
For my 10th birthday my parents gave me a little orange typewriter—the old-fashioned, manual kind—so I could embrace my inner Judy Blume. The early attempts were not good. A lot of insipid tales about poor orphan girls finding treasure in the woods, rainbows, unicorns. What can I say? I was a happy kid. I hadn’t experienced any real drama or trauma to speak of, let alone to write about. And then
. . . junior high.
Let me say this about junior high: nobody—and I mean nobody—comes out unscathed. I don’t care how beautiful you are, or how cool your clothes are, or how many friends you have; being 13 is a harrowing experience. It messes with your mind. It messes with your body. It messes with your feelings. And, lucky for Y.A. fiction writers everywhere, it makes for some pretty fantastic story material. When readers ask me, “Where does your inspiration come from?” I always give the same answer: “Straight from my inner 13 year-old girl.” By some miracle of foresight (or some errant pack-rat gene), I still have every note I ever received in seventh and eighth grade, sitting in a box in my closet. All I have to do is open that box to remember viscerally what it felt like to be that age—the angst, the self-doubt, the tiny twinkle of hope that maybe, if I wear the pink Forenza sweater tomorrow, H.H. will notice me.
There is no question that my ability to access my adolescent self has helped me to become a writer, but so have my dearest girlfriends from childhood, high-school, and college, and the countless kids I’ve worked with over the years—as both a camp counselor and teacher—many of whom have allowed me entrée into their worlds, into their teenage psyches.
I didn’t actually sit down and try to write a novel until I was in my late twenties. I had promised myself that if, after five years of teaching, I didn’t absolutely love being a teacher, I would stop and do something else. The five-year mark hit me just when I’d gotten engaged. I packed up my classroom at Ecole Bilingue (the French-American school in Cambridge, MA) and moved in with my then fiancé (now wonderful husband Erik), who said to me, “Now, how about the book you always talk about writing?”
That summer, I wrote PERFECT. I sent it to a Y.A. fiction contest at Random House, and, while I didn’t win, I did garner the interest of an editor, who worked with me to revise the manuscript. Fast forward a year and a half, three months after my first son was born, when I received the phone call to end all phone calls: the editor-in-chief at Milkweed Editions, telling me that PERFECT had won the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature. I was about to become a published author.
Now, here I am, four books and two (almost three) babies later, and I still can’t believe my luck. I get to wake up every morning and do what I love. I’m a full-time mom and a full-time writer, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure, it’s nuts. Some days I’m up to my eyeballs in diapers and Play-Doh and Cheerios that have been mashed into the carpet, and I can barely eek out a sentence. Other days I’m so entrenched in my writing that I forget to make dinner and I have to call Erik to bring home a pizza. But I love it. I LOVE being a writing mom. And I’ve promised myself that I will keep doing what I’m doing until I stop loving it, or until I run out of story ideas, or until I find out I’m pregnant with octuplets (heaven forefend). Then, maybe I’ll reevaluate.
I was born in 1972 in a small college town in upstate New York, to an English professor dad and a poet/actress mom. Growing up in a house without a television (which, of course, my brother and I thought was the worst possible kind of abuse) I spent much of my childhood in the library. I wasn’t just a reader; I was an inhaler of books. By the age of 9, I could be found skulking around the corner of the library deemed “inappropriate for my age.” The infamous “Teen Readers Only” section. This was my mecca: home to the Sweet Dreams romances, Go Ask Alice, The Catcher in the Rye, and anything and everything by Judy Blume. I still remember reading Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret for the first time and thinking, “Judy gets me.”
For my 10th birthday my parents gave me a little orange typewriter—the old-fashioned, manual kind—so I could embrace my inner Judy Blume. The early attempts were not good. A lot of insipid tales about poor orphan girls finding treasure in the woods, rainbows, unicorns. What can I say? I was a happy kid. I hadn’t experienced any real drama or trauma to speak of, let alone to write about. And then
. . . junior high.
Let me say this about junior high: nobody—and I mean nobody—comes out unscathed. I don’t care how beautiful you are, or how cool your clothes are, or how many friends you have; being 13 is a harrowing experience. It messes with your mind. It messes with your body. It messes with your feelings. And, lucky for Y.A. fiction writers everywhere, it makes for some pretty fantastic story material. When readers ask me, “Where does your inspiration come from?” I always give the same answer: “Straight from my inner 13 year-old girl.” By some miracle of foresight (or some errant pack-rat gene), I still have every note I ever received in seventh and eighth grade, sitting in a box in my closet. All I have to do is open that box to remember viscerally what it felt like to be that age—the angst, the self-doubt, the tiny twinkle of hope that maybe, if I wear the pink Forenza sweater tomorrow, H.H. will notice me.
There is no question that my ability to access my adolescent self has helped me to become a writer, but so have my dearest girlfriends from childhood, high-school, and college, and the countless kids I’ve worked with over the years—as both a camp counselor and teacher—many of whom have allowed me entrée into their worlds, into their teenage psyches.
I didn’t actually sit down and try to write a novel until I was in my late twenties. I had promised myself that if, after five years of teaching, I didn’t absolutely love being a teacher, I would stop and do something else. The five-year mark hit me just when I’d gotten engaged. I packed up my classroom at Ecole Bilingue (the French-American school in Cambridge, MA) and moved in with my then fiancé (now wonderful husband Erik), who said to me, “Now, how about the book you always talk about writing?”
That summer, I wrote PERFECT. I sent it to a Y.A. fiction contest at Random House, and, while I didn’t win, I did garner the interest of an editor, who worked with me to revise the manuscript. Fast forward a year and a half, three months after my first son was born, when I received the phone call to end all phone calls: the editor-in-chief at Milkweed Editions, telling me that PERFECT had won the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature. I was about to become a published author.
Now, here I am, four books and two (almost three) babies later, and I still can’t believe my luck. I get to wake up every morning and do what I love. I’m a full-time mom and a full-time writer, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure, it’s nuts. Some days I’m up to my eyeballs in diapers and Play-Doh and Cheerios that have been mashed into the carpet, and I can barely eek out a sentence. Other days I’m so entrenched in my writing that I forget to make dinner and I have to call Erik to bring home a pizza. But I love it. I LOVE being a writing mom. And I’ve promised myself that I will keep doing what I’m doing until I stop loving it, or until I run out of story ideas, or until I find out I’m pregnant with octuplets (heaven forefend). Then, maybe I’ll reevaluate.