by Beth Goobie
For a moment, she stood, head down and simply breathing. It had been eight days since her drunken attack on Stella—eight days without a beer and she was twitchy like she had never felt it, the sensation like fine sandpaper rubbing everywhere against the inside of her skin. More than anything, she wanted to ditch what lay ahead, take off for the nearest liquor-store scalper, and barter away Stella’s sweatshirt, the Black, anything for a bit of the magic fluid pouring down her throat. Breathing, just breathing—Shir stood with her head down until the urge passed, then glanced guardedly around. No one appeared to have noticed her; slowly, ever so slowly, she began to wheel the Black toward the bike racks.
Earlier at breakfast, Stella had suggested they walk to school together, but Shir had said, maybe tomorrow, their relationship still too raw, and this first day back something she needed to face alone, on her own terms. Sidestepping a group of gossiping students, she edged the Black’s front wheel into the nearest bike rack. Incredibly, no one had yet recognized her, but then, as she bent down to click her bike lock shut, she heard a voice say, “Hey, it’s her! Do—”
The voice cut off abruptly, as if its speaker had been elbowed in the ribs, and Shir straightened to find everyone in the vicinity gone quiet, the usual catcalls and laughter evaporated into thin air. Raising her eyes hesitantly, she saw a crowd of fifty or so students, standing motionless and staring, their expressions as tentative as her own. To her left, a girl stepped forward, smiling, as if about to speak, but was suddenly interrupted by several loud whistles. Startled, Shir glanced beyond the group immediately surrounding her to see students all over the school grounds coming to a halt and watching, and then, without warning, piercing whistles exploded on all sides.
Someone began to clap and others took it up, eddies of applause rippling through the throng, and finally, in a burst of unleashed enthusiasm, a wave of cheering broke forth, her name “Shirley! Shirley!” lifting simultaneously from hundreds of throats toward the early morning sky.
Interview with Beth Goobie
This is a tough, powerful story about victimization, exclusion, and the abuse of an ugly girl—and sometimes it’s quite painful to read. Can you say where the idea for this story came from?
Everything I write is ultimately an exploration of my life experiences. In junior high, I was targeted by a group of classmates for pretty much unremitting abuse. They were from upper middle-class families; mine was low income. Although my physical appearance was average, my mother dressed me funny—I was still wearing my grade-three cat-eye glasses, and two pairs of polyester pants that were so short in the leg, a brocade ribbing several inches wide had been sewn around the bottom. One pair was mustard yellow, the other rust red; the ribbing was psychedelic. You get the picture—social disaster. I didn’t get my first pair of jeans until well into grade eight. To round things out, I also had prominent buck teeth and braces.
I did have one supportive friend, and there were a few classmates who remained neutral, neither contributing to the abuse nor defending me from it. But the majority were vicious, and, gradually, much of the school joined in. The limerick read to Shir was read to me (and remains burned into my memory), and I have had feces rubbed in my face, although under different circumstances. One of my coping mechanisms was a beautiful spot I found in my hometown of Guelph, that contained the walking bridge described in Born Ugly. I called it “Myplace” and spent many hours there, always alone.
When I moved from junior to senior high, the abuse gradually lessened because I was no longer trapped all day, every day, with the same group of students. In addition, my appearance had normalized—my teeth were straight and my wardrobe copied everyone else’s. Still, there remained something invisible that followed me around—with few exceptions, I was never accepted by my peer group. And so the strongest feeling I get now when looking back at adolescence is one of overwhelming bewilderment at what was happening to me, loneliness, and rejection. As Shir tells Finlay late in the novel, I felt as if something had been taken from me, and I didn’t know how to get it back.
Not only does Shir find it impossible to connect with any of her peers in Collier High School, but her family also excludes her. What drew you to write about a character who is so alone in the world?
Because that was the way I felt much of the time as a teenager—completely alone. I was good at covering up my feelings; I never told my family about the peer abuse I experienced in junior high, nor did I tell anyone at school about the sexual and ritual abuse I experienced through my family. Even when my brother Mark committed suicide at fifteen, I went to school a day after finding out, and I certainly never told anyone about my own suicidal thoughts. Instead, I went to Myplace, crawled up onto the bridge’s western support arch, and watched the river ripple past, letting it wash away pain and memory, and, ultimately, the truth of my own life so I could go on pretending everything was all right.
We can do so much for each other. It doesn’t take much to be a little friendlier, to notice what goes on outside your own circle of friends. If only it was cool to be kind, to be caring, to be generous of spirit. To see past your own reflection in the mirror.
It seems that everything in Shir’s world is stacked against her. Where do you think she finds the strength to make her last defiant move against all those who tormented her?
Partly Shir’s strength comes from herself. Despite her alcoholism and aimlessness, she is naturally a strong person or she wouldn’t have survived this long. Then Finlay comes into her life, and this begins to open up possibilities. I think much of this is due to the fact that with him she experiences creative thought for the first time—thinking just for the sake of itself, as play and exploration. This changes things inside her head, and internal changes tend to lead to external ones.
That being said, her messages on the store wall, Mrs. Duran’s sidewalk, and even the school floor, are basically suicide notes—one moment of truth to throw at the world before everything ends. She survives the crisis primarily due to Finlay’s support, as well as her ability to read tiny slipstreams of movement in rivers and crowds. But as she tells Stella at the end of the novel, the fact that she is still alive is largely a fluke; she didn’t expect to be.
And so, in a way, the end of the novel is the beginning of another story—what happens next? The truth has been laid bare, both for Shir’s schoolmates and family, and the truth is always about change … and responsibility. The ball is now in their court; how are they going to respond? This is their chance to learn and change, just as it is Shir’s. The end of the novel is a question for the reader to answer.
A lot of young adult fiction is written in the first person, probably because that helps the reader identify more strongly with the main character. Yet in Born Ugly, you have written in third person. Why did you choose that approach?
Born Ugly is my sixteenth young adult novel; seven of these were written in first person, nine in third. I find the choice of first or third person narrative depends upon the voice through which the story is speaking. Each protagonist is markedly different; each chooses her own unique narrative style. A story won’t work if you’re writing in first person and it requires third. My job, as novelist, is to listen to the narrator speak, not to tell her how to do that speaking. And while first person may bring the reader emotionally closer to the narrator, I find it gives me less room to maneuver in terms of word play and general description, because it restricts the point of view to only that which the narrator consciously notices. Finally, most of the ya books that I read as a teen were written in third person. Quite probably my “writer’s voice” was shaped by this exposure—I read voraciously as a child and teen, still do.
What is there about the creation of young adult fiction that appeals to you?
It’s simply the voice that continues to dominate my writing. Probably this is because adolescence was when I felt most vividly alive—my emotions, both positive and negative, were strongest then. I know I write ya novels now for the girl
I was then. That part of me still has stories to tell, issues to explore.
What advice do you have for aspiring young writers?
Read Harriet the Spy and any poetry by Sharon Olds.
Before you start writing anything, prose or poetry, write the five senses across the top of your page: smell, taste, hear, touch, see. Then incorporate them into your work. If you find it hard to get going, start with a smell or a taste. This will beat most writer’s block.
Write bit by bit. No novel was completed in a day, even most poems aren’t. If you manage to write one page, even half a page, that’s great—you’re making contact with your inner voice, keeping the door open to the inner creative current.
Writing is an adventure. You don’t have to know it all when you start—you figure it out as you go along. When I begin a novel, I have no idea where it’s going. All I knew about Born Ugly was that it dealt with the life of a non-photogenic girl who was scapegoated due to her appearance, and that she drank and worked as a delivery girl. The rest revealed itself bit by bit as I worked on the story day after day after day.
Finally, writing is play, but it’s also work. No getting around it—if you want to be a writer, you have to write.
About Beth Goobie
Beth Goobie is a multi-award winning author who has published books for both young adult and adult audiences. She has appeared on the American Library Association’s Best Books list, been nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and won the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Book Award. Beth studied at the University of Winnipeg and lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.