An Indies Introduce Q&A with Daisy Garrison

Daisy Garrison is the author of Six More Months of June, a Summer/Fall 2024 Indies Introduce YA selection and a July/August 2024 Kids’ Next List pick. 

Katie Pionk of McLean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Michigan, served on the panel that selected Garrison’s book for Indies Introduce.

“The most wonderful burst of angsty teen nostalgia! I am so in love with Mina, Caplan, and their group of friends. Just when you think you know exactly how this book is going to go, it does the absolute best thing and goes the way you wish it would instead,” said Pionk. “Honestly, I was cracking up and tearing up throughout. Daisy Garrison has perfectly captured the banter of the teenage girl, the thought process of the teenage boy (or, sometimes lack thereof), and that achy, wonderful ‘please don't let it end’ pang. Absolutely recommend this to kick off your summer!”

Daisy Garrison: Hi! Thanks so much for having me.

KP: It's so exciting to have you. And congratulations also on being nominated for Indies Introduce.

DG: Thank you so much.

KP: Let's just get right into it.

DG: Sure! Yeah!

KP: What was the first aspect of the story that you remember coming to you, and you were like, “Oh, my gosh! I have to start writing this book”?

DG: I grew up next to my town’s public high school. As long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with teenagers and with high schoolers. I used to run home from school, in elementary school, so that I could watch the high schoolers walking home. And particularly on graduation day, they would block off our whole street. The graduation would happen outside, and I would climb up on [my] parents shoulders and try to watch the seniors graduate. I felt about that day the way that people feel about Christmas or their birthdays. I thought it was so exciting and so magical when I was eight.

And I don't remember how old I was, but I have this distinct memory of a boy on a skateboard in his grad robe, skateboarding down our street. The formality and the billowing freedom — the antithesis of all that was going on in that moment, and how free he looked. I was just obsessed. That image has stuck with me. So I feel like literally since that age, I've known I wanted to write about a graduation day.

And then there's a game that they play in the book — a sort of truth or dare style thing. That's based on a real game that we would play in college that was made up by this historic, iconic older student. I was a very homesick college freshman when I was at Northwestern. And I remember being taught the rules of this game that are ridiculous and crazy, and being told that this has been played by Northwestern theater majors for years and years because of this brilliant, iconic, older, famous person.

And I suddenly felt —not less homesick — but that I was part of a sort of grand, ridiculous tradition, and it made me feel better. And I remember thinking that I would definitely write about the game someday, because it was a good engine for a scene, and an agent of chaos.

KP: I would say it's definitely a good agent of chaos in your book, without giving anything away. And you can tell just throughout the whole thing: the excitement and that kind of crazy feeling. It's like this horribly painful thing on the other hand, because all the nostalgia is building up, and then all of a sudden, you're entering into all of these very “first lasts.”

DG: Yeah. Totally.

KP: You totally did such a good job of capturing all that. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I felt like graduating high school, and I've kind of forgotten all about it.” But the book itself really captures the magic of that final moment of high school.

DG: Thank you so much! I'm so glad.

KP: Yeah! Also, in that same vein, I would say a lot of books — especially YA books — tend to focus on a dual POV. There's two main characters, and everybody else is kind of just filler. But I felt like you did such a good job — this is truly a cast of characters that we're watching. Did you always know that you wanted to stick with a whole cast? Or did that kind of just evolve naturally?

DG: It's funny. There's a really bad version of this book that I tried to write when I was a senior — the characters had different names and everything — but it was totally a forerunner of this book. I think if that had been the version of the book that I wrote, the biggest difference would have been that the side characters, Quinn and Hollis, would have just mattered a lot less and been a lot less dimensional, because I didn't care about them at the time. Hollis in particular, was so mean and so boring and stupid and just like a classic it-girl and is hateful.

KP: Yeah.

DG: This time around, I felt like I came into it with so much brainstorming and thought and planning about the arcs that Mina and Caplan were going to go through, and the things that were going to happen to them, and the growing that they were going to do, and how they were going to come in, and how they were going to finish, and how it was going to be different. All that pressure of the planning was on them.

And I knew that Quinn and Hollis were going to come in and bump around and affect the plot, but I had a lot less expectation on them in terms of what they were going to have to go through. So anytime either of them entered a scene, I felt like it opened up in terms of possibility, because the plot was weighing less heavily on them. I felt kind of like it freed me up, and it always kind of ended up surprising me. I really figured them out while I was writing it, and it was really fun. I think they're my favorites. I love them.

KP: Well, I think it definitely evolved really beautifully, and I absolutely adore Hollis. I think she's so great. There's that first moment where she has the opportunity to stick in that high school mean girl mode. And instead, she genuinely reaches out to Mina, and I was so excited. I was like, “Oh, my gosh! I can't believe she did that. And now I'm really excited to see what else she's gonna do.” I feel like Hollis just surprises you in a really great way as the story evolves.

DG: Yeah, she's my girl. I loved her. I loved writing about her.

KP: I loved them as an entire cast of characters, and they are all so great.

DG: I remember thinking that just because Quinn and Mina don't end up together, and they're not meant to be, doesn't mean that they might not also have cute, fun chemistry, because they're both cute people. You know what I mean?

KP: Yeah.

DG: That was fun, to walk that line of letting myself root for them a little bit while I was writing about them, not to give anything away.

KP: Yeah, not to give anything away. That was honestly one of the hardest parts of coming up with questions. I was like, “Oh, I have so much I want to ask, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone.”

So Mina and Kaplan are obviously the main focus of the story, even though Quinn and Hollis are very important, and a lot of their bonding is through some pretty serious stuff that they both deal with in their past. I would say, especially Mina, has a lot that she reflects on continually. What were you hoping for readers to gain or learn from watching both of them cope with how these things affect them? Because not necessarily is everything they're doing a good way of reacting to stuff. But it's definitely realistic.

DG: I struggled a lot with this. There were a lot of different versions of drafts to kind of strike that balance of trying to be responsible about what I represent, and trying to keep it real and make it feel like it was true. The biggest thing that I went into it knowing I wanted to do was — hopefully not at the expense of the import and the weight of some of the trauma, particularly in Mina's past — show a story where something so terrible and so unforgivable could happen. And then within the same character's life, there is a path forward that is possible to heal, and have normal, happy, consensual experiences.

I think I would have really benefited, as a younger person, to see or to read something where the darkness of the initial thing is not adorned, or obfuscated, or dressed up to make it prettier or easier. And the ending is still sort of happy and hopeful for the future. Which is maybe kind of fairy tale-y or not realistic, but one can hope.

Caplan is the first person she ever tells, and that is a huge gift and a big step forward, and it's kind of a cornerstone of their connection. But I also wanted a lot of the healing to only be hers. So I was struggling with how to balance that. The way that I ended up trying to do it was that in the present tense of the novel, they're eighteen years old. It's been a really long time. She has moved past certain aspects of this more than he realizes, and she has to bring him up to speed and be like, “I'm a normal person. I'm not this damaged little bird that you need to kind of handle with caution anymore.” 

That transition is a hard thing for a person to go through. And it's also a hard thing for the person who loves them, and has spent time taking care of them. I wanted to show all of that, with its messy miscommunications, as truthfully as possible.

KP: I think you did. There's such a beautiful scene that sticks in my mind, when they're in Caplan's bathroom together after his grad party. The fact that they could sit there, and she's laughing about it. I just think that's so wonderful because he's so, like, traumatized on her behalf. She's like, “No, look at me. I'm literally fine, and I can laugh about this and now I'm making you laugh about it.” It's one of the scenes that I cried in. And I cried and laughed a lot through this whole book.

DG: I remember…that first scene evolves into a pretty important moment, and I remember being like, “They're in high school. I need it to be hot and awkward—”

KP: Yeah.

DG: “—and kind of moving and complicated.” We have a lot on our plate, and we have to spin all the different plates at the same time. I'm glad that that came through for you.

KP: It's so well done. And again, you just do a really good job of capturing the high school experience. And with the different point of views throughout the story — of the boys miscommunicating and reading a totally different situation than how the girls see everything. That was spot on.

DG: In middle school — I would hang out with boys and be the only girl — I would get as quiet as I possibly could in the hopes that they would forget that I was there, and then I would go home and literally write down everything they said. I still have journals with — some of it is unrepeatable, unspeakable.

KP: Oh, yeah, I can only imagine.

DG: What crappy popular 7th grade boys are saying about girls…the documents belong in the Pentagon; it's a nightmare. But I returned to them a lot to be like, “How do they speak when no one's listening to them?”

KP: I can only imagine what all of those notebooks and conversations are like, but a thank you to those boys, because it lended to some really believable male characters throughout your story, which I think it's definitely a hard thing to do — to write a totally different point of view than what you experience growing up. So hats off.

DG: It was the result of being super boy-crazy and fascinated as a tween. “What are they thinking about, and how is it different to be them than it is to be me?” I never just had a crush. I was like, “What would it be like to walk around inside your skin?”

KP: Amazing. What other favorite stories and authors of yours have blended to Six More Months of June?

DG: I feel like I can't even talk about this book without talking about Jenny Han, and all The Summer I Turned Pretty books. They totally changed my life. I just was the perfect age when they came out. I think I reread them every single summer for six or seven summers in a row, in middle and high school.

I just was like in awe of how important they made the main character, Belly’s, feelings about first love and deep friendship seem. I was like, “Finally! Someone understands. This is all that matters to me.” The experience of reading those books was almost religious to me. And the DNA of those books is absolutely somewhere in this book.

And then another favorite that I returned to a lot while writing it — from slightly earlier in childhood that I still reread today — is The Penderwicks. It was one of the first books I remember my mom reading out loud to me. The pure humanity of those books, and how they imbue the most simple experiences of growing up with so much magic and so much adventure, I think it totally changed how I see the world and how I write.

And in the second book, they live on a cul-de-sac on Guardham Street, and the feeling of that neighborhood, even though it's in Massachusetts and this book is in Michigan, definitely made its way into the book.

KP: Definitely. There are so many pivotal scenes of Mina and Caplan, and the cul-de-sac is almost a character of the book. How much it lends to Mina’s security about Caplan's house, and how close they are emotionally and physically, because they literally live right across the street from each other. I think definitely you captured the magic of that for sure. And I also love that you're a Jenny Han fan. I read those books as they were coming out, and I would say that Caplan definitely has some Conrad similarities.

DG: Totally, I feel like when I was like, “Who's my perfect boy?” I was like, “We're gonna take a Jeremiah, and we're gonna take a Conrad, and we're gonna go like this.” Mash them into one person. With a little of my own stuff in there, so that I'm not just ripping off Jenny Han.

KP: Definitely. But I would say the combination of those guys is definitely every tween and teen girls’ dream guy.

DG: Totally. It's a powerful thing.

KP: Okay. And then I definitely had to ask you, because I am from Michigan. I live in Michigan. Work in Michigan.

DG: Oh cool! Oh, my gosh!

KP: So how did you decide to set the book in Michigan?

DG: So, my parents grew up in Michigan, in Ann Arbor. They went to Huron High School and they actually met in high school. Whenever I tell people this, they're like, “Oh, and are they still together?” And I'm like, “Yeah, they still really like each other.” So that lore in my family of this magical, perfect thing — that they met when they were 15, and then they went to different colleges, and then they came back together — at certain moments has been a little bit of pressure.

But mostly it's just been a wonderful magical way to grow up around them. And I just think I've always felt that that Michigan is kind of good luck for love in my family, and it kind of represents the weighty prophecy of that kind of high school experience.

I also knew that if I set it in a more East Coast suburb, like the one I grew up in, it might have been harder to get creative with building a world if it felt too close to my childhood. And I also think it would have been harder, both for myself and for certain readers to see it as fiction, and that was important to me. It was not autofiction.

Also, dialogue and character comes much more naturally to me than description or scene setting. So it helped me to be able to do some real research and look up different places, and get on some Wikipedia lists and look at street names. That part is a little less natural for me, so it was helpful to have a specific part of the country to look at.

KP: It's definitely got to be a hard line to walk. [You] want to be inspired by your own experiences in your life. But you don't want somebody to read the book and be like, “Wow! This is just Daisy's whole life right here.”

DG: Yeah, or “Oh, this is about me!”

KP: Yeah. Oh, definitely not.

DG: I went to a big, public high school with a lot of fun characters. And there was some rumor mill gossip, when I posted on Instagram that I was publishing a book about high school, that like made it all the way up. My mom works in publishing and her boss came into her office and was like, “The person I play tennis with is from your town and says that your kid is writing a book about all the kids she went to high school with.” And I was so kind of upset and embarrassed. And my mom was like, “Let them wonder. Let them buy the book. Don't worry about it.” That was good advice.

KP: That's very good advice from your mom to have. Also, while I can definitely see it being mortifying a little bit, I think that's a good little bit of mystery around what your book’s going to be about.

DG: Yeah, I think putting yourself out there in any capacity is a little mortifying. And we're about to find out just how much, and I'm going to try to just steer into the into the rip tide if you will.

KP:  I personally don't think you've got anything to worry about.

DG: Thanks.

KP: This was like overwhelmingly one of the top favorites of all of our team. It's very exciting to have it finally on the list and get to tell you and talk to you.

Okay, I also did have a silly little bonus question. If we’ve still got some time.

DG: Yes.

KP: Okay. If you had to encompass Mina and Caplan's relationship into a song, what song do you think best fits them?

DG: It's hard because, like I feel like there would be. I feel like they would have different answers to this. Songs that I listened to a lot while working on it…For Mina it was “Steamroller” by Phoebe Bridgers. It's just a really beautiful song about almost a brotherhood level friendship with someone that you're a little in love with.

And then for Caplan, I was writing this book a little bit after Folklore by Taylor Swift came out, and the song “Betty” just struck me to my core. I think even in that song we get the image of the boy on the skateboard and the high school party of it all. And I just thought it was such a fun, true teenage boy voice in the first person, and I was like, “I want to write something from that kind of perspective.” So that's definitely Caplan's song, “Betty” by Taylor Swift.

KP: I mean, those are both perfect choices and really great choices, and they totally fit in with the perfect scene you have of Quinn literally on his skateboard so much throughout this book. I'm just really excited for you, and I'm really excited for everybody to get their hands on it, to eventually read it.

DG: It was so nice to meet you! Thank you so much for all your all your questions, and for being so nice to me, and about the book. Yeah, it's super exciting. I appreciate it.

KP: Yeah, thank you so much for being here. And again, congratulations. We can't wait to sell it and have it out on the shelf.

DG: Thank you.

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Six More Months of June by Daisy Garrison (Flatiron Books, 9781250348654/9781250348678, Hardcover/Paperback Young Adult Romance, $23.99/$13.99) On Sale: 6/11/2024

Find out more about the author at daisygarrison.com.

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