Guest Post with Author Amy Zhang

Hello & welcome today's guest post with FALLING INTO PLACE author Amy Zhang and her main character Liz Emerson.

LE: So, why did you decide to start writing? I mean, it’s not exactly, like, the most stable career in the world, right?

AZ: Well, I guess not. I started writing because I was bored, really. I had just moved to a new state, and I was lonely and moping all the time, and I had an extra notebook. The career thing is a different question—I never really wanted to be an author. I wanted something stable, like you said. I wanted to have a long, fancy title and a job that could support my house and white picket fence. But sometime during junior year, while I was struggling through AP classes and SATs and college prep, I decided that I didn’t want to spend my life doing something that made me unhappy. I didn’t want to continue going to math and science classes—I just wanted to write. What about you? What do you want to do when you grow up?

LE: I—I don’t really know. Whatever. Growing up is an overrated idea.

AZ: Maybe it is. I spent a lot of time daydreaming about it when I was younger, though.

LE: Yeah, me too. How stupid is that? I wish—nothing. I mean, I just wish I hadn’t. Spent so much time thinking about growing up, I mean. It sucks here. God, I used to be so excited about going to high school, you know? Whatever. Okay, so, when you moved, you switched schools, right? Did that suck?

AZ: Kind of. I moved from a fairly large, diverse school to a very small, close-knit community—not unlike Meridian, actually. How do you feel about your town?

LE: I can’t wait to get out. It’s—like. I don’t know. It’s just kind of suffocating. Everyone knows everything about everyone else, but like, not really, you know? No one actually cares.

AZ: Well . . . I don’t think that’s true. Moving was definitely a big change, and I didn’t handle it as well as I could have. For a while, I used writing to escape. I gave my characters boats and planes and cars and sent them far, far away. But writing about you, and Meridian, really forced me to look around me. Honestly, I love my town. I moved away recently, and I miss it like crazy.

LE: I won’t. Miss it, I mean. Okay, I just have one more question. Why me?

AZ: What do you mean?

LE: Like. You know. Look, there are seven billion people on the planet, right? There are Martin Luther Kings and Mother Theresas and, I don’t know, Santa Claus types. People who contribute, you know? Why didn’t you write about one of them?

AZ: I didn’t want to. Perfect characters aren’t interesting to me. I could never really connect with Charles Darnay or Sara Crewe or any of those morally secure characters. People are flawed, and those flaws are infinitely more interesting to me than perfection.

LE: Whatever. But you didn’t answer my question. Why me? I don’t matter.

AZ: Why not?

LE: What?

AZ: Why don’t you matter?

LE: I just—don’t. You’ve taken physics, right? I don’t understand, like, any of it, except this: there are negligible factors. There are things that don’t contribute to the equation. I’m a high schooler in Meridian, okay? I’m nobody in the middle of nowhere. I’m negligible. I don’t matter.

AZ: Actually, a lot of negligible factors—air resistance, friction, and so on—are only ignored in high school physics. In higher-level classes, in real life, everything is included. Everything matters. Everything connects. Every action is an interaction, and that’s why I wrote about you.

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About the Book

On the day Liz Emerson tries to die, they had reviewed Newton’s laws of motion in physics class. Then, after school, she put them into practice by running her Mercedes off the road. 

Why? Why did Liz Emerson decide that the world would be better off without her? Why did she give up? Vividly told by an unexpected and surprising narrator, this heartbreaking and nonlinear novel pieces together the short and devastating life of Meridian High’s most popular junior girl. Mass, acceleration, momentum, force—Liz didn’t understand it in physics, and even as her Mercedes hurtles toward the tree, she doesn’t understand it now. How do we impact one another? How do our actions reverberate? What does it mean to be a friend? To love someone? To be a daughter? Or a mother? Is life truly more than cause and effect? Amy Zhang’s haunting and universal story will appeal to fans of Lauren Oliver, Gayle Forman, and Jay Asher.

Published on 9.9.14 by GreenWillow, you can find out more about the book on Epic Reads and Goodreads.