John Neufeld: Lisa's 40 and Still Helping Teens
RSSThis article originally appeared in SLJ's Extra Helping. <a href="https://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/subscribe.asp?screen=pi8">Sign up now!</a>
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 03/10/2010
Photo: John Emmons
Lisa, Bright and Dark, (1969, SG Phillips) still captures teens with its story of a young girl grappling with a bipolar condition and her parents who don’t seem to understand. We caught up with author John Neufeld to find out about the impact of Lisa, named a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year when it was first published more than 40 years ago.
How did Lisa’s story come about?
I had dinner one night in New York with a friend who was a psychiatrist and had interviewed that day a girl from Long Island, who we now would say is bipolar. But he was convinced her parents would never let her return because he felt they were too ashamed of her. And it made him very angry. And I thought ‘There’s a story.’ A story of a girl who knows something’s wrong, wants help, yet can’t because of her parents. But her friends know, and they start their own psychiatric institute. This grabbed me instantly. I flew to my parents' house [in Florida], set up an office, and in five days had finished the book. I knew where it was going, and wished other books had been that easy.
Did you believe teens would connect to Lisa so profoundly?
We knew within a couple of weeks what we had. First, it had been purchased for filming, and then I began getting letters instantly from young lady readers saying ‘How did I know?’
The difficulty with the letters was there was such a temptation to play psychiatrist, and I couldn’t do that. But I had to treat each one seriously. I couldn’t say, ‘Come on don't take it so hard.’ I had to give them credence. I decided I would answer each and every letter, and in the first year before it went in paperback, I probably got 200 letters. When it went into paperback, the book went into mass market, and that’s when the story exploded and then we got thousands of letters.
Are you still getting those kinds of letters?
I just got an email from a reader in October, from a mother, and she had read Lisa as a young girl, and now wrote me to thank me.
Do you think books written for teens today are similar to what was being published in the late 1960s?Susan Hinton with The Outsiders (1967, Viking) really kicked this thing off. By 1968/69 there was a real surge in young adult literature. I do separate young adult literature from young adult books in that there was nothing being published then to compare with what goes on now. I think a lot of young adult stuff now is written very fast. And If I knew what I now know I would have written Lisa’s story three, four, or five more times.
Are you still writing for young readers?
I don’t think I could write a book for young readers set in their world now, because it has so changed. I don’t know what they know. I don’t have TiVo, or a cell phone or a Palm Pilot. So I would have to take a new story and put it in the early 1960s. But underneath all the technological stuff, it is my firm belief that kids are the same as they were in the early '60s. The frou-fara has changed, but underneath we still stick to the same problems — insecurity, wanting to be part of the crowd, and romance and where things go wrong.
So would you change Lisa today if you could rewrite her?
The thing about Lisa is the characters are 15 and 16 years old, and 10-,11-, and 12-year-olds are now reading Lisa. If I had known that the book would slide down the age scale I would have made many changes. The characters would be younger. But the book came out of one week of frenzied work, and it’s still alive. And I’m very pleased it’s still alive.
