Answering the Call

By the time Meg Rosoff finally sat down at her computer, How I Live Now (Random/Wendy Lamb Books) was spilling out of her. It was January 2003, and Rosoff, an American living in London, was still feeling the pain of the unexpected death of her youngest sister, Debby.

There was also the nagging irritation of trying to figure out how to live her life. Despite the clear calling she had as a young girl to become a writer, the 46-year-old Rosoff had veered in another direction. She felt her many years working in advertising were a waste, and she was tired of living the wrong life. "I felt it was not so much a life I was living, but a life postponed," Rosoff recalls.

She was like so many of us, someone with a dream deferred for reasons unknown. But Debby's death from breast cancer in December 2001 and her sister Liz's diagnosis with the same aggressive disease proved to be Rosoff's tipping point. So one night, after putting her six-year-old daughter, Gloria, to bed, Rosoff began to write.

Most nights, she would write from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. By April 2003, Rosoff's manuscript was finished. How I Live Now, which is dedicated to Debby, was published in August 2004 in the U.S. and U.K.—and Rosoff soon had a trans-Atlantic hit on her hands. Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has called How I Live Now "that rare, rare thing, a first novel with a sustained, magical, and utterly faultless voice." And People magazine ratcheted the raves even higher, heralding Rosoff's debut as "a book for the ages." How I Live Now has also received some heady awards—the 2004 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and this year's Michael L. Printz Award as the best book for young adults—and it was narrowly nosed out for the Whitbread Children's Book Award, one of England's top literary honors.

At its heart, How I Live Now deals with a mix of grief, first love, sex, anorexia, self-discovery, growing up, modern-day warfare, the struggle to survive, and ultimately, unconditional love. The story is told through the eyes of 15-year-old Daisy, a troubled teen who leaves her long-widowed father, "evil" stepmother (whom she dubs "Davina the Diabolical"), and New York City's posh Upper West Side for a life-altering respite in England. Daisy's salvation comes in part from her eccentric British cousins, 9-year-old Piper and 14-year-old Edmond. In saving them, Daisy saves herself.

If you think the book's subject matter has an after-school-special ring to it, think again. Don't expect a Brady Bunch ending—the story is a bona fide heartbreaker. Plus, it's downright hilarious at times, thanks to Rosoff's first-person narrative—delivered straight from the mouth of a wry smart-ass who has visited way too many shrinks during her brief time on earth. Referring to her pregnant stepmother's decision to send her abroad, Daisy observes, "If she was making even the slightest attempt to address centuries of bad press for stepmothers, she scored a Big Fat Zero." And later, after swiping a crucial map, Daisy deadpans a line that's guaranteed to make a lot of librarians wince: "I did what every other sensible New Yorker has been doing for years in the Public Library, I tore the page out and hid it in my underwear."

To understand how Rosoff came to write How I Live Now, you need to turn back to her past. As a kid growing up in Newton, MA, a well-heeled suburb of Boston, Rosoff says she was "not socially terribly successful." "I was not good at sports and had frizzy hair," she sighs. The daughter of Chester, a surgeon, and Lois, a psychiatric social worker, Rosoff was a smart kid who loved to read. Her favorites included A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Nobody's Girl by Hector H. Malot, and Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. "I knew my calling was writing at six or seven," she shares. "Throughout my life, everyone would say, 'You should write a novel.' But, you know, I was never good at plot."

After three years of studying English and fine arts at Harvard University (her fall-back choice after being snubbed by Princeton), Rosoff took a break and attended St. Martins College of Art and Design in London from 1977 to 1978. It was there that she says she found her "spiritual home." Although longing to remain in London, she returned home to finish her degree and headed to New York City in 1980. She worked as a copy editor and in the creative departments of some big ad agencies, including J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy, and Young & Rubicam. Since she was admittedly a bit contemptuous of her superiors and their obsession with money, she kept getting fired. "It was soul destroying," she remembers. "I always felt like a train slightly derailed." Finally, in 1989, after years of procrastinating, Rosoff applied for a permit to work in advertising in London for three months. She's been living there ever since, now with her husband, Paul Hamlyn, a painter and an illustrator, and their daughter.

In England, Rosoff gained a new perspective of the world that flavors How I Live Now. In the early '90s, when the war in the former Yugoslavia was raging, she felt it was happening in her own backyard. Moreover, she discovered that war was happening to "people like us." "That started [the story] for me," she explains. "In America, you feel the world is a long way away, that war is always happening somewhere else. I didn't feel that anymore." Rosoff is Jewish and her feelings about World War II resurfaced as she walked around the neighborhood near King's Cross, seeing churches that had been bombed and other signs of destruction. The U.S.'s recent invasion of Iraq was like "the last domino falling" in coming up with the story for How I Live Now.

Rosoff wanted to write for teenagers, partly because it had taken her so long to feel like an adult. First, in the summer of 2002, she wrote a story about horses that made its way to a friend of her husband's, Catherine Clarke of the Felicity Bryan Literary Agency. ("How amazing is that?!" says Rosoff, still marveling at her good fortune. "It's not like everyone I know is an agent.") Clarke didn't buy the story, but she encouraged Rosoff to write something else. "I didn't know if there were rules I had to follow to write for young adults, and I wondered if I couldn't write about sex," she laughs. However, Clarke gave her the best advice: "She said, 'Don't worry about rules, just write the best book you can write.'"

Rosoff knew how the story began and how it ended, but she needed to nail down Daisy's voice. "I had an idea of Daisy, and knew Daisy was what would propel the story," she says. Alas, it seems that those dreary days in New York City paid off after all. Shortly before sitting down to write, Rosoff happened to visit a Manhattan friend and her daughter. "I saw a needy, impossible, and overindulged New York girl who gets in her head for a long time and doesn't realize it," she relays.

Daisy was born.

Once again, Rosoff's sister Debby proved inspirational. "Debby would wonder why do so many children have to have the best of everything, because it's not always what makes the best human being," she says. "What makes a great person is often hardship and difficulty."

Rosoff didn't need her imagination or memory to put herself in the shoes of a teenager. "That's the biggest cheat in the book," she says with a laugh. "The difference of being 15 and the difference of being 46 is a loss." The result is a believable teenage protagonist who often expresses herself in breathless run-on sentences and seems allergic to quotation marks. The author's inspiration for this distinctive style? Winnie the Pooh, of course. Daisy's "voice was running so fast, I didn't want to interrupt," explains Rosoff. "I wanted to keep it stream of consciousness."

Betty Carter, chair of the 2005 Printz committee, recalls not being able to put the book down. "Daisy wouldn't let me," says Carter, who teaches young adult literature at the School of Library and Information Services at Texas Woman's University. "I'm caught up in her frenzy, knowing that she's going to get it all out and that what she's saying is important to her and that I have to just listen."

Rosoff's success comes on the heels of another turning point in her life. She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and in January 2005 finished her last round of chemotherapy. It has made her view death differently. "I'm not afraid of dying anymore," she says. This is partly due to having more concern now for her daughter's life than her own. The other reason is that the author has gained peace of mind knowing that she's finally following her calling.

Rosoff is feeling well these days and already hard at work on her next novel. She will only say that it's about a boy who's obsessed with the notion that fate is out to get him. Her first picture book, Meet Wild Boars (Holt), which was inspired by Gloria, will be published in May; it features illustrations by Sophie Blackall, a colleague from Rosoff's advertising days in London. Meanwhile, Passion Pictures has purchased the film rights to How I Live Now, and Rosoff is working on the screenplay. Also on the horizon is a possible move. She and her husband have fallen in love with Barcelona. "We can live anywhere now," she explains. "He's a painter and I'm a writer."

But for the time being, Rosoff is content to spend her days living in a sunny, 1920s house in Highbury with a huge garden ("by London standards"), in which she channeled some of her grief over the loss of Debby by planting "lots of flowering trees and hundreds of tulip bulbs" that now attract woodpeckers, blue tits, and foxes. "I work in a tiny office at the front of the house that I share with my husband—reluctantly—and that lets me spy on all the neighborhood comings and goings," she says. All in all, it seems like Rosoff has created a fulfilling life for herself. Or as the author might prefer to put it, that's how she lives now.