In Alison McGhee’s latest novel, Falling Boy (Picador, 2007), a teenager named Joseph is paralyzed after a mysterious accident. Uprooted from his mother and his home in New York, Joseph is sent to live with his father in Minneapolis, where he spends one hot summer working in a bakery with a seventeen-year-old free spirit named Zap and an inquisitive young girl named Enzo. Full of superhero dreams, sleepy bees, distant parents, and broken cookies, it’s the kind of book that demands complete, quiet concentration as its secrets unfold. Remember lying in a field, dissecting leaves with your fingers in order to see the cells?

McGhee spoke with me from her home in Minneapolis, where she lives with her family.

Mary Phillips Sandy: I read an interview in which you said that this book started when Joseph came to you and told you to write about him – is that typical for you, that books start with a character demanding attention?

Alison McGhee: No, this was the only time that’s ever happened to me. I blame myself, really, because I was being melodramatic. I’d been a couple of months without a real focus in my work, and that’s a kind of hell for me. I pretended I was Job. I spread my arms to the universe and said, “Give me something to write about!” Then this boy just leaped into my mind. He was sitting in the wheelchair and he looked up at me, his hands were on the wheels. He said – he swore at me, but I won’t say that for the interview. He said, “What, you can’t write about me?”

And I really didn’t want to. I’m not a boy; I’m not a teenage boy. I don’t know what it’s like to get through life using a wheelchair. I felt intimidated by the whole idea of it, but he truly would not leave me alone. I wound up putting years into the work and figuring out what he wanted.

MPS: How long did it take you, from that initial conversation with Joseph to the end of the book?

AM: It took about three years, from the very beginning image, to beginning to figure out who these people were, and the setting, and the research and drafting and drafting and revising and revising. Three years.

MPS: Sounds like it was quite a challenge. Was there ever a point where you wanted to throw in the towel, tell the kid in the wheelchair to go away and leave you alone?

AM: Yes! I wanted to do that quite a bit, especially the first six months. But then I realized, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound. I just followed him through, and he was- it was a difficult book to write. He did not want to reveal himself to me, much the way he is in the book itself. I had to be gentle and work and keep teasing out information from him.

MPS: Many of your books are written for kids or teenagers, or are focused on them. Is there something that keeps bringing you back to the world of kids?

AM: That’s a good point. Many of my books – even if they’re designed for adult readers – will feature a child as a main character. Usually those characters are teenagers, older teens like Joseph, or a nine to eleven year old girl. I’m not sure why I return to that, other than that it feels so visual to me, so powerful, those particular ages. As a writer, or as a human being I suppose, I don’t feel as if I’m any particular age. I don’t feel as if I’m only a woman in my forties. I feel as if I’m all the ages I ever was. Those specific times of life are very, very intense, and I can tap into the emotion and intensity of those times without even thinking about it. Maybe that’s why I’m always drawn to it.

MPS: Plus you can talk about superheroes in a way that grownups rarely do.

AM: Superheroes are so cool. When I was a little girl, I put myself to sleep almost every night by making up adventures where I was Batman’s companion. We were saving the world together.

MPS: There’s a real sense of freedom in reading about a world in which adults exist on the periphery, and the adults who are there don’t understand anything. They’re just an impediment to the action. It made me think of all these books I loved when I was younger, like Pippi Longstocking.

AM: Or Harriet the Spy.

MPS: Or Harriet! What other books did you read as a young person that still influence you now?

AM: Perhaps the most influential book of all was My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. That’s the one about a boy who leaves his family in the city, and he goes and lives on a mountain on his own. He tans his own deerskin, he’s completely self-sufficient. That was enormously influential. Another that I read over and over was Heidi, the original Heidi where she makes her way up the mountain to her grandfather. That sense of the outdoors, the wilderness, and being out in the sun and the rain and the wind and the woods, that’s always been really influential in my writing.

MPS: You grew up in the Adirondacks.

AM: Yes, I did.

MPS: I was wondering if Joseph’s terrible homesickness for the Adirondacks, as he’s sitting there in the Midwest, mirrors your own longing for the place you grew up.

AM: It absolutely does. Falling Boy is the first book I’ve ever written that I have been able to set in Minneapolis, which is the city I’ve lived in for twenty years. I am such a landscape-bound person. The land where I grew up, those foothills of the Adirondacks, is so in my bones. It had always, up until now, felt like the only place I could truly root my characters. Something shifted in me a couple of years ago. I suddenly realized that Minneapolis had gotten into my heart and soul, too, and once I felt that sense of love for this place, I was able to set Falling Boy here. And yet, Joseph moved to Minneapolis from upstate New York... so he does mirror my journey.

MPS: Are you planning on setting more books in Minneapolis now that you know you can write about it? The setting in Falling Boy was very evocative, your use of the place names and streets and playgrounds. I’ve never been there, but I really felt the sense of that place.

AM: Oh, that’s good to hear. Yes, in fact, I have a little novel for children coming out next summer that is set again in this exact place. It also features Zap and Enzo, nine years after Falling Boy.

MPS: They come back?

AM: They come back! Enzo lives with Zap in an apartment that’s just above the apartment of the main character, who’s a little girl who’s nine.

MPS: She does? That’s great. I’m so glad she gets to live with Zap.

AM: I know, I know. I love Zap, isn’t he just a perfect human being?

MPS: He is. He reminds me of so many gentle, hippie boys I’ve encountered, the boys who put things in their hair.

AM: He’s sort of based on my older child, my son, who juggles constantly, who has that long hair whipping around his face. I think in some ways he was the inspiration for Zap.

MPS: I was going to ask that. You have kids of your own?

AM: I do, I have a son who’s sixteen and daughters who are fourteen and eleven.

MPS: Do they like your books?

AM: They don’t read many of them, actually. They read the picture books. My son has read Falling Boy, and he did like it. He’s read a couple of the others, but the girls haven’t read them [laughs]. Which is- I think, probably, they’ve just grown up in this book world, so it’s no big deal to them.

MPS: That’s very funny. Falling Boy is dedicated to “Luke O’Brien, whose unexpected answer to my superhero question gave me the pivotal perspective from which I wrote the book.” Can I ask what that question and answer was?

AM: Luke is my son. As I was trying to feel out the book, I knew that it had something to do with superheroes. So I began asking kids, mostly the ones who pass in and out of my house, “what do you think is the essential characteristic of a superhero?” Most of the answers were, “a cape!” You know. “Duh, a cape!” Or, “they have to fly,” or “they have to rescue someone,” “they have to save the world,” “they have to have some special superpower,” blah blah blah. None of it was what I was looking for. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.

Then I asked my son, Luke. “What, in your opinion, is the essential characteristic of a superhero?” And he said, “a supervillain.” He said it so quickly- there was something in the way he said it that let me know that the key to the book was in that answer somehow. As I kept working on the book I realized that his answer was, in a way, the great truth and the great sorrow of the book. Which is that if there are no supervillains, then there can be no superheroes. So the adults, as ineffectual as they are, are not supervillains. Joseph’s mother, who’s portrayed as this supervillain, is not a supervillain.

So therefore Enzo’s great quest to find a superhero who will rescue her from this life she doesn’t care for is in vain. What we have, in the end, is our ordinariness. We have to find the heroism in that. And that’s what the book seemed to be about to me, ultimately. It was encapsulated in that little, one word answer.

MPS: That was something that occurred to me as I was reading Falling Boy. At Enzo’s age, it’s such a vivid time, and everything seems like good and bad. Good versus evil. The whole crux of growing up is realizing that nothing is quite good and nothing is quite evil.

AM: Exactly. And there’s a lot of sorrow in that.

MPS: You talked a little about your next book. What is the title?

AM: The next one is for children, younger children, and it is called Julian Julian and the Art of Knowing. That comes out next summer from Scholastic.

MPS: Anything else on the horizon that you might want people to know about?

AM: There are several other picture books coming. The book that came out the same week as Falling Boy, in fact, is called Someday. That is a book that is very near and dear to my heart, the way Falling Boy is. That’s a picture book that I think of as a picture book for grownups. It’s about the hopes and dreams and love and devotion between a parent and a child.

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Alison McGhee has won the Minnesota Book Award four times and has been a finalist for the award an additional three times. She is the author of NBC Today Show Book Club selection Shadow Baby, Rainlight, and Was It Beautiful? She also writes books for young adults and children, including the novels Snap, All Rivers Flow to the Sea, and the New York Times bestseller A Very Brave Witch. Her picture book Someday was released by Simon & Schuster in March 2007.

Mary Phillips-Sandy grew up in Waterville, Maine, where she was a co-founder and assistant director of the Maine International Film Festival. She now lives in Brooklyn and is the editor of RuinedMusic.com. She also performs with DraculaZombieUSA East Coast Annex (Serious Business Records).