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>>HOST: And now from the Multicultural Center,
I have three wonderful students
who are coming into Heidi's living-room as well.
So please introduce yourselves and go at it.
>>PARTICIPANT 1: Hi, Heidi. My name is Mariah Leewright
and I am Student Advocate in the Women's Resource Center here
at Sylvania. My question for you today is,
how much of your life experience is similar to what takes place
in the life of Rachel's character in the book.
>>HEIDI DURROW: 27%, maybe 27 and 1/4.
>>PARTICPANT 1: You figured it out exactly?
>>HEIDI DURROW: Exactly, yes. It is a great question.
I'm just joking, but I do get that question often.
How much of your story is Rachel's story?
How much of Rachel's story is your story?
And I don't have a great answer for it except to say that, obviously,
what happened to Rachel didn't happen to me. Thank god, right?
But the central struggle she deals with over identity,
over being a girl growing up in a society
that still makes it difficult for girls to grow up
thinking about themselves in a different way other than beauty
and putting their value in that.
Those kinds of struggles were very much my struggles.
I remember thinking, "Why can't anyone see that
what's most important about me is that I work really hard
and I have these stories to tell?" But what they wanted to know,
always, was you know, "How did you get your hair so shiny?"
or, "Are those your real eyes?"
Those were the kinds of questions I got and then beyond that,
every other character is also me. Every struggle, every grief,
all of the feeling, they're all my feelings too.
>>PARTICIPANT 1: Thank you.
>>PARTICIPANT 2: Hi, Heidi. My name is Steven
and I work at the Multicultural Center.
You talked a little bit about this earlier,
about your experiences in higher education,
but I was also wondering what are some of your other experiences
around your racial identity, ethnic identity in higher education.
>>HEIDI DURROW: One of the things I was really surprised at
when I got to college was
that I didn't necessarily find the exact position
in the black community that I wanted to have.
I had this idea when I was growing up
that the reason I wasn't connecting with the black students
who I knew, who were around me,
was that they weren't oriented educationally in the same way I was.
You know, they were good students,
but I just really wanted to go onto the biggest,
baddest school I could go to and I thought, "Well, once I get there,
the black community will be exactly, everyone will be exactly like me
and I will find my place."
And then I can be in the African-American community
and I was shocked by the fact of class differences.
I didn't realize that that would matter once I had gotten in
to such a great school. I thought, you know, "I'm here.
Obviously, I've achieved on the same level you have."
But there was still this issue of class.
I didn't have a history of doctors and lawyers in my family.
In fact, I'm the first person in my family, ever,
to graduate from a four year college
and went on to get two Master's degrees after that.
But these guys came from doctors and lawyers and scientists
and things like that.
So suddenly, I had another way to be ashamed,
that it wasn't just my cultural identity didn't fit,
but suddenly, my background didn't fit. I had been poor
and I worked in the cafeteria during college
and the other kids didn't necessarily do that
and so that was one of the defining experiences for me.
I think the best thing is just getting older and, then,
not caring about what other people think about you.
I think that's my best message to the people who were younger
and struggling or if you're my age and struggling, that at some point,
you just have to give it up and stop being polite
and just be who you are. It makes me a lot more comfortable.
>>PARTICIPANT 2: Thank you.
>>PARTICIPANT 3: Hi, Heidi. My name is Kerry Wilbourne
and I work at the Women's Resource Center here on campus
and I was kind of wondering, being a woman of mixed race myself
and growing up in Northeast Portland myself
(there's a lot of similarities between Rachel, your story,
and mine growing up).
>>HEIDI DURROW: I didn't steal it, right?
>>PARTICIPANT 3: I don't think so.
>>HEIDI DURROW: You can't get my royalty checks, no.
>>PARTICIPANT 3: No. You kind of talked a little bit
about this already, but I was wondering if you can go
into a little bit more depth about your experiences
receiving lateral racism from the African-American community
as well as the White community and being caught
between the racial identifications, cultures, and communities.
>>HEIDI DURROW: It's a great question
and it's something that I didn't know how to talk about except in fiction
because it's kind of the dirty laundry of the black community
that still, and I say "we" because I feel like
I'm part of the African-American community. I also feel like
I'm part of the Danish community, too.
So if I say "we" a lot, it's because I think I'm part of all of you.
I'm part of all of your communities and your lives.
But in the black community, in particular,
it's something you're not supposed to talk about,
these ideas that we have of colorism and shadism.
Also, it's a little bit of self-loathing, I think, ultimately
and it goes back to the days of slavery and it makes sense,
obviously; that when you've been an oppressed person,
there is certainly a reason that you want to lash out and lash back.
But there's hope, I tell you, because Ebony Magazine"
Now, I don't know if any of you read it,
but I think grandmothers read it now, mostly --
Ebony Magazine, you wouldn't think would do a multi-racial issue
for their magazine, but in fact,
this issue (May) that's out on newsstands now,
there is a 12 page spread about multi-racial identity
and all of the different ways that black people are actually saying,
"We recognize this now.
It's not going to divide our community anymore
just by talking about the fact
that we actually are a multi-racial community."
And so I think that's very exciting.
But I talk about it better in the book.
That's the great thing about writing, especially fiction.
You can actually tell more truth in the stories than I could tell you here
on stage today, telling you the non-fiction version of my answer.
>>PARTICIPANT 3: Thank you.
>>HEIDI DURROW: You're welcome.
>>PARTICIPANT 3: So if we have a little bit more time,
we were wondering
if we might be able to ask a couple more questions,
more specifically to your book.
>>HEIDI DURROW: Yes, please. That means they read it.
That's great.
>>PARTICIPANT 3: We did. So we will start with people,
this might be a spoiler, I'm not sure or it might be obvious by the title.
Why did the character Rachel jump
and what is the symbolism behind this action?
>>HEIDI DURROW: Go like this, whoever you are.
I love that question. It's hard for me to give a good answer to it,
but I can tell you the background to writing the story was that
I saw a newspaper article and it's about a tragedy that happened,
just like the one I describe in the book, and the girl survived.
And I became obsessed with this story.
I cut out every newspaper article I could find.
I watched all the TV reports and, of course,
in the typical American way, we become outraged for two days
and then the tv cameras go away and we all forget about this tragedy.
But I was obsessed with it and I remember sitting down and thinking,
"I need to write this girl's story. This real girl survived.
What does her survival look like?"
And so I sat down to write her story.
In my mind was the real girl who, in fact, is out there, somewhere.
She's out there and I had this picture of her
from the newspaper story, kind of an old fuzzy school portrait.
I knew her name and I knew her age
and I tried to imagine what would happen to exactly that girl
and I just got terribly stuck.
And then I thought, "The reason that I'm obsessed with this story
is the most important thing
and the reason I'm obsessed with this story
is that it seems to have something to do with my own story
which was coming to Portland, Oregon at age 11,
never having known anything about race,
and then feeling like I fell from the sky into a racialized society
and not knowing how to navigate that.
And I imagined very much that Rachel would feel the same way
because, obviously, she's in a new place and she's the new girl
in the same way that I was the new girl.
I'm dodging the other part of your question
because I don't want to ruin it for you out there, hi."
>>PARTICIPANT 3: That's understandable. Thank you again.
>>PARTICIPANT 2: This one might have another spoiler
so close your ears. What do you think happened to Rachel and Brick
after the book ended?
>>HEIDI DURROW: They went to go see a vampire movie?
It's a good question. Very honestly, I don't know what happens
to them next. That's why the book ends right there
and when my mom finally read the book.
I didn't let her read my work. All those 12 years,
she never got to read any of my work,
but when I finally had an advance reading copy,
something that looked like a book. It had a cover on it,
but it was a paperback version of it and the first thing she said was,
"I read it twice last night. I stayed up all night. I love it. It's amazing."
You got to love your mom for supporting you that way.
Then she said, "So, what happens next?
When are you writing the sequel?"
and you know how we get exasperated by our parents.
This is how I talked to her. I was like, "Ah, mulla. Ah. You're so silly.
Oh my gosh. There's no sequel. That's where the book ends."
And so now, people keep asking me, "What happens next?"
I don't know, but I kind of want to know, now,
and if you guys have any ideas for me,
you can write me at heidiwdurrow.com to let me know.
Very honestly, I've started to take notes about what happens;
not to Rachel necessarily
because she's such a complicated character.
I'm not sure what happens to her.
She probably goes to Stanford University, Columbia,
and then Yale Law School. I imagine that's what she does,
but I think more interesting to me would be to write about Brick
and so I've been taking notes on it won't be my next book,
but I think there is a book in me in the future
writing the story of the lost years of Brick and, also,
what happens to him next.
Does he actually go off and achieve his goal as he heads off to do.
But it's a great question.
>>PARTICIPANT 2: Thank you.
>>PARTICIPANT 1: My second question for you is:
why did you choose to write your book in the format of many voices.
>>HEIDI DURROW: I didn't set out to do it that way, at first.
I really thought I was just going to write the story of Rachel,
in the first person, present tense over the course of 300 pages.
I have to tell you, it was exhausting to write that way,
but it must be exhausting to read, also, because you're right there,
right there all the time.
And then, at some point,
I realized that the character Rachel is terribly unreliable
because she not only lies to other people about what happens,
but she also lies to herself. She fakes her diary entries, in fact.
She's an unreliable narrator and so I needed someone else
as a counterpoint to tell a piece of the story that was happening.
I think the first other character I brought in
was the character Laronne, the mother's friend and employer,
the piece that you heard earlier.
And then, after that, it became a much more organic process
and I thought, "I could bring in another character here
because it's in service of the story."
So that's how all the characters came about.
Someone asked me yesterday,
"Well, why didn't you give Grandma a chapter or two?
She never gets to say anything." And, I mean, I had to think about it
for a minute because it never occurred to me
that I should write Grandma because it wasn't in service
of what the ultimate question of the story is and the ultimate question,
for me in the story, is really what happened on the rooftop
and there was no way that Grandma could answer that question.
>>PARTICIPANT 1: Thank you.
>>HEIDI DURROW: Thank you, guys.