At the Intersection Of Change and Stasis

A story about famous writers, a famous editor, and worrying about being bored enough to risk everything.

The other week I went to a private screening of Jandy Nelson’s “The Sky Is Everywhere,” a film adaptation for Apple TV+ she wrote of her own New York Times best-selling young adult novel of the same name. It was a great night on so many levels.

First, I love Jandy, and we’ve talked a lot about the long road of turning her book into a movie and her current attempts at turning another of her books — and another best seller — “I’ll Give You the Sun,” into a television series. In the second half of my two-year development deal with FX, we compared some notes and some feelings about writing, about thinking, about waiting and about hope.

That premiere night for “The Sky Is Everywhere” was special not only because, holy hell, she did it — she wrote the book, she wrote the movie and there we all were, friends and loved ones, watching it on the big screen with her — but also because she’s one of my daughter’s favorite authors. At a casual post-screening party in San Francisco, on a beautiful night that allowed guests to mingle outdoors, I met some other lovely people including Jandy’s tenant-in-common (if you don’t know that term, it’s when two people buy a building together that houses a unit upstairs and downstairs), Nina LaCour, another young-adult novelist. I texted my daughter: “Do you know Nina LaCour?”

The response?

Let’s just say she flipped out. Wait, you’re at a party with Jandy Nelson and Nina LaCour? Why am I at home? Their work had collectively changed my daughter’s life, she said, and meanwhile I was standing around not having read anything, in a moment I couldn’t fully appreciate. You know, jokingly, in her mind.

Ah, but I could. In a different way.

Many years earlier, Jandy was my literary agent at Manus & Associates, where I gave them, over the course of a few years, absolutely nothing, and they gave me, every year, a gigantic candied apple (for being a client) that simultaneously thrilled my small children and made me realize I was never going to write that book.