In her latest novel, The Opposite of Everyone, bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson tells the story of a successful lawyer who is forced to revisit her traumatic past when her estranged mother goes missing. Joshilyn's previous novel, Someone Else's Love Story, was a LibraryReads winner, and now The Opposite of Everyone is one too! Today we're very excited to welcome her to LLF to share her love for libraries.
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Lying in Libraries
I come by my love of libraries naturally; my mother practically raised me up inside of them. My father was in the army when I was young, and we moved all over: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky… In every new town, my mother would find the closest library practically before she found the Piggly-Wiggly.
The library is also where I learned to lie.
I remember one move—I must have been around eight—when my mother took us to check out books the very first Sunday we were there. I made a little Library Friend in the children’s section, and we were playing quietly and picking out books for each other. We ran into my mother on the elevator.
“Oh, hello,” the little girl said. “You must be Liz’s mom.”
Not only had I told this kid that my name was Liz, I had also invented an entirely fictitious life and history to go with my glamorous new name. (I thought “Liz” sounded posh and cosmopolitan.)
My mother’s eyebrows went up so high they almost disappeared into her hairdo, but she didn’t rat me out.
“If this is Liz, then yes, I must be Liz’s mom,” she said, and she fixed me with a cool, appraising stare that told me there would be a reckoning and a long, long talk about the value of truthfulness later.
That was the only time I remember getting so thoroughly busted—but it was certainly not the only time I ever invented an entirely new self and wore it like a dress for a Library Friend. I was a voracious reader, deeply enamored of story, so of course I wanted to star in stories of my own. Some I wrote down on paper. Some I told as elaborate pretends for an audience of one or two kids who didn’t go to my school. Library Friends were perfect for this, because they were such temporary creatures. The likelihood of ever running into the same girl twice in the year before we moved again was slight.
I did the same thing at summer camp, except under my own name, test driving various versions of myself with widely varying histories and personalities. To a lesser extent, I reinvented myself every time my father was re-stationed. I was about ten when Dad retired from the military, and I remember weeping bitterly because I knew that whoever I decided to be next, I was stuck—maybe for the rest of my life. I was worried that I might not like that girl.
I think this nomadic early childhood—and my younger self’s penchant for being so flexible with the truth I was practically a lie-yogini—has had a huge effect on my career. I try very hard to live authentically, to keep my love of narrative held strictly between book covers, but certainly this part of my history caused me to create Kai—the erstwhile, feckless, hippie mother of my new novel’s narrator. Kai is an itinerate story-teller who reinvents herself and her kid as she moves from town to town and boyfriend to boyfriend.
When her daughter, Paula, tells a story of her own, Kai goes to prison, and Paula lands in foster care. These events will shape Paula into the ruthless, winning-obsessed divorce lawyer she is at the beginning of THE OPPOSITE OF EVERYONE. Her mother’s stories and her own also form her ethical core and create her huge heart for underdog. Paula fights dirty—and enjoys it—but on behalf of people who cannot fight for themselves.
OPPOSITE, at its core, is a book about the power of story, and I wrote it because I do believe the stories we choose to tell about ourselves shape us. Certainly the ones I told—especially the whoppers—are what made me into a novelist.
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Thanks, Joshilyn! The Opposite of Everyone goes on sale next week, so there's still a little time to download the egalley before it appears on shelves!
-Amanda