Remember that feeling of being 13 and starting a new school year? You pick out your outfit — cool but not too cool — and wonder if your crush is going to notice how much you changed over the summer. And then, of course, nothing about the new school year goes as you planned.
Emma Hunsinger is something of an expert at capturing both teenage cringe and joy. Her new graphic novel, "How It All Ends," tells the story of Tara, a teenager hurled into the wilds of high school after skipping eighth grade.
A graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies, Hunsinger lives in Norwich with her family. She's a regular contributor to the New Yorker, including the viral piece “How to Draw a Horse.”
The following partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mikaela Lefrak: In your new book “How It All Ends,” there's the main character, Tara, and she's selected for this accelerated school program in which she'll skip eighth grade entirely and head directly to ninth grade. She's diving right into high school as a 13-year-old. How did you come up with this premise?
Emma Hunsinger: I stepped back into my own memories, and I asked myself, "when did my imagination really change?" And I pinpointed it to around eighth grade. I was still playing with my Lord of the Rings action figures with my brother. And then at 14, that was so over. There were no more action figures, it was just hanging out, right? Not playing. So I decided that it would be really interesting to have the main character not sort of ease from middle school to high school — to just make it a jump cut into the adult world of high school. What is interesting is that this actually became a reality for a lot of children due to the pandemic, where they were in school online for a year.
High schoolers are different. They're big, so it's pretty jarring. And I really wanted to work with that jarring experience.
Mikaela Lefrak: Tara finds some things about high school exciting, like getting to eat pizza in the cafeteria, but socially it's overwhelming in a lot of ways. But there are some people who are on her team and have her back.
Emma Hunsinger: I gave Tara, the main character, an older sister, Isla. She's an amalgamation of all three of my siblings. I have two younger siblings and an older brother, and my older brother is only 17 months older than me, so we were up against each other in high school. And I wanted to give the sisters in this book a dynamic of being best friends, because I feel like a lot of times in middle grade, conflict comes from siblings not getting along anymore. And I didn't want to explore that. I wanted to explore other things, so I made them really close. They have a pretty sweet relationship, where Isla takes care of Tara as she goes through this transition.
Another person in Tara's network is Jessup, who gets pulled up from eighth grade to ninth grade with her. And he's the kind of person who's afraid of his own shadow and everything makes him nervous. But they bond over their feelings of being scared, and ultimately, they have a pretty sweet friendship by the end of the book. He was a really fun character to write because of how frightened he was of everything.
And then the last character in Tara's network is Libby, who is in an English class with Tara that is dominated by a pack of rowdy boys. And this was an experience I had in high school. I had a history class my freshman year that was full of lacrosse boys that were dedicated to tormenting our teacher, Mr. Stevenson. And they were coming up with something new to do every day, and it was painful for so many people. I remember feeling so outnumbered when I was in high school and I was in that class, and I wanted to give Tara, the character, a lifeboat in that situation. That's how she meets Libby.
And not only are they sort of saving each other from these boys, but they're becoming friends, and they're genuinely connecting. And Tara starts to wonder if Libby could be her best friend, and gets in her head about what this friendship could be, and what it could mean.
Mikaela Lefrak: Is that something that you would do in high school?
Emma Hunsinger: Yeah, I definitely was obsessed with, “How do I look as cool as possible every single moment of every single day?” I remember one of the things I latched onto was wearing a beanie. I put it on one day. I did not take it off until June. The beanie stayed on my head. It was my thing. I wore the beanie. And that was the best I could do -- that was the only solution I had.
Mikaela Lefrak: It was kind of you to save Tara from the same fate in your book.
Emma Hunsinger: I couldn't relive it.
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