YA Bestseller Becky Albertalli On The Pride Book She Had To Write

Anyone even tangentially familiar with the author Becky Albertalli, who has written a number of hugely popular young adult books featuring queer protagonists, might recognize the “pulled from the headlines” quality of her latest book, Imogen, Obviously.

The thing is, she wasn’t telling someone else’s story, as usually happens in such a case. Those headlines were generated by her life in 2020, when she came out as bisexual following years of very public discourse regarding her sexuality by other people on social media.

Even then, many people questioned the timing of Albertalli’s coming out—it occurred after, she notes in the foreword of Imogen, “my straightness became problematic for a subset of readers.” Others felt the author had been pushed out of the closet—and she acknowledges in the foreword that “it wasn’t the coming out story I’d have written for myself.”

‘I Don’t Think I Was Prepared’

Still, the public pressure and the public reaction and the very publicity of it all gave Albertalli the subject for her next book, about a teenage girl who doesn’t realize she’s queer because, gees, wouldn’t she have figured it out earlier? Of course, in the book, it takes Imogen until age 17. It took Albertalli until she was in her 30s.

“There was a narrative that was being built around me for a very long time that didn’t always track with what internally, you know, what I was thinking and feeling,” she says. “In the years since I posted my coming out essay, that has been a consistent and positive change, but I don’t think I was prepared for how intense it would get when I came out.”

Albertalli is quick to note that she didn’t see pile-ons like others have received on social media. And she doesn’t feel like the discourse related to her was “overtly hostile, or at least it wasn’t meant to be.” The issue, as she and many others have noted, is that discourse over social media leaves little room for nuance. And Albertalli saw a lot of nuance in her story, just as there is in anyone’s coming out.

How does a writer deal with that? They write, of course.

The author of the hugely popular 2015 novel Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (later made into the movie Love, Simon), co-author of What If It’s Us (with Adam Silvera), and several other books, Albertalli began putting words to page about Imogen, a high school senior whose younger sister and two best friends are queer but who has always seen herself as simply an ally. After sparks fly between Imogen and another girl during a college visit, the protagonist begins tentatively questioning her sexuality, all the while worried she is playing into straight-girl queerbaiting. But eventually, she begins to understand herself, and her own history, better.

“As soon as the idea came to me, I didn’t want to write anything else,” says Albertalli. “It did feel like this was an opportunity for me to kind of talk about this in the way that I wanted to and the way that I probably would have wanted to do to begin with. I will say, though, that I’ve been in the game long enough to know that there’s nothing I can write—not this book, not any book, not any essay, not any tweet or whatever—nothing is going to be the perfect combination of words that convinces everybody that I am I telling the truth in good faith.”

Approaching the book’s early-May release date, she says, she had to keep reminding herself, “any kind of empowerment or just catharsis that I get from it has to be independent from people’s reaction to it.”

Imogen Earns Raves

The book has received strong reviews—a 4.4-star (out of five) average on GoodReads and a starred review from Kirkus, which called it, “fresh, endearing, and heartfelt.” It also noted: “Imogen’s journey feels authentic and sincere, and readers will find it difficult not to fall for her.” And it was released just in time to make many Pride Month reading and “most-anticipated” lists.

Perhaps best of all for Albertalli, who saw so much of her private life playing out in the public sphere the past few years, Imogen gave her an opportunity to learn more about herself on her own terms—because, as she freely admits, there’s a lot of her in Imogen.

“It’s truly a delightful surprise learning things about yourself, at a time when I didn’t think there were major things left to learn about myself,” she says. “It’s so funny in retrospect how unbelievably, comically oblivious I was to this for decades. It’s so obvious, in retrospect, you know, when I think about the ways that I would explain it in my head. I guarantee you like things that I have thought myself and put into Imogen, people are gonna be like, there’s no way somebody could be that clueless. And I’ll be like, ‘I am.’”