Six Questions: An interview with Mindy McGinnis

1) Do you think that personal experience with mental illness or addiction is necessary to write a book which deals with mental health or addiction?

I think a measure of it is useful, of course. And – if we’re being honest – pretty much all of is have that, either in our own experience or through loved ones. Having never been an addict myself (to substances, anyway), I wanted to be sure that I knew what I was talking about when I wrote this book. Research involved reading thousands upon thousands of pages about addiction, but also talking to counselors and addicts. The best compliments I’ve had for HEROINE is when a recovered addict tells me I got it right.

2) It’s clear that society is facing a massive addiction crisis, particularly when it comes to heroin. How much was your book inspired by that ongoing issue?

I got the idea for writing HEROINE after visiting a school district that had been particularly hard hit by the opioid crisis in southern Ohio. That, combined with my own experiences as a school librarian for fourteen years (and an intense love of softball + respect for female athletes) were the two sticks that struck together to create the spark for the story.

3) More often then not, when we’re dealing with books about young adult and sports, it’s written as a male character; yours obviously has a female lead. Why do you think that is?

I was a YA librarian for 14 years in a public school system. I could count on one hand books that featured female athletes, and needed both hands to count off male authors who only wrote about male athletes. As a former high school athlete who was also a reader, I had to wonder – why the disparity? There’s no real reason. So I set out to plug that hole.

4) I noticed that a few of the reviews noted that the book made readers uncomfortable because of the subject matter. Is that level of discomfort a basic requirement when dealing with a topic this heavy?

It depends entirely on the reader. I’ve written books where people get set on fire, or nine year olds are shooting someone to protect their water source. I don’t pull punches and I don’t shy from rough topics. I show teens using drugs – and liking it – in this book. I’m sure it will make some people uncomfortable. That’s reality. It’s not pretty or nice or kind or comfortable.

5) Your book comes with a trigger warning about how has “realistic descriptions” of opioid use, and there has been a good amount of debate over the subject of trigger warnings in recent years. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why you included one and what your thoughts are on the subject generally.

I’ve never used trigger warnings in any of my books, regardless of the fact they all do feature pretty intense content. For this one, I chose to include a trigger warning because of the honest depictions of drug use. It’s not an after school special with people doing drugs and immediately hating themselves or puking. They do drugs and love how it makes them feel. I didn’t want a recovered addict to read a realistic description of the high of heroin, and miss it enough to relapse.

6) If you could do it again – anything you’d do differently with the book?

Too early to say. I can point to things in my older releases that I would do differently because I have some distance and time has passed since I wrote them. HEROINE is still too fresh to have that perspective.

Harper Stacks: Krista Taracuk on Mindy McGinnis' Heroine

The paradox of the same pronunciation of the words heroine and heroin are pivotal to Mindy McGinnis’s latest work Heroine. The author tackles the front-page headlines of the opioid crisis through the eyes of her teenage protagonist and superstar athlete, Mickey. Mickey’s physician prescribes Oxycontin to her after a severe injury sustained in a car accident and through the pages of this novel, we slowly see how Oxy consumes all aspects of her life.

In a recent conversation with award-winning author Mindy McGinnis, she stated, “It was important to me to create an addict that readers would feel empathy for, and – according to my early readers – it seems to have worked. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they were sucked into Mickey’s slippery logic, her self-justification for always seeking out the next fix, to the point that they were almost rooting for her to get what she believed she needed…. not help, but heroin. That’s exactly the reaction I was looking for.”

Coaches hear the horror stories of their athletes who return to school after an injury or an operation and are immediately asked by other students if they have leftover drugs to sell. Emergency squads are inundated with calls for overdose victims. There’s a raging debate about how tax dollars are diverted to deal with the effects of the drug epidemic. Illicit substances can change the course of family life and the trajectory of development where addiction and dependence are prevalent; this can take the form of grandparents raising children, adjustments for teachers, and early intervention by medical professionals. Children in these situations might experience physical, emotional, psychological, and academic setbacks. Teachers are experiencing a higher rate of burn out dealing with the range of issues that are associated with children impacted by addiction and dependence. It’s even been recommended that the common citizen should carry Narcan.

So what does the opioid crisis have to do with libraries? Where do libraries fall in this issue? This book highlights the intersection where teachers, parents, educators, and students can see the impact of substance use. Reading this book helps bring about a better understanding of the protagonist’s challenges to the wide range of issues that are faced. One of the stops on the way to understanding someone’s journey with addiction and dependence involves accessing resources and knowledge. We need libraries involved in the process because they help disseminate information, share resources to the community, offer a space for forums, and provide access to those seeking information. Those with limited means and resources are utilizing the tools of the libraries more and more for those services.

Mindy McGinnis

The author states, “It’s easy to slot people into arbitrary “good” and “bad” categories, but I often tell aspiring writers to remember that no one is ever the villain in their own narrative. Everyone that makes a bad choice has a good reason (to them) why they did it. Readers find themselves sliding down the slope of self-justification along with Mickey, and that’s right where I want them to be – with her, slipping. Not judging from a safe distance.”

Thus, public and school librarians are in the midst of unusual conversations about whether staff members should be provided with the medical tool of Narcan. As staff are not trained for this mission, fear of misuse and lack of education are major concerns. Clinical studies have shown that paramedics have been using Narcan for 40 years as an assistance in reversing an overdose. Though not as dramatic as jolting awake like in the movies, the nasal dose used by non-medical personnel gives a few more minutes of life to the overdose victim before the EMTs arrived. One nasal dose of Narcan is considered the standard. Yet, this brings us to Carfentanil, a more potent form of fentanyl which is used to sedate large animals like horses, elephants, etc. Carfentanil might take 3 or 4 doses of Narcan to help the person; how on earth is a public or school library staff member supposed to know this? Having Narcan on hand falls under the Good Samaritan Act and is considered to be just another tool like a fire extinguisher, defibrillator, aspirin for heart attacks, etc. However, the impacts of the opioid epidemic are providing new challenges to citizens in jobs that require no medical training.

Thus, the realistic and well-researched novel Heroine by the ever-fascinating Mindy McGinnis is an excellent discussion starter among educators, kids, and their parents. The author states that “I’m hoping as Heroine finds more readers, that it will provide a safe space for parents and teens to talk about things like addiction through the lens of fiction, then branch out into their own realities.”

This book provides a harrowing view on the intersection where teachers, parents, students, and community members can see the impact of substance use. It is a must read for all citizens as the epidemic has started to impact each and every one of us, whether we know it or not.

“It’s Not Nancy Drew Out There": Writing Tough Topics for Teens

Rape. Murder. Suicide. Overdose. It might sound like the lead-in for a true crime show, but it’s a sampling of the traumas my students dealt with in the more than a decade that I worked in a high school library. I’m from a rural community in Ohio, graduating under 100 kids every year. The grass is green, the wheat is golden, and hometown football games are the place to be on a Friday night. While the setting may sound idyllic, our lives often aren’t.

Almost 25 percent of our students live below the poverty level. Lines at food banks are long, and often those standing in them lack other essentials as well—like a good winter coat. But class inequality and nature aren’t the only things that harm us. Sometimes we hurt one another, and often we hurt ourselves. Even though I worked in a school serving a very small community, staff and students experienced the traumas mentioned above—in some cases more than once.

Teen literature as we know it today did not exist when I was growing up, and there was a very large gap between what I read as a middle schooler before making the jump to adult titles. I often joke that I went from reading books about hiding a stray puppy in the basement so that allergic parents wouldn’t know it’s in the house to . . . Cujo.

There were a handful of authors available to me as a teen—Judy Blume, Lois Duncan, Caroline B. Cooney, and Christopher Pike, to name a few—who did push the envelope as far as content was concerned, and I am eternally grateful to them. Even so, topics such as rape or addiction weren’t something many authors were willing to address or, when they did, were handled so carefully as to render the text vague and antiseptic.

When I wrote The Female of the Species as an adult—a rape-revenge, vigilante-justice story—I got in trouble . . . with my mother. She was upset that I would talk so openly in a book for teens about consensual sex, violence, rape, and drinking. I remember defending the book by telling her, “It’s not Nancy Drew out there anymore.”

Since the publication of The Female of the Species, I have received emails, tweets, and messages from multiple girls and women letting me know how much the story resonated with them. One woman in her 40’s said that if she had read a book like it when she was a teenager, she might have found the strength and courage to report her attacker rather than accept such behavior as the norm.

Heroine, my newest release that focuses on a female athlete and the opioid epidemic, has garnered much the same reaction. Early readers reached out, thanking me for writing about addiction in a way that empathized with the user, sharing how their loved one suffers and that the book helped them understand that struggle a little bit better.

If writing about difficult topics makes it more likely for people to feel comfortable talking about them, then I consider my work a success, even if I am not a household name. I have heard from multiple parents that Heroine helped them open up a conversation with their teens about prescription drug abuse, and I know that The Female of the Species is very often a mother-daughter read.

As a librarian I became good at finding the readership for a particular book, especially for my students who were dealing with tough topics. It’s a small town, and often I knew what their story was, without them having to tell it. I could pair a teen with a title, and felt the warmth of reward when they finished it and asked for another like it. It’s an unfortunate fact that a book like Heroineor Female of the Species has elements that will resonate with so many young people. As I explained to my mother—it’s not Nancy Drew out there anymore.The truth is it never was. We just didn’t talk about it.

Libro FM Interview with Mindy McGinnis

Edgar Award-winning author Mindy McGinnis has written across multiple genres, and her newest audiobook takes on a heavy topic: a young female athlete that finds herself a victim of the opioid epidemic. I had the chance to speak with Mindy at Winter Institute about her upcoming release Heroine, out 3/12, narrator Brittany Pressley, and her favorite audiobooks.

So how did this story surrounding a female athlete and the opioid epidemic take shape?

On a school visit to a city in Ohio that is generally thought to be one of the epicenters of the opioid epidemic, McGinnis spoke with local librarians and learned that if you lived in this city, you worked at the school, the hospital, the prison, or you sold drugs. Sadly, many opted for selling drugs.

She had been wanting to write a story featuring a female athlete for a long time–having worked in a high school library for several years, she knew that female athletes weren’t often the center of stories.

“I wanted to write about the opiod crisis and I wanted to write about female athletes and those two things are married, unfortunately, very easily,” she says. “So that’s how the whole concept came about.”

Mickey is a softball player with a bright future, and she’s the hero–the heroine–of this story. But she’s not particularly extraordinary. “I’m using this character that is in every woman,” said McGinnis. She’s not the most popular girl, she’s not the best athlete on the team even. She is very good at what she does, but she’s not beautiful, she’s not smart, she’s not perfect, she’s not any of these things.”

Mickey’s relatability is key, as the reader will watch her make small choice after small choice that will ultimately lead to addiction.

McGinnis did a lot of research before this book was written and she took it very seriously, knowing how crucial it would be to the telling of this story: “Because of the expanse of the opioid epidemic, everyone knows someone, so it was important that this was correct and people are going be able to see themselves or someone that they know.”

Teaching Tolerance: The Opioid Crisis

During an opioid overdose, the brain betrays the body. A single event—be it a rush of heroin or fentanyl or a semisynthetic prescription painkiller like oxycodone—sets off a series of repercussions: The drug travels from the bloodstream to the brain; it latches itself to opioid receptors; it suppresses the brain’s ability to control breathing rate; it blurs the brain’s recognition of dangerous carbon dioxide levels in the bloodstream; it causes the brain to cross wires in its communication with the diaphragm; and, finally, the drug causes failure in the lungs to breathe in and out as normal. The drug suffocates its user, systemically. 

The suffocating tendrils of addiction reach wide…