Ryan and Avery don’t know each other, but they immediately find each other among the crowd of the queer evening. Ryan has blue hair, Avery pink. Both are sixteen years old, go to school, have different experiences behind them – including self-discovery. The latest book by American author David Levithan, Ryan and Avery (Rizzoli 2024) explores these two characters and the relationship that develops between them, through their first ten dates. The prose of Levithan – who will be a guest of Un mare di libri in Rimini today (Teatro Galli, 3pm) – is sweet, the words are carefully chosen to tell their love story in a world that still struggles to accept the queerness. Among Levithan’s novels, the bestseller Every day (Rizzoli 2013), Everything happened in a night (Mondadori 2006), written with Rachel Cohn together with Va a fini che ti amo (Mondadori 2009) – all transformed into film adaptations.
In Ryan and Avery he chose to tell the story as an omniscient narrator. Why?
“I wanted to have the point of view that Ryan and Avery don’t have, to be able to express each other’s thoughts. They’re both discovering love, and I wanted the narrator to be able to comment on that, because he knows more about it. of them”.
In your opinion, how is queer representation evolving in literature and cinema?
“When I started writing young adult queer novels twenty years ago, there were very few of them. Now there are many more. But cinema is moving more slowly. A big phenomenon was that of the TV series Heartstopper, because it was the first really simple and authentic queer love story that everyone could watch together. It’s something very powerful, and I hope that in a few years it will finally be “normal”. But it’s not like that yet.”
When you decided to write this story, what message did you want to convey?
“I wanted to give queer readers a sweet, tender love story that they could find themselves in. And I wanted to show them that their love stories are just as important and strong as other teenage love stories.”
In your opinion, is the representation of sex in literature and cinema changing?
“In my opinion, teenagers, especially queer ones, are presented with a single narrative where every relationship is a progression with the end goal being sex. What I wanted to show in Ryan and Avery is just how they question these dominant hetero narratives , and also the stereotypes regarding sex. The most important thing is not the sex, but the fact that they can talk honestly about it with each other, that’s what I wanted to show to those who read it teen films in particular, the depiction of sex is unrealistic and creates the wrong expectation.”
How did you decide to write novels for teenagers?
“Ever since I’ve been in high school, every year I’ve written a story for my friends on Valentine’s Day. One year I started writing a story about two boys who fall in love, and it started getting longer and longer, until I realized that I was writing my first novel (Boy meets boy, Fabbri 2003). And I realized that I was writing it to be the teen novel that in my opinion didn’t yet exist teen”.
In your books, how much is invented and how much is inspired by your personal experience?
“The events that happen are fiction, based on what teenagers do in their lives rather than what I do in mine. But the emotions are all mine.”
The novel Two Boys Kissing was among the 20 most censored books in the US between 2010 and 2019. What is the situation now?
“In the US, censorship is a really big problem at the moment. It has become political: lists with hundreds of titles are sent to schools, and they are asked to remove them from libraries. We have never seen anything like this before, there have already been more than four thousand books that have been contested. I have created a group together with other authors called “Authors against book bans”, and we are trying, State by State, to counter this trend. Many of the censored books are examples of literature queer for teenagers. Censorship in this case is a direct message to the queer community, especially transgender people, to go back into hiding. Defending books means defending the freedom not only to read, but also to be who you want to be.”
