Author of the Riverman trilogy Aaron Starmer delivers a multigenerational speculative novel with You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This, illustrated by Jaime Zollars. Twelve-year-old Roman always ducks out of the room when Grandpa Henry starts regaling older family members with the gruesome story of how he lost his pinkie toe. When Grandpa Henry dies unexpectedly, Roman is tasked with packing up the late patriarch’s belongings, among which Roman finds a jar of murky green liquid and a notebook containing a bizarre yet alluring story about a girl and a pack of dogs. That’s nothing compared to what he finds locked up in Grandpa Henry’s shed, though. In a conversation with PW, Starmer reflected on his experiences growing up in a large family and the importance of maintaining a sense of wonder in adulthood.
A major theme in You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This is the idea that as you get older, certain aspects of your family become more apparent and begin to make sense in a way that they didn’t before. What inspired this direction?
Roman Barnes is the youngest of a large group of cousins, which I was as a kid. I related to that feeling of everyone else having knowledge that I didn’t. It wasn’t out of malice or anything like that. It’s just that everyone else had reached these points of maturity that I hadn’t. I always felt like I didn’t have access to either the teenage or adult worlds. I really wanted to explore that feeling in a more fantastic way, because it’s a common one for anyone who has older siblings or older cousins, or who’s discovering things about their parents or grandparents that make them feel like actual people with lives and stories and secrets and darkness that you don’t necessarily think about until you’re a certain age.
After Grandpa Henry dies, Roman worries that he’ll never get the opportunity to learn more about his family. What did you hope to convey by exploring this aspect of grief?
I wanted this to be an active adventure for Roman; he’s the one finding the answers. A lot of time in these situations, there’s an assumption that everyone has the same information. After a wedding with my wife’s family, we all went back to her grandmother’s house, and her grandmother was telling all these old stories that my wife had never heard, that her own mother hadn’t heard. But her grandmother just assumed that they knew them all. I wanted to make this journey something that Roman had to confront for himself and decide that he was going to learn about these things, that he was going to seek them out, because no one else was going to do that for him.
For his birthday, Roman receives a Magic 8 Ball from an unknown sender. What role does this gift play throughout the novel?
That detail came a little later in the writing process. As you read the book, you’ll notice that there’s all sorts of strange objects, and sometimes they’re not explained, but they’re all linked in a sense. The Magic 8 Ball was an object that I had in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t quite sure how to fit it in. And then I realized that it needed to be there in the beginning. There are aspects to it, like the murky water inside, that provide a lot of links to things that will happen later. A lot of us, when we were kids, or even as adults, played around with one of those, when we were feeling nervous or anxious. We’d pick it up, and we’d want the right answer to pop out to soothe our nerves. I think that’s something that everyone can relate to.
In your acknowledgments, you describe You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This as a book of stories. Can you elaborate?
There’s the main story, the first third or half of the novel, that’s about a girl and a pack of dogs. I had actually written that part first, and it was something that I was experimenting with, and trying to figure out how I would incorporate it into a bigger piece, or whether I would trim it down into a smaller piece. I set it aside for a while, until I started thinking about these other stories, like the one that launches everything, which is the creepy story of the toe beast. So that one came next, and I had in the back of my mind this idea of a curiosity shop with all these things, and this idea about a bucket, and I started to think, “Well, maybe these are all stories about someone’s family history and how all the family members are tied together through this common event that happened in the past, but also through these objects that bind them together.” And that’s how I came upon Roman. I had to have a character who investigates everything.
What draws you to speculative fiction?
I like to write about realistic emotions and situations, and then have the characters be confronted with something that quickly pulls them out of that. It’s a challenge because you’ve got to keep the audience with you, and you’ve got to make it realistic in terms of “how willing is the character to accept this?” It’s a lot of fun to write that for young people because when they’re 12 or 13, they’re sort of abandoning the idea of magic—but when it’s thrust in their face, they have to accept that, well, maybe this isn’t childish. Maybe there’s something more to this. Maybe part of becoming an adult is being open to things like this.
You Are Now Old Enough to Hear This by Aaron Starmer, illus. by Jaime Zollars. Penguin Workshop, $18.99 Mar. 24 ISBN 978-0-5937-5109-1
