In The Moon Without Stars, Luna, a writer, starts offering book prescriptions to classmates who, like her, are struggling with the challenges of seventh grade. Things escalate when she and best friend Scott start creating personalized zines, as Luna grapples with opportunities that push her out of her comfort zone. PW spoke with Miller about the differences in writing this book and her middle grade debut, the Newbery Honor-winning Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All, what she likes about writing for middle graders, and helping kids understand how to repair harms they’ve caused and learn how to seek help.
Did writing this novel feel similar to writing Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All?
When I wrote Magnolia, I needed to give myself a dose of pure delight. I was constructing a literary city while living in New York during the pandemic; I wanted something to hang on to so I could breathe better and just enjoy this world I was building. With Luna—sometimes you don’t know why you’re setting out to write a book until afterward. But I’ve observed that for my three decades on this earth, I’ve been someone who’s tried to be good and nice, and that’s been a large part of my identity. And it was wearing me out. I wanted to think about what being good means and if it’s even obtainable.
I wanted Luna to be good. She’s well behaved, she’s friendly, but even so, as she’s growing up, she inadvertently hurts the people closest to her. When that happens, we have to ask ourselves, how did that happen? Who is important to me? What’s important to me? How do I mend this? I was also thinking a lot about how, even if I identified as good, I witnessed a lot of people doing mean things and didn’t do or say anything. And I realized that passivity is also a stance, and it’s not one I’m proud of. I wanted kids to start thinking about what role they’re playing. Because we’re all playing a role whether we acknowledge it or not. I wanted to think about day to day, minute to minute, how we participate and sustain relationships in our lives.
You came to middle grade from the adult space. What differences or challenges did you encounter?
I wouldn’t use the word “challenge,” because I’m having a great time. Life took me on a loop-de-loop detour, and then I got back to where I was meant to be. I will say that because my memoir [Know My Name] was so personal, it took so much out of me while I was writing it. I would be crying; I’d feel gutted. And when I was writing Magnolia and I wasn’t crying every day, I genuinely couldn’t gauge if the material was good. If you’re not dying, does it even count at literature? Am I allowed to be emotionally regulated and still produce good work? Turns out the answer is yes. You can write and not be in all-consuming agony.
The Moon Without Stars focuses on Luna’s first months in seventh grade, when Luna is struggling with the feeling that she needs to change, that the Luna she’s been up to now isn’t quite enough. Do you see middle school as a time for reinvention?
I’m fascinated by how much is changing in middle school. Things are falling apart and coming together at record speed, there’s a constant flux, and a lot of it is out of your control. You might be excluded from a friend group, and no one sits you down to tell you why. You’re living in the unknown and wondering who you’ll sit with the next day. There’s so much turmoil. All I ask at the end is that readers offer themselves grace—that they see that as a universal experience and learn the practice of self-forgiveness. And I hope they learn to stay in the conflict. I was so scared of conflict, and now I understand that that’s when we need to negotiate and try to make things better for both people. All these things that have taken me so long to learn—I wondered if it’s possible to infuse them earlier.
When Luna and Scott start making zines for classmates, they’re mainly about body issues: acne, eczema, periods. Why did you want to focus on these concerns?
It wasn’t something I planned initially, but one thing I love about traveling is going to bath houses in Korea and Turkey and understanding that the West is so disembodied. I’d only ever see other women’s bodies, maybe, at the YMCA locker room when I was there with my mom. And I just kept thinking if I’d grown up seeing natural bodies of all ages it would have completely changed my relationship with my body.
Your body is making lots of demands in middle school because it needs new things. You have questions to answer, and for me, it felt like such a private and humiliating grappling. And now I’m asking—why? If we’re all going through it, and we’re all in bodies, why is it so hush-hush? It’s such a shame. If I had just learned that your body is full of information, and it’s your job to be in constant dialogue with it, I could have taken care of it better and connected with people who could have helped me through. I really hope that kids can do that early. It’s not on you to be closed off in a bathroom and freaking out.
Why did you want to showcase or explore these questions of personal growth and change through a tween lens?
I’m very interested in subtleties, in things that aren’t so bad, things that people can justify or rationalize. In teenage land, the stakes get higher and concrete things that we know to be awful happen. From the outside, Luna’s fine, but on the inside, she’s totally crumbling. And it’s even harder when you don’t have the language to describe how catastrophic things feel because it’s not as obvious. And that’s when I can come in as a writer and really stay with her interior life. I can honor what she’s going through and not put it on some hierarchy of intensities of what things mean.
When I was a kid, I took great pride in being independent, self-sufficient, doing well in school, keeping up with my peers, and when life got harder, and my behavior started changing, I realized that I didn’t know how to deal with anything less than perfection. I didn’t know how to recruit help or lean on other people; it wasn’t a response that was built into me. And I love that I can take Luna out of her depths and show her that you can’t fix this on your own. You need to let people help you. Growing up, you don’t know what people are going through, but now I’m endlessly fascinated by that. I just want us all to stay open and be curious, not make assumptions, and participate in the practice of leaning on others, especially if that’s not natural to you.
The Moon Without Stars by Chanel Miller. Philomel, $17.99 Jan. 13 ISBN 978-0-593-62455-5
