Audiobook narrator turned author Natalie Naudus and YA author Jenna Voris share unexpected common ground: books about queer girls navigating their relationship with religion. Gay the Pray Away, Naudus’s traditional debut from Quirk after self-publishing it last year, centers on Valerie, whose sudden feelings for Riley, the new student in her Bible study class, change everything she thought she knew about the world and herself. In Voris’s third YA novel Say a Little Prayer, bisexual Riley (another coincidence) abandoned the church once it became clear that she was no longer welcome because of her sexuality. But when she lands in trouble at school, she’s stuck at church camp for spring break, where she finds her friendship with Julie, the pastor’s daughter, evolving into something new. Naudus and Voris spoke about discovering queer literature as young people, grappling with their own religious upbringings, finding empathy in the face of harm, and releasing queer books in a conservative political climate.
Natalie Naudus: I’m so excited to talk with you! I feel like we have so much in common. We both have sapphic romances coming out that feature girls [dealing with] with religious trauma. When I was reading your book, right from the start, I was like, “Oh, she knows about this environment. She gets it.”
What was it about gay girls in church that felt compelling for you to write about?
Jenna Voris: I came up with the logline pitch, committing seven deadly sins at church camp, a while ago and I just thought it was funny. I didn’t have a story around it. But I was really involved in my church. I’m from Indiana, the Midwest, so I was active in my church all throughout middle school, high school, and basically until I left for college. It was a large part of my social life. I was at every Bible study. I went on the summer mission trips where you would go to a random neighborhood and paint people’s houses. As I started to move away from that experience, I also felt torn because I knew that the religious [aspect] was not something that resonated with me anymore, but I did genuinely have friends in the church.
And I think that’s a very specific experience, almost a trauma bond, when you’re young and in these environments. I think about retreats where we would all be in the chapel together. It would be dark. They would be playing acoustic guitar music and some guy is saying, “You’re all going to hell unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior.” And everyone was crying and I was like, “Oh, it’s because I feel the spirit.” And then you’re like, well, not really. It’s probably just because we’re sleep-deprived and it’s like cold and no one’s had dinner yet. I remember that being a very formative experience, where I had such strong connections to these people. And yet I have absolutely no connection to the teachings anymore.
Naudus: I love that you took an upbeat approach to your book with the seven deadly sins. It’s so fun. It’s brilliant.
Voris: Thank you! You’ve spoken about how you dreamed up this story while imagining what it would have been like to encounter a single queer book earlier in your life, which hit me because I remember feeling the same way. Do you remember the first sapphic book that you read or the first piece of queer media you encountered and what that felt like for you?
Naudus: When I was in college, in the gym, there was some queer period movie playing and I’ve never been able to find it, but it blew my mind that these girls were kissing. And I’ve actually searched for this movie and not been able to find it, but it was really formative. I remember being on a treadmill and being like, “Oh my God, people, don’t look!” But I’m totally invested in what is happening on this screen because I didn’t realize that this was an option.
How about you?
Voris: I was going to say, a lot of it was fan fiction at the time. I also feel when I was growing up, a lot of the queer books that were being published, what few of them were being published, were about boys and gay men. The first time that I actually saw queer women, and specifically lesbians, was on Glee. That was a really interesting environment to grow up in, not really seeing that kind of relationship.
I was really interested in your title as well. I think it’s a funny play on the common phrase “pray the gay away,” but I love that you’re reclaiming it for this queer book and making it your own. While you were writing, was there anything else that felt like a reclamation of your experience? Were you able to recontextualize anything from your past over the course of writing this book?
Naudus: A lot of writing this book for me was looking back and telling my younger self, “You were good and you’re not bad”—maybe loving my inner child in a way that she wasn’t at the time. And I really hope that I can provide that for other people too, to look back at your younger self, who felt the weight of all that constant guilt and self-criticism, and find some sense of self-worth and goodness in retrospect.
Voris: I love that. I think that’s a theme that I also tried to explore as well, in this sense that there’s no one black-and-white guide for how to be a good person or how to live your life. And I think a lot of the times the church or religious leaders will try to make it seem like if you do this, then you’re good. Or if you do something else, that’s a sin and you’re bad. In reality, there are so many different shades of gray.
Naudus: Something else that I found really similar between our books is the idea that familial love in a Christian family is conditional. Even though a lot of the parents say the same things, which I heard growing up, like, “We’ll always love you. You’ll always be our child,” there’s an undercurrent of [but only] if you believe what we believe, if you love who we say you should love, if you keep going to church and believing these things. How was that to unpack for you?
Vorus: I feel very lucky in the sense that my parents also are not really part of the church anymore. They have been incredibly wonderful and supportive of me, and I have never once doubted their love of me because of my sexuality. But I had so many friends in the church whom I knew that would not be the case for. And I think that there are a lot of teens now whom that is not the case for. I have Riley, the main character, who does have a family like mine was, that is supportive of her. And then we have her love interest, Julia, who is the pastor’s daughter who has been taught, like you said, that love is very conditional and if she does something that is out of line, she risks losing her parents’ love forever. And I remember thinking how terrible it must be to go through that without the support of family. That was important for me to reflect on the page because I’m sure that a lot of teens experienced that.
Naudus: One of the most striking things in your book was when the pastor is giving this spiel and Riley says, “The worst part is I think he really means it.” And that really struck me because it’s easy to villainize the people who still believe these things, but they do come from a place of genuine belief that they’re right and that if they don’t save you, you’re going to hell. And it’s like that saying, “Born to be a hater but forced to see where they’re coming from.”
Did you find it hard to get this book published because it is about church?
Voris: No, I’ve been fortunate that I have a very supportive editor and publisher. I have been with the same editor [Maggie Rosenthal] for three books. I had pitched this idea over a lunch at one point, and she was like, “I want that book.” It’s funny because she is Jewish and so I’m teaching her things about church camp. And at one point, she was like, this can’t be real. And I was like, no, you don’t understand. You go to church camp and sometimes they make you eat rice and beans for two days to teach you about gluttony; that’s just kind of how it is sometimes.
What was the process like for you? How do you feel about the difference in self-publishing and traditional publishing with the content of the book?
Naudus: I had an easy time finding an agent, but then it did not sell on sub. And I actually self-published it. And now it’s being republished by Quirk. I was really glad that I was able to self-publish it first because I was able to keep everything the way that I wanted. It is such a personal story for me. I did get some feedback while on sub but because it is so personal, I really wanted to do it in the way that I wanted to. I wanted to tell some harsh, hurtful things, but ultimately from the lens of healing and love. I didn’t want to sensationalize it or make it a scary cult book. And so I am really glad I was able to do it my own way first.
Voris: Do you feel like anything has changed in response to the current political climate? Do you feel more hesitant to put this book out, or are you excited for it to reach new readers?
Naudus: I would say all of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up on some banned book lists. But mainly I’m excited for it to reach more people.
Voris: Yeah, I feel the same way. I’m hearing from so many people saying, “This was my childhood” or “I think this will be healing for me.” I think that’s why it was important to write these books.
Gay the Pray Away by Natalie Naudus. Quirk, $12.99, May 20, ISBN 978-1-68369-511-0
Say a Little Prayer by Jenna Voris. Viking, $12.99, Mar. 4, ISBN 978-0-593-69274-5
