Sarah Darer Littman

Sarah Darer Littman is the critically acclaimed author of middle grade and young adult novels for young people, including Some Kind of Hate, Deepfake, Backlash (Winner of the Iowa Teen Book Award and the Grand Canyon Reader Award) and Confessions of a Closet Catholic, winner of the Sydney Taylor Book Award. As well as writing novels, Littman teaches in the MFA program at Western CT State University, and with the Yale Writers’ Workshop. She is also an award-winning columnist. Littman lives in Connecticut, in a house that never seems to have enough bookshelves.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Quite a bit! Both the title, Some Kind of Hate, and the dark, ominous cover art serve to warn anyone that picks up the book that this will not be a light, easy read. That’s intentional - as are the content warning at the beginning of the book and the author’s note at the end. The novel is told from dual perspectives - Declan, a teen boy who becomes radicalized to right-wing extremism after an event that could destroy his future, and Jake, his friend and baseball teammate who happens to be Jewish.

What's in a name?

Jake’s surname is Lehrer, an homage to the mathematician, musician, and satirist Tom Lehrer, whose albums I listened to as a teen. I would love to be able to write satire with the same brilliant, biting wit that he employed. A future life goal...

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self wouldn’t be at all surprised that I was inspired to write a novel about rising antisemitism, because like many Jewish teens with Holocaust trauma in the family, I was obsessed by trying to understand how it could have happened. I wanted to figure out what the warning signs were, and developed almost a hyperalertness for that danger.

Teen Sarah would be proud of me for facing our deepest fears and interviewing former Neo-Nazis for research. She wouldn’t have had the courage and confidence to do that.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Young people see this “woman of a certain age” and ask how I’m able to write so convincingly as a teenager. I tell them that while the technology and lingo change, the emotions are the same.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The news. I’m an avid consumer of news, and try to ensure that I’m getting it from sources around the world so I can see how the same story is reported in different ways. Whenever there’s a breaking news event, I flip between channels to see how differently the story is being framed depending on the source - or if a particular source is making the choice not to cover it.

Two of my previous careers - working on Wall Street with a focus on the technology sector and newspaper columnist - have also had a major impact on my writing. My background as a financial analyst allows me to look at technology with a critical eye. As a columnist I’ve been on the receiving end of some of technology’s downsides (hate mail, threats etc.)

But I’m also fascinated by the intersection of teen life and technology, because I grew up without the internet and social media. That allowed me to make my teenage mistakes (and believe me, there were many) in relative privacy. What we hopefully learn from the mistakes we made as teens helps us become better adults. So what happens when the cost of making those mistakes becomes so high, due to social media and the fact that “the internet never forgets”?

I’m not a Luddite. I can see how technology makes our life easier in many ways. But I worry that teens today don’t have the same freedom from constant surveillance and connection that I had growing up, and think about what implications that has for their ability to problem solve, and most of all their mental health and resilience.

Visit Sarah Darer Littman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue