“‘I’m a serious writer.’” But Dessen decided to trust her agent, et voilà: “And now here I am, 25 years later, and it’s a dream. “I was like, ‘Oh, God, no, I don’t write YA,’” she remembers telling her agent. When selling her first book, Dessen resisted the label.

Teenagers don’t want to walk into the kids’ section.” “The big sea change was when we realized booksellers and librarians are always ahead of the curve. “Now you go in, and you can find a paranormal romance YA section. She said her books were shelved-metaphorically, at least-next to Goodnight Moon. When Dessen’s first book came out, in 1996, there was no real young adult section. In the 25 years she’s been writing from Chapel Hill, Dessen has seen the young adult genre grow up, even if she’s worked hard to keep her voice that of a teenager. She’s been along for her own kind of ride. With her daughter away at summer camp, Dessen agreed to speak from her vacation on a North Carolina beach about the Netflix adaptation of her 2009 novel, Along for the Ride, which came out in May. She became a full-time writer before the book release and tour for 2006’s Just Listen. For nearly a decade, Dessen kept working alongside her writing, moving from waitressing to teaching at UNC’s creative writing program. “If I wasn’t writing,” Dessen says, “it was like having that feeling like I left the curling iron on.”Īfter about a year of rejections, Smith enjoyed one of Dessen’s books enough to send it to her agent who passed it along to another agent, who has worked with Dessen ever since. In between, she sat down to write every day, seven days a week. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, she worked mornings as Chapel Hill writer Lee Smith’s assistant and in the evenings pulled shifts as a waitress at the Flying Burrito.

“I remember graduating at Chapel Hill High School, and everyone had their little Class of ’88 keychains,” she says. The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.

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