Hey. It’s me. It’s been a little while since my last irregular blog post, and I was feelin’ one. I wanted to share a little about my new book (it releases tonight.). More pointedly, I wanted to tell you a little bit about my process writing this book. Where the genesis of it came from, where I drew inspiration and scenes, and a little bit about my old neighborhood.

I had the idea for Cry Baby a little over a year ago. It was sparked by a few things. Like a lot of themes I write into my fiction, some great reporting inspired me here. I was listening to an in-depth piece on NPR about a kid who had to run home after school and hide in his apartment because he was avoiding joining the gang that ravaged his neighborhood. If they saw you, and you were male and of the right age, you were in. It was that simple. Or rather, that complex and horrifying. He couldn’t hide at school, so he survived the torment there. I think about that boy and his story often, wondering if he made it out alive, or if he was sucked in.

The rest of my inspiration came from my world. I grew up in a part of Phoenix that often led the state in gang activity. My street happened to be a few hundred yards away from the one two rival gangs used to divide up territory. I used to have this recurring dream because of some of the things I’d seen and heard, and I had just had it for the first time in years right before I started this book–it had maybe been a decade. The dream always goes like this: Me and my dad are pulling out of a gas station that vaguely resembles the one on the corner of the main street in my old neighborhood. I’m always a young teen girl, twelve or thirteen, and my dad is always in his forties. It flips to slow-motion, and both my dad and I see a car slow down and begin to turn into the gas station, the passenger-side windows facing us and two men leaning out the windows with guns turned to the side and ready to fire. We’re just in the way, but it doesn’t matter. They begin to shoot. Glass shatters. Sometimes my dad is hit in his arm or his chest. He’s never killed, but we’re always both terrified. He pulls me down and ducks above me, shouting at me to push the gas because for some reason he’s no longer able. I always push it with my hand while he turns the wheel, and sometimes I can feel our car dip into the gutter and level out on the road back home. Sometimes we crash. Sometimes, we just keep turning and driving, in circles while bullets pierce our car. It goes on like this until I wake up.

It’s always the same dream. Always so real feeling. I covered a shooting at that very gas station for the newspaper when I was fresh out of college. But this last time I woke up from the dream with a strange feeling. I used to write the dream off to things I heard about at school, to the gun shot sounds we could hear at night from the living room of the house I grew up in, or to the boys I watched grow up in grade school only to read about their incarceration or tragic death in high school or after graduation. This time, though, I woke up thinking about Tristan. He had a name. He had a backstory, and a tragic existence. He was trapped in the same dream I was, and he was loud and demanding. His prologue flew out in minutes. The rest of his story would take a lot longer.

I ruminated about Cry Baby for months, while I worked on other projects. I spent time in my old neighborhood, revisiting the scene of some dreadful things. I sifted through police reports from shootings I was there for, only a block or two away from the place I slept. I began to save stories about MS13, the gang that’s made a lot of news over the last few years. It’s become a political spotlight, of sorts. The saddest part to me, though, is the kids the gang members all start out as.

Kids like Tristan.

I began researching MS13 cases, and digging into old Bloods and Crips articles. Some of the stories truly broke my heart, and every single time, I thought about the young kids who didn’t have a choice. Choice is tricky. If you’re only shown one thing when you’re young, it’s hard to realize you have one. It’s harder still when you know that not falling in line might mean torture and death.

This book is one of my greatest accomplishments. It was tough to write. Honesty is that way, I think. I didn’t sugarcoat things. I gave my readers the real world that some have to survive, and that others fall to. I also hope I gave you characters to love, to root for, and to want in your lives. Maybe people we all wish we were a little bit like, too. Brave.

I hope you enjoy Cry Baby. I hope you feel it in your bones and let it simmer in your soul. I hope it hits you like that NPR story hit me, and I hope we all think about the ways we’re lucky for just a little while, even though there are often ways we aren’t.

Until next time.

XO
Ginger