Kate S. Martin’s debut novel Are You Okay Elliot Hart? is a fantastically moving story that tells us, through the lives of two teenage boys – Elliot Hart and Josh McBride – that what you see on the surface isn’t always what’s going on inside. Ahead of the release of its sequel next month, we want to celebrate Kate’s first book (nominated for the Cheshire Schools’ Book Award 2023) with an interview library assistant Rosie was able to have with her earlier this year.
What’s it been like getting your first book published?
I wrote the book without really intending on getting it published. So I finished it and it sat on the shelf for a while and then I went to lunch with my dad and had a couple of glasses of wine and came back and just thought ‘oh, why not?’. I found some small presses, sent it off and it got picked up quite quickly and then it’s just crazy. So it’s stressful, but the highs are great, like the support from everyone – family, friends, colleagues, other authors, and feedback from readers.
What do your students think about it?
I didn’t tell them for a very long time, and when it was published it was only a few that knew, and you start getting a bit of imposter syndrome and thinking like ‘oh, it’s awful, don’t read it’. Then as it became more popular, they started to find out. At our school they read for five minutes at the beginning of every lesson, and there’s nothing quite like looking up and seeing one of your pupils with your book. There was one pupil in my tutor group who is quite quiet, keeps herself to herself, and she sent me an email that just said ‘your book is beautiful’ and that was it. If nothing else happens, this’ll be it.
I haven’t read much really about young carers or teens going through domestic abuse. Why did you want to tell that kind of story?
Elliot’s a young carer and it took me to about 38 to realise I was probably a young career as well, but I never really knew about that label, we just kind of got on with our family situation. A lot of people say that your first book is the one that you have to write, and Elliot was without a doubt me processing a lot of emotions about my experience.
I found a few books about young carers, and I’ve read all the ones I could find. But I couldn’t find lots, and then I thought – if I read that book when I was a teenager, it would have helped to know that actually yeah, other people do have extra struggles and extra worries and extra stress when they come to school.
Josh, with the bullying and the domestic violence, was probably more of my teacher head on. One of the saddest things you see as a teacher is bullying and I didn’t want to excuse that, but just put a spotlight on the fact that even those angry teenagers and the ones that make people’s lives difficult, quite often there’s a story behind that. And it doesn’t excuse it but it’s the start of a discussion, it’s the start of them being seen as well. The domestic abuse I’ve no experience of so I just needed to make sure that I got that right and dealt with that as sensitively as I could.
How did you find the experience of writing between the two characters?
It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be. When I first started writing the book, it was Elliot’s story and I wanted to explore that, and Josh was just a character in his story. But then I realised that if I was going to do a book where what you see on the outside isn’t quite what’s going on inside, I had to do dual narrative, it would have to be between Josh and Elliot.
I scarily find it really easy to write as a 15-year-old boy, probably from spending every day for so long surrounded by teenagers, so I reckon what I found difficult was making sure that they sounded different. I kept going back and checking on that because even though their personalities are very different, they’re both teenage boys, they’re both from the same town, same village. So I tried to play on their emotions and personality; Elliot’s quite shy and introverted and uses different vocab, while Josh uses more short sentences, just kind of angry. Josh was probably even more – not necessarily enjoyable to write – but I got really engrossed in his narrative because he was just struggling with rage all the time. So being a teenage boy – not difficult. Making them sound different – probably.
Did you switch between them as you were writing it quite a lot?
Yeah, I switched between them, so it was: write Elliot and then thinking about what I need to show from Josh’s perspective and write that. I don’t reckon I could have written all one and then the other, because the journey changes them, especially their relationship, and they kind of develop as characters as the book goes on.
What part of the book was hardest to write?
There’s one chapter that still gets to me, even though I’ve read it many a time, because when you’re editing, you read the book about 80 times. But this chapter, Elliot turns up at school in his uniform, because he doesn’t get a message that it’s own clothes day. So he turns up and everyone’s in their own clothes. And it’s something that always happens, and it can be a bit embarrassing, but it’s more than that for Elliot because it’s highlighting what he doesn’t have.
So he then walks back home really angry. Angry at his situation, angry at his mum for not passing the message on, jealous of everybody else’s life, and it’s raining and he’s got a plastic bag of food and he goes in and he confronts his mum. And for me, out of all the chapters – and there’ve been some sad and gritty chapters – that one gets to me, probably because Elliot is so reserved and so controlled for a lot of the book but it just bubbles over.
Obviously it deals with a lot of heavy topics, so did you have to step away from it at points, to give yourself a break from that?
Things were quite difficult in my life in the year that I wrote it, so writing it I found quite therapeutic. I did it in 15 minutes stints every night in a notebook on my bed and it was my 15 minutes of peace weirdly.
I now go to schools to do workshops as well as teach and I’ve realised that I have to talk about it a lot, and talk about quite personal stuff and quite difficult topics. And it’s equally a joy working with teenagers and there’s always somebody that says something that you realise that you’ve helped in a way. But at the end of days like that, I need half an hour to kind of decompress a bit.
So Are You Okay, Elliot Hart? is getting a sequel, is there anything you can tell us about that?
Yeah, so the sequel comes out October 24th. I think I’m going to end it there, so it looks at Josh and Elliot’s final year at school. It moves a bit away from totally about Josh’s home life to the reasons he might struggle in school, and Elliot, now he’s kind of accepted his situation a bit more, it looks at what you could do then. Because I realised after I’d written book one that as much as it explored difficult issues, it didn’t really say what you do next.
And then there’ll be a third book that’s totally different, different characters, still young adult. I can’t imagine not writing for teenagers – even for myself it was always going to be centred around them – and I always like writing about difficult topics, and that’s probably about as much as I can say.
Do you read a lot of YA books? What other books would you recommend for people who enjoyed Are You Okay, Elliot Hart??
There’s not always much time to read, but when I do get the opportunity, I reckon 9 times out of ten it’s YA. I find teenagers fascinating, and I’ve also got to know a few YA authors so I’m interested in what they’re writing.
The Weight of a Thousand Feathers (Brian Conaghan) really tackled what being a young carer’s like. Eve Ainsworth has written quite a few books that look at difficult topics. Stuart Foster’s All The Things That Could Go Wrong really helped me with the dual narrative, which is more middle-grade, and looks at OCD and bullying. The Eternal Return of Clara Hart by Louise Finch is about #MeToo issues, that’s won a few awards. Simon James Green, Boy Like Me. There’s so much talent and I’ve discovered a lot more since I’ve been writing.
What About You, Josh McBride? comes out October 24th 2023.
Find out more about Kate S. Martin on her website.
Subscribing schools can order a copy of Are You Okay, Elliot Hart? via our online request form or by emailing educationlibraryservice@cheshiresharedservices.gov.uk.
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