Hello lovely human who is a lover of books and does such important work in this world – Hi! My name is Haley! I’m a bisexual writer living in Brooklyn and my debut novel, OLD ENOUGH, comes out this June. I’m just – over the moon about it. And I’m so excited to tell you about it, but first, I have a little backstory as to why writing to you feels very tender and special to me. I was horrifically shy as a kid. Being an only-child with a massive gap between my front teeth and glasses that my mother insisted I wear a CHAIN with (and it wasn’t trendy then, ok? Not. Trendy.) – it didn’t bode well for me in the cool kid department. I was not so athletically inclined and I had many allergies and so it took a while for me to find my stride as a person with interests and confidence. So, like many shy kids do, I took to books. Books that my grandmother brought me – piles and piles of books from the library she worked at. From the library she still works at – she’s 97. If that’s not a testament to the power of literature I don’t know what is. I’m a writer because I was a reader. I read everywhere – constantly – upside down on the couch, in the bathtub, during recess, and out to dinner. I was voracious and hungry and I earned the nickname the girl who reads a lot and I was okay with that, actually, I was pretty proud. I grew up in a house where books were precious and special and I thought writing was just about the best thing ever. All because my grandmother taught my Mom the power books can hold, and then she taught me. My grandmother is also Catholic. So there’s certain things that we don’t quite align on. The me being gay thing in particular. But she’s old and religious and Italian and it is what it is. So as the story often goes in a religious household: Mom grew up with a lot of rules. She went to Catholic school with nuns and their rulers. She lived in a tiny town where things were done a certain way and she would have continued to believe things should be that way if she didn’t have the one rule that changed it all for her. The rule was that she was allowed to read anything she wanted. So despite my grandmother being, um, particular, she never shielded my Mom from any books. And so my mother learned about the world outside her tiny town, she learned that there was no certain way to live, that so many people had their own way. She learned about queer folks and hippies and rockstars and scholars alike. She read it all. She was voracious and she was hungry, and her mother taught her to be that way, and my mother taught me the same. So I grew up reading anything I wanted. And I grew up in a house where I could be anything I wanted. And now I am a writer, who wrote a queer book, a book about a girl who is learning that she can find her own way. All because my grandmother works in a library.
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