Meg Eden Kuyatt: THE GIRL IN THE WALLS (Autism)

1.  Hi Meg! Welcome back to A NOVEL MIND! Can you tell us a bit about your new book, THE GIRL IN THE WALLS?

Thank you so much, Sally! 

The Girl in the Walls is about V, a girl who finds a ghost in her grandmother’s walls. When the ghost invites her to do pranks on the grandmother, V is more than happy to join—until the pranks get increasingly dangerous and troubling. She has to decide if the ghost is an ally or an enemy, or maybe something a little more complicated. 

Like Good Different, it’s a story about disability, particularly the generational trauma of being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world.  V is autistic, and in the story, V learns she may not be the only neurodivergent person in her family after all. As she learns about her family’s history, she discovers different ways people have historically coped and masked in an ableist world, but also how she can be a model for change in how we talk about and handle neurodivergence. I really appreciate that my editor encouraged me to lean into the neurodivergent aspects of this narrative, as I hope this book can be a helpful conversation starter on generational neurodivergence, masking and celebrating neurodivergence!

2.  Your first novel, GOOD DIFFERENT, was a poignant contemporary realism story. This new novel is firmly in the realm of spooky magical realism. What turned you toward this more fantastical direction? 

When I wrote GOOD DIFFERENT, I wrote very literally and directly about my feelings. I was overstimulated, so I wrote poems about feeling overstimulated. I tried to do this at first with WALL but quickly found the feelings too painful and difficult to stay in grounded reality. I needed to hit them at an angle (“tell it slant,” in the words of Emily Dickinson), and I needed something beautiful and strange to lift me out of the ugly. At first I played with time travel, but with time I discovered instead a ghost-girl. Through the ghost, I could unload my heavy, awful feelings. I could get out, through the ugly, how powerless I can feel, but also envision possibility, joy and healing. The fantastical gives us a little more breathing room for possibilities and hope and making the ending we really want to see in our world. 

3.  Tell us a bit about V. How did she first come to you -- how did you create this character?

All my protagonists start out with one of my wounds, or a side of myself I want to explore. While Selah in Good Different is discovering her autism, I wanted V to (at least start) loud and proud about her autism. With V I wanted to explore how I love being autistic, but people can make me doubt this, or make me wonder if I am only appreciated when I’m a high-masking, well-behaved autistic. Would I still be loved as sincerely if I struggled more intensly with impulse regulation, or RSD, or externalizing symptoms? Have I always been told I’m a “good kid” in large part because I happen to be someone who internalizes her symptoms? What are the ramifications of this? I know surely that for those who truly love me, I am loved as I am. But this doesn’t mean doubt can’t creep in, and hurtful interactions can make me doubt myself. And when I struggle, I write about it, because I’m learning alongside my protagonist. I wanted to see how V found a way through to learn how I might be able to more healthily deal with my feelings and invite room for grace and restoration when possible. 

4. V's grandmother is a difficult and complex character. Her uptight anxiety is so palpable, it almost jumps off the page. Tell us a bit more about how she came about.

This story started from feeling greatly hurt by a few different people—people I greatly looked up to that disappointed me, but also people that I really had trouble understanding. I knew part of the reason I needed to write this book was to learn empathy for people that seem, to me, to have shallow, superficial interests, or people who do things that just make no sense to me. 

Being autistic, I can easily default to black and white thinking. I know I need to be particularly proactive to counteract this impulse. Because of this, much of my antatgonist character creation starts with my superficial, flat impression of people that have led me to feel frustrated or hurt. But then, I ask what the other side might be. The why. When I came to my mother with my hurt feelings, she asked me, “Is it possible this person is feeling X? That they might do this because of Y?” It’s such a simple but powerful set of questions. I realized I had neever taken the time to try to explain (note, not justify) this person’s behavior. It’s so easy for us to take the hurt, or the negative experience, and to make that a person’s entire personality. To assume that people are out to get us, that they are purposefully rude or hurtful or ableist or unkind. But the reality is, most of us think we’re doing the right thing when we do something. The reality is, we all mess up. And all of us have a reason why we do things. When I apply this exercise to my characters, they suddenly become much more interesting, and they have a lot to teach my protagonist—as well as me. 

5. Both V and your first novel's Selah have significant trouble regulating violent/destructive impulses. Can you tell us a bit about why this is part of their nature?

This is a really interesting question. The boring answer is that characters need to be active—and having them be destructive is an easy way to be active. A more interesting answer might be that these were my instinctual narrative impulses (though I think my editor had to encourage me to keep pushing V’s pranks to be harsher, more honest and messy), and that they rang true to me. When we hurt, when we’re overstimulated, sometimes we say and do things that we wouldn’t do otherwise. Perhaps that speaks to certain impulses I’ve subconsciously learned to mask? 

6. Tell us more about what's on the horizon -- are you working on any more stories? 

I have some exciting things in the works that I hope I can share more about soon (by the time this publishes, I think I’ll be able to say it though)

I’m so excited to have a Good Different companion novel in the works, and a YA with two autistic leads (that I’ve been working on for over ten years now, so it’s such a joy to know it’s coming out into the world)! Being undiagnosed for most of my life, I’m really enjoying exploring what it means to be autistic and how to be a healthy autistic person in a neurotypical, often ableist world. So we’ll see where that leads me as I play with future ideas!

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