Susan Metallo: Reasons to Hate Me (PTSD, ASD)
- A Novel Mind
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
Welcome to A NOVEL MIND, Susan! Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m so happy to have connected with you! I am neurodivergent (autistic with OCD), a young adult author, and a youth services librarian. I think I’m drawn to literature for children and adolescents in part because I’m still processing through so much of the anxiety that I experienced as a kid, before diagnoses helped me understand how my brain actually worked. I also now have an 80 lb. American Bulldog who makes an excellent weighted blanket, which helps. Like the protagonist in Reasons to Hate Me, I was a huge theatre and creative writing nerd in high school. And like the antagonist in Reasons, I majored in vocal performance in college and still sing with a symphony chorus. Writing is now my full-time job, in addition to parenting, spousing, and enjoying the Albuquerque sunshine.
What sparked REASONS TO HATE ME?
A few things converged to spark Reasons. I’m also often embarrassed by some of the thoughtless mistakes I made as an adolescent (because I forget nothing), and the book began when I was noodling around in a Word doc, making a list of the worst things I’ve done in my life—and trying to “reframe,” as my therapist might say, and give myself the grace to have once been thirteen or seventeen or twenty-two and still growing as a human being. Some of the things I was mortified about as a teen were so funny to me as an adult, and I wondered if there was a YA book somewhere buried in that concept. It turns out, there was.
When I started to turn my noodling into a book, there were two more ideas I hoped to explore. First, I wanted to explore why people’s stories get told and whose stories get amplified or silenced. That’s something I think a lot about as a disabled reader; my real world is so full of disabled people, so why are the books I read so empty of disabled characters?
Second, stories about trauma don’t usually reflect my personal experience with PTSD. I know that some people’s experiences with trauma survival were genuinely dark and unrelenting, but my experience was actually more of a yo-yo: I’d be fine, laughing with friends, having fun, and then something would trigger a flashback and I wouldn’t be fine. . . until I was again.
And because of the truly bleak of PTSD that I had gleaned from the books I’d read and movies I’d seen, I honestly didn’t realize that I might have the disorder for a long time. Even when I finally sought help from a counselor, I went in for a symptom—insomnia—not thinking that I had something bigger going on.
So, when I started writing Reasons, I was determined to write a comedy about trauma—a disabled character who was fun and funny and living her life, while gradually starting to realize the ways PTSD was affecting her and that she needed to ask for help. In the end, I don’t know that I actually created a comedy about trauma. It’s really more a story about friendship, loving yourself, and setting boundaries. But accepting community support to navigate mental illness is still definitely a big theme.
Tell us about the character of Jess, "autistic theater nerd and champion of questionable life choices."
Jess is so very human. She’s a mess, and sometimes she’s kind of a selfish jerk-face, but at the end of the day, she’s trying to be a good person. High school social rules are hard for every single high schooler, especially girls and kids who were socialized as girls. Jess has the added challenge that the bullying clique—as well as her sister and her mother—are allistic, and their social cues make even less sense to her as an autistic person. A lot of her brazenness in the book is masking her own insecurity as she feels down about herself and her struggles to fit in. It’s my hope that readers can genuinely disagree with some of her questionable choices, but still be rooting for her the whole time.
Tell us about your choice of story-structure -- you use blog posts and shorts scripts to tell this story. How did you develop this approach? Why is it effective?
The blog posts came out of my prewriting for the book—funny anecdotes about terrible or embarrassing things Jess might have done. I found her voice early, and formatting the story as blog posts allowed her to be the storyteller, a self-conscious narrator. That means readers know they’re hearing the story through the filter of what she chooses to share, and that distance allows her to be unreliable. You’re never sure she’s telling you the truth, because she’s holding you at arm’s length, addressing readers as though they are some of her bullies. When she becomes more vulnerable and stops addressing the reader in second person, the intimacy feels more dramatic.
The scripts were a more natural approach for me. When I write, the first draft of a scene is usually a disembodied conversation between the characters. I think part of it is because I’m so used to rehearsing conversations in my head as a social coping strategy, something I’ve been doing forever, usually in front of my bedroom mirror so I can get my facial expressions just right. (Fellow autistics, please tell me you do this, too!) When I started telling a story in Jess’s voice, it seemed like something she would do as well. Pithy, formal action descriptions and setting details add so many comedic possibilities. Or I can eliminate action description entirely and lean into the drama of silence. I’m a fan of novels in verse and the white space speaks as loudly as the print.
Can you tell us a little about the other neurodivergent characters in the story?
Since in my experience, neurodivergent people tend to find one another like we are equipped with invisible homing devices, it made sense that Jess’s best friend—the main antagonist in the story—would also be autistic. Chloe and Jess share a diagnosis, but they are very different people. For example, Chloe uses language fairly literally and is more likely to misunderstand sarcasm or metaphor while Jess uses a lot of figurative language. Jess struggles to interpret social cues more than Chloe. The girls have different sensory preferences and different strengths and weaknesses. But they both love Broadway musicals! I wanted to represent two very different autistic characters because I didn’t want Jess taken as an emblem of all autistic people or even of all autistic girls. I hope that neurodivergent readers might resonate with either Jess or Chloe—or, like me, a little bit of both!
Jess also has another friend who is described as neurodivergent. I don’t share a label for Dee’s neurodiversity, but I describe them as mentally “bouncier” than Jess or Chloe, and they frequently seek bold sensory input.
What feeling or notion do you hope your neurodivergent readers come away with, after reading this story? What about for your neurotypical readers?
I hope that every reader who picks up this book will come away feeling seen and having a better handle on what people around them might be thinking and feeling.
I know that many autistic women and girls have told me the saw aspects of themselves in Jess or Chloe that they rarely see in represented in media, and I know from ND characters that I’ve connected with—like Addie in A Kind of Spark or Aza in Turtles All the Way Down—that it’s is a very special connection. But because the characters in the story are dealing with such common adolescent conflicts and emotions, I hope that all readers, regardless of neurotype, feel seen. And I particularly hope that readers who face mental illness, bullying, ableism, or any of the issues my characters encounter, come away from the book with a stronger sense of their own strength and dignity and the knowledge that there is help and community out there.
Similarly, books help us all develop empathy as we vicariously experience life through someone else’s thoughts and actions. Even readers who relate strongly to one of my characters will gain insights about other characters who may be more different from them. Of course, I’d hope that readers who are neurotypical and have had a narrow or erroneous perspective on neurodivergent people will experience great leaps in their understanding of autistic people or of PTSD, but in writing the story, I wasn’t actively trying to educate people. And I certainly wasn’t able to depict the whole range of neurodivergent experiences! I just tried to make the characters I created as real as possible so that the story would be both validating and thought-provoking no matter what identities or prior experiences a reader brought to the book.
What's next for you?
My sophomore novel is a YA Historical Fiction titled Hearts on the Table. It’s a queer, neurodivergent twist on a Shakespearean comedy (Twelfth Night), and it comes out September 22, 2026. There should be a cover reveal soon! I also have another YA Contemporary in the works, so you can keep an ear out for that one next year. I post details about my projects as soon as I can share them on my website (susanmetallo.com).
Susan Metallo is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, living her best nerd life, and when she's not writing a book (or reading someone else’s) you might find her doing a crossword puzzle or singing the soprano line of a Baroque fugue. She lives in New Mexico with her husband, children, and an 80-lb. bulldog who fervently believes she will fit on your lap.