Hi everyone, thank you for joining me for my next repDISND 2024 interview! I’m excited to bring you my interview with author Leanne Schwartz. We had great fun talking about intersectional representation and writing an adult autistic character for her debut adult novel, My Kind of Trouble.

You can find the full interview below!

Hi Leanne! Thank you so much for agreeing to join me for an interview as a part of repDISND to discuss disabled and neurodivergent representation. It is wonderful to have you here at Just Geeking By 🙂 

Hi, thank you so much for having me!

Could you start us off by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about who you are and what you do?

I’m Leanne, an erstwhile English teacher and current full-time author. Pre-pandemic I taught high school English and led poetry and drama classes, and I love writing fantasy and romance that lets autistic, fat, and queer characters star as the heroes. I’m a big fan of live theater and enjoy hanging out at the library or outside here in San Diego.

 

You have published two young adult novels, A Prayer for Vengeance and To a Darker Shore, and your first adult romance novel, My Kind of Trouble, (under the pen name L.A. Schwartz) is due out in October! 

Can you tell us a bit about them?

It has been a year and it’s not over yet! A Prayer for Vengeance debuted in September; it’s the story of an autistic poet in a city-state surrounded by monsters who accidentally wakes a murderous statue with his prayer, and it deals with overwritten and lost histories, questions of violence and faith, and finding love even when you think you’re too broken.

To a Darker Shore is inspired by Dante’s Inferno and Hadestown, and features two autistic best friends, shepherdess Alesta, who wants to be an inventor, and painter Kyrian, who does not want to be the new heir to the throne as he finds himself. When Kyrian’s sacrificed to hell in her place, Alesta follows, determined to slay the devil and end her island kingdom’s sacrifices forever—only to find Kyrian alive but monstrously transformed. I got to really dig into themes of ableism and oppressive beauty standards, as well as religious trauma and demisexuality.

My Kind of Trouble is completely different! Though I think it has a lot of the same heart that readers of both genres might enjoy. Inspired by The Music Man, it’s the story of Harmony Hale, a plus-size conwoman who comes to a small northern California town to get revenge on the man who ruined her father’s life, and ends up falling for Preston Jones, an autistic librarian raising his autistic little sister, fighting book bans, and trying to save drag storytime and his job. It’s frothy and fun—writing a hyper-confident fat woman was a blast—but still looks at the loneliness and exhaustion of autistic masking as well as the homophobia driving a lot of current censorship.

It’s clear that including plus size, LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent representation in your work is important to you. How much of this is due to missing representation when you were younger?

Definitely—in the deepest way. It took years for me to get my head on straight about my own beliefs and accepting myself enough to write about these topics for others, coming of age in some of the most fatphobic years we’ve had of late, while neurodivergence was almost exclusively considered “a boy thing” and gay representation meant AIDS tragedies often written by straight people. I remember this one moment as a teen so clearly, sitting in my writing classroom, trying to imagine a fat heroine, and thinking it was a ridiculous idea. That somehow being fat precluded the ability to be the hero in the center of one’s own story. Because I had never seen it. It’s so hard to imagine for yourself something you’ve never been shown in the sea of books and other media you’re consuming, full of actively and insidiously negative messages. Ursula or Durselys, Holes or Jemima J—almost all of the rare fat characters we got were ridiculous, evil, or had to learn their lesson and lose the weight, just as disabled characters tended to serve merely as inspiration for the real heroes and queer characters to be laughed at or tragically die. Those were the only stories they were allowed. And ultimately that gaping lack of representation circumscribes our own humanity, for ourselves and in others’ eyes. So yes, it’s hugely important to me to get books out there where characters get to go on adventures and be romanced and grapple with all kinds of themes, all while just happening to be fat, or ND, or queer. And that’s why I always strive to get the labels on the page when I can, or make it very clearly canon. While it’s definitely still a steeper climb finding welcome on many shelves, I really hope that getting those characters in those stories allows readers today to feel seen and envision fuller possibilities for themselves, and for other readers to understand their experiences and humanity a bit better.

 

 

As someone who wrote about my weight being related to my disabilities, I hear you loud and clear about the need for this representation. Has there been an improvement in plus sized representation, and if so, is it intersectional? 

I’m so thankful for this growing wave of wonderful authentic plus size rep over the past several years in both young adult and adult spaces, and so much of it is intersectional, with main characters who are fat and queer, BIPOC, and/or disabled, etc. Off the top of my head, we’ve gotten A Song of Salvation by Alechia Dow, The Seafarer’s Kiss by Julie Ember, Becky Abertalli’s Leah on the Offbeat, Here the Whole Time by Vitor Martins, Claire Kann’s If It Makes You Happy, Crystal Maldonado’s Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, Glitch Kingdom by Sheena Boekweg, Renée Watson’s Love is a Revolution, Camryn Garrett’s Full Disclosure, Amy Spalding’s The Summer of Jordi Perez, Olivia Dade’s Ship Wrecked, Jenny Howe’s On the Plus Side, and more and more. The scope of these characters and stories is so wide, it really illustrates how far we’ve come from those stereotypical scraps. We get to see all the little ways moving through the world in these bodies can impact us, and how fatness can weave into other issues characters are dealing with, and also how it’s just one piece to their lives. That’s really where we get to see the full humanity of fat characters.

 

 

How did the idea for My Kind of Trouble come about?

I’d been reading a lot of romance while enjoying the rollercoaster of querying and otherwise attempting to block out scary existential thoughts at bedtime, and wanted to try something different after writing several big fantasies and finding myself still looking for my first yes from publishing. I read romance craft books and brainstormed a lot, but nothing was really coming together. Then one day my sister (who attends a lot of theater in NYC) kept texting me about the Broadway revival of The Music Man, and as I was in turn talking excitedly about it to my husband, I stopped mid-sentence, the idea of a bookish hero and slick conwoman coming to me in one flash. Of course I love my local libraries, and I’d been following a lot of librarians online for years, learning about their field and challenges, and tracking the upsetting increase in book bans and attacks on drag storytimes, so the idea of a librarian fighting book bans and trying to protect his library programs felt really timely to me. And as I outlined more, the opportunity to explore autistic masking in parallel with the lies of a grifter with a heart of gold, and connecting the two very passionate people beneath those façades, was so appealing. Ultimately a love story to me is the story of people learning to trust each other, so getting to see Preston and Harmony take that journey, as they also deal with melty ice cream, angsty teens, sinister tech bros, and nosy PTA moms, was just a lot of fun.

Did you find it different to write about an autistic adult in My Kind of Trouble compared to writing about younger characters in your YA novels?

Yes, it was really exciting for me to write an autistic adult, and in a contemporary setting. About ten years older than my YA autistic characters, Preston is in a more mature place and has a better sense at this point of himself and his autism, whereas the teens may feel confident about who they are at times but still be questioning everything a lot more and deflecting messages from their society about themselves. Preston still deals with the exhaustion of masking in professional and public settings and the loneliness as he struggles with connecting with people. But he knows who he is and is adamant any of those struggles are exterior to that.

He also exists in a world that for better or worse has a fuller understanding of his disability, so he’s gone through harmful therapies but also has access to autistic research and communities, whereas my YA fantasy teen autistics don’t know nearly as much even about their own autism, as they’re figuring out why certain things may be harder or different for them, and certainly not as a general concept, growing up in worlds that don’t bother to study what they’d only see as a weakness or sin.

This isn’t to say Preston doesn’t have moments of feeling overwhelmed or regretful about his disability, as I think many of us find a common enough experience. Even when we understand what we’re dealing with on a logical level and have pride in our identities, those moments can still hit us in waves. And there are certainly parallels between Preston trying to survive day to day life with too much on his plate and my fantasy teens literally trying to survive as monsters attack. Plus, Preston’s been fighting that battle a lot longer and is watchful about autistic burnout. But he gets to take what he’s learned about himself (and that strong autistic sense of justice), and applies it toward trying to make things better and easier for young people—like his sister, who’s also autistic, although it displays in some different ways, and the marginalized teens at his Youth Services programs.

Do you have any recommendations for readers who are looking for more books with neurodivergent protagonists?

Absolutely! Sonora Reyes’ The Luis Ortega Survival Club is a fantastic YA contemporary dealing with issues of consent and assault with an autistic protagonist and a group of revenge-seeking teens. Also YA, Andrew Joseph White’s The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is a stunning, harrowing Victorian fantasy with a trans autistic doctor in training sent to a sinister finishing school. Ivelisse Housman’s Unseelie is another YA fantasy, with an autistic heroine, playing with the fae changeling trope, and I’m so excited for the conclusion of the duology next year. Daniel, Deconstructed by James Ramos is delightfully geeky and super sweet. Stradling fantasy and adult, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries stars a deliciously grumpy autistic heroine, light romance, and dark folklore come to life. And possibly my all-time favorite, Act Your Age, Eve Brown gives us two very different autistics falling in love in the sweetest, funniest, steamiest adult contemporary love story.

Thank you Leanne for taking the time to talk to us!

Thank you for reading my interview with Leanne! Please take the time to check out Leanne’s books, you can find out more about her work on her website. You can also follow Leanne on GoodReads, Twitter and Instagram!

Her new book, My Kind of Trouble, is available for pre-order now!

This review is part of repDISND (formerly known as GeekDis) an annual event I run for the disabled and neurodivergent community to discuss representation. Follow the hashtag #repdisnd or follow me on social media for more!

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