The Joy of Knowing Yourself

by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

I wrote The Mermaid, The Witch, and The Sea for one kid in particular.

Her name is Clare. I met her when she was nine, and I worked in a bookstore. For the first two years I knew her, her parents would bring her into the bookstore where I worked, and would do most of the talking for her. She has a mess of unruly, bright red hair (she is AWARE she looks like the girl from Brave) and was also painfully shy. 

But then one day a flip I hadn’t touched switched. She came bounding into the bookstore, found me at the info desk and asked, breathless: “DO YOU LIKE POKEMON?”

Which. Sadly, reader, I do not. I am too old. Miraculously, this didn’t put Clare off. She told me about Pokemon anyway, and I was thrilled that she finally trusted me enough to talk to me. To show the breadth of her seemingly limitless enthusiasm. For Pokemon, of course, but for books as well. And it became apparent that she wasn’t just the voracious reader her parents had introduced me to— she was a brilliant one. With fascinating insights into world building and structure that only a kid who lives part time in their imagination could have. 

Eventually, her parents hired me to be her creative writing tutor, during which time we discussed books even MORE and blessedly uninterrupted by the customer service bell. And it became apparent during that time that something was missing from the books Clare was reading, something she missed, a part of her own identity that was rarely reflected in the stories she so passionately loved. 

Queerness. 

See, this was almost ten years ago, the demands for diverse representation in kids’ books was there, but hadn’t gained the necessary support it has now. We Need Diverse Books didn’t exist yet. And while there was a smattering of queer books in the YA section—Malinda Lo being of particular importance to Clare— there weren’t nearly enough to keep Clare’s pages turning. 

And so like an arrogant twenty something I sat down to write one for her. It had to have all the things she loved best— high stakes, magic, rules, murder, and mystery. But most of all it had to center around a big queer romance. With pining and kissing and a sense of romantic destiny, just like all the hetero books got to have. 

It came in fits and starts and I didn’t know what I was doing, and it’s safe to say that each and every single word I put to the page in my first attempt to build Clare a story is gone now, deleted and forgotten. My discipline in writing it was patchy at best, and so many years passed as I drifted in and out of this world.  Clare went to high school. Then to college.

And as I wrote this purposefully queer story for Clare, a funny thing started to happen. I realized I wasn’t just writing to her queerness, but to my own as well. I’d hooked up with girls, in high school and in college, and also after college, and also while I was writing this book, and had somehow convinced myself that each of those (myriad) events were aberrations, special cases. That they didn’t apply to my identity, which I assumed was straight. 

Reader, I was not. I am not. I’m very much a cheerful and slutty bisexual, and it took writing an entire novel for someone else’s queerness for me to realize it. Not that I was slutty. I was already well aware of that. 

I could see in retrospect the reasons I didn’t allow myself to name it before— internalized homophobia, of course, but also a fear that I wasn’t queer ENOUGH to claim the identity. I went to an all women’s college, and so naturally there was plenty of sapphic hooking up. That is one of the chief benefits of attending an all women’s college. But there was also an attitude among my peers that bisexuals were just tourists in queer identity, and that those people were toxic. And I didn’t want to be toxic. I just wanted to be slutty. So I pushed that part of me aside, for many years.

But just as any step taken to stand closer to your true self does, naming my queerness allowed me to better know myself, better pursue my own happiness. By knowing herself, from such an early age, and seeking out the representation that she deserved, Clare allowed me the freedom to find myself, too. And what a joy it is, to know yourself. 

Having a teenager pull the curtain back on your identity is kind of, in my opinion, the whole point of young adult as a genre. Coming of age does not stop at eighteen. 

This week, I drove across the Bay Bridge with a single copy of The Mermaid, The Witch, and The Sea resting on my passenger seat. My author copies arrived late thanks to the pandemic, and so that’s how it came to be that nearly a decade too late, and almost a month after my book ventured into the world I finally got to deliver a copy to its single, most important reader. 

I laid the book on her porch, rang the bell and waited on the sidewalk with my face mask on. When she saw it, she hugged the book to her chest, and I felt something like peace wash over me. The book was in the right hands, now. Its job was done.

I didn’t cry when I saw her holding it, but I did as I drove back to my home in Oakland. The person that I was when I first imagined The Mermaid, The Witch, and The Sea is gone now. And that’s good. Because now, as I live and when I write, I get to take my queerness with me. And that’s the great gift Clare has given me. 

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