I was very involved in the campaign, but we didn’t succeed, and it stayed on the books for something like 15 years.Īnd I wrote the book, and I wanted to get it published, but I didn’t know anything about publishing. I was in my early 20s and out, and here was a law being passed saying that who I was was something that people couldn’t talk about in school, and librarians couldn’t have books about it in schools. It became law in 1988 and there was a campaign against it in 1987. When you wrote the book, were you aware of Section 28? Not one case was ever brought under the law, but what was insidious about it was that librarians and others weren’t sure about what they could and couldn’t do, so they censored themselves. I’m not saying that’s why it was turned down, but those were different times, and that was part of the climate then. So I wrote the book for the degree, did well, got a distinction, and no one wanted to publish it back then.Īnd that may have been related to a 1988 law called Section 28 that prohibited schools or government agencies from “promoting” homosexuality? Beyond that, though, the book is nothing to do with my life, except of course that it’s what was in my head and my heart that I wanted to write about. The book definitely links to my life: I came out when I was younger, and I had an amazing English teacher who changed my life in a lot of ways. They’d just started a novel writing course in Manchester, and I wrote this for my degree. I was out of school and had been working for a few years, and I wanted to write. From her home in Cornwall on England’s Southwest coast, where, if it’s not too foggy, she can see the sea as she works, Liz Kessler spoke with PW about her 16th book, its long back story – both personal and political – and her complicated feelings about seeing the book come into the world. There are no mermaids or time travel in the story of Ashleigh, whose encounter with an inspiring teacher makes her realize not only that she’s smart, but also that she’s gay it’s Kessler’s first YA novel and it’s highly personal, not least because it’s actually the first book she ever wrote. next month, is different on several counts. But Read Me Like a Book, which comes out in the U.S. British author Liz Kessler, best known for her middle-grade series about Emily Windsnap, a girl who finds out that she’s half mermaid, has 15 books under her belt.
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