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When Sara Zarr noticed a phone message from the National Book Foundation on her answering machine back in October 2007, she let it wait before listening. Zarr, who lives in Salt Lake City with her high-school teacher husband, thought for sure it was some sort of sales call.
One month later, she and her husband found themselves dressed in formal attire, sitting at the same table as author Sherman Alexie for the National Book Awards ceremony in New York City. Zarr's Story of a Girl and Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian were running neck-and-neck for the foundation's award for Best Young Adult Novel.
"If I didn't win, I knew that was easy to do. I've been a not-National-Book-Award-winner
The disappointment was harder to take than Zarr expected. She congratulated Alexie. After half an hour of waiting, her husband, Gordon, at last made his way to the men's room. Then a well-known book company CEO made his way to Zarr's table. "It must be awful for you," he said.
The scene was perhaps every bit as awkward, unexpected and bittersweet as a scene from one of Zarr's three novels.
Her expertly, even achingly, drawn teenage characters sense whispers of happiness, truth and love whenever they stop to untangle the emotions inside their heads. As adolescent luck would have it, their progress seems
"If I'm ever lucky enough to have [a National Book Award nomination] happen again, it won't be as sweet," Zarr said, sitting at the desk of her Ninth and Ninth district office. "Now I'm acutely aware of the week phone calls for those awards go out."
Her words reveal more ambition than disappointment. Few writers have the luxury of having their first published novel hit a home run all the way to a national award nomination. Zarr, 39, said her goal now is not to squander the attention the nomination has drawn. At the same time, it gives her leeway to make the right kinds of mistakes.
Not one to rest, Zarr has turned out two more books since 2007's Story of a Girl , her frank but not graphic, tense but never teasing tale of Deanna Lambert, a 17-year-old girl who struggles with the fallout of losing her virginity at age 13. Zarr followed up with 2008's Sweethearts , an ode to teen entanglements that don't fall into romantic stereotypes. Once Was Lost , published last month, ventures into Zarr's most personal territory yet: the struggles of faith endured by a minister's daughter when her mother enters rehab and a young woman in her father's congregation vanishes.
A California native who grew up in and around the Bay Area, Zarr is the daughter of a special-education teacher and alcoholic father who worked in retail. Often financially strapped, Zarr's family attended a variety of evangelical Christian churches in San Francisco during a time when some in the hippie counterculture were turning from drugs and free love to the allure of a Christian community in the "Jesus Movement."
One church she attended growing up was heavy on "End Times" theology of God bringing about the end of the world. "I was kind of surprised to be around another year," she said. "At the same time, [my family] would find money under the door so we could buy groceries. We knew that was from someone at church, so it was a very mixed bag."
Although sometimes conflicted, Zarr maintains her Christian faith today. As coincidence has it, her small basement office sits just down the hall from that of her Presbyterian minister.
Zarr never thought about writing as a career until two years after she graduated from San Francisco University with a bachelor's degree in organizational communication, and after a string of jobs, realized she was not one to take orders. Writing seemed as exotic as being an astronaut, Zarr said. Then she finally met a few authors in Internet chat rooms. "I realized these people weren't gods," she said.
In 1996, she committed to writing something from beginning to end, and yet it took her more than a decade of regular writing to accomplish the publication of Story of a Girl.
She appreciates young adult readers because of their honesty, and she believes that most teens' opinions and thoughts are not yet papered over with false decorum. "When I first wrote, I did it from the premise of creating the kinds of books I wished there were more of," she said. "Then I tried to write those books."
Zarr attended local writing groups in Salt Lake City, but one of her most lasting professional relationships remains her connection to Tara Altebrando, a New York City-based writer of young-adult novels she met at myspace.com. The two exchange drafts and feedback on a regular basis.
"She writes very clean books about very complicated topics, which is a great skill," Altebrando said. "She's not a prima donna. She knows writing is hard work. I've seen early drafts of hers that contained lovely, lovely passages that did not make it in because of the detours she takes to achieve a total vision."
Although her first book sold more than 100,000 copies, Zarr said she never reads online reviews of her book or searches the Internet for her name. The distraction is too noisy and of no use. She will open reader e-mails, however.
"Only a teenager would tell you that you've written their very favorite book after Twilight and think it's a compliment," Zarr said. "But I know that as passionately as they feel about Twilight , that is a big compliment."
The 2002 abduction of Elizabeth Smart, and empathy Zarr felt as Utah's tight-knit religious community struggled with misfortune, played a large hand in forming the narrative for Once Was Lost . Turning the corner on a grocery aisle to see Smart and her mother shopping after Smart's resurfacing, Zarr said, was the closest she's yet come to "facing a miracle."
Zarr's books don't always end on such high notes. She's interested in the ways her young protagonists make sense of life's messier edges, of what she calls the "work of adolescence." The work of growing into oneself, she believes, mirrors the hard work of writing -- make that thinking -- itself.
