I've mentioned my love of Meg Cabot many, many times, so I won't again, but after choosing Jinx as one of my favourite books of 2007, I asked Meg to do a guest blog and she said yes! Squee! So I'll hand you over to Meg and go and have a lie down in a dark room to recover from all the excitement...
(Oh and check back next week for the chance to win one of five copies of the latest in the Princess Diaries series, To the Nines.)
The weird thing about the series of books I write in the form of diaries about the princess of a made-up principality is that—well, they really are based on my own teenaged diaries and experiences. Except the princess part, obviously…
In the latest and penultimate installment of the books, To The Nines, Princess Mia deals with something I dealt with in high school--a bad break up and the really crushing depression that followed (oh, and she finds out an ancestress of hers might have declared her country a democracy four hundred years earlier, meaning Mia might never get to rule after all).
Adolescence is tough!
But the truth is, my depression was preceded more by my astonishingly bad SAT scores and my decision sciences professor father’s despair over them. My dad was convinced I was going to be a complete failure in life. I believe the words, “Lifetime hostess position seating people at Pizza Hut, because she can’t even count back change,” were spoken.
It is to my everlasting chagrin that he died before I ever got published and proved him wrong.
Now people who knew him tell me he would have been proud of me…but would he ever have read any of my books? They’re awfully girlie and pink for a guy who wrote computer programs.
Still, I like to think that he would have seen that the girlie pinkness is the “spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine”—i.e. the important message about female empowerment with which I imbue each and every one of my books—“go down.”
In other words, yeah, I did flunk Algebra--twice. But that doesn’t mean I’m dumb! It just means, like Princess Mia, I’m talented in other areas than my father was—and I’m trying, in my own way, to make a difference in the world!
That’s nothing to get depressed over, as Mia finds out in To The Nines. It’s actually something to celebrate….
And the fact is, you can do anything if you have enough motivation. Even Algebra. As I found out when I got out of college and landed a job where I had to do payroll. I just stayed late after work with my calculator until I got it exactly right…because otherwise my employees would have kicked my butt!
Like Mia says, in To The Nines—“Do one thing every day that frightens you. And never think that you can’t make a difference. Even if you’re only sixteen, and everyone is telling you that you’re just a silly teenaged girl—don’t let them push you away. Remember the other thing Eleanor Roosevelt said: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
