Alice Oseman: I Wrote a Book about a Sad Girl

 
In case you don’t know who I am, my name is Alice Oseman. I’m twenty years old. When I was seventeen, I wrote a book called SOLITAIRE, a coming-of-age story about a pessimistic sixteen-year-old named Tori Spring. Since SOLITAIRE was published, Tori Spring has been called many things. She has been called an overdramatic, silly teenage girl. She has been called whiny and annoying. She has been diagnosed with severe depression, has been pronounced mentally ill, and I have been lauded for my portrayal of depression in young adults.
I wrote SOLITAIRE because I was a very sad teenage girl.
I have never been diagnosed with depression. At fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I understood myself to have very much the average sort of ‘sad’. I cried sometimes at the end of the day. I felt lonely most of the time. I was angry about everything, I didn’t have very many friends, I hated school with an absolute rage, I listened to sad music on the bus. I properly and utterly hated myself, for a whole array of reasons.
Adults call this ‘teenage angst’. I believe that ‘teenage angst’ is a pathetic and patronising way of phrasing feelings that millions of teenagers (and, let’s be honest, adults too) experience. I just call it what it actually is – an emotion. ‘Sad’.
All of this went into my book. All of the sad.
I’ve written posts before about what writing my book was like. To say that it ‘saved me’ feels like an overstatement, but that’s pretty much what it did. It was something that allowed me to get all of my sad out and put it somewhere, as if writing it down was putting it into a specific drawer, then closing the drawer, and not thinking about it anymore. I couldn’t find any books about a sad teenage girl. There was The Catcher in the Rye, and there was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I couldn’t find one about a British girl like me. So I wrote it myself.
I stand by the belief that writing SOLITAIRE saved me. Without it, I think I would have continued to feel worse. Much, much worse.
What I have found, now that SOLITAIRE is out in the UK, is that reading SOLITAIRE has had the same effect on people. Dozens upon dozens of people have come to me and told me “your book was so relatable – it made me feel allowed to be sad” or “finally, somebody understands me!” And that is what made me realise how important talking about mental health is in literature – whether it is complex analyses of specific mental health disorders, or whether it’s just the idea of a person feeling sad a lot of the time. Because a lot of people actually do feel sad a lot of the time, for no specific reason. Because if you know that somebody else feels the way you do, you know that it is possible to carry on. It is possible that things will get better. It is possible to survive.
I wish I’d known that a few years ago. I didn’t, so I had to write a book to prove it to myself. The final lines of my book were me telling myself – you’re going to be okay. I honestly believe that I’m going to keep spreading this message until I die. Whether you’ve been diagnosed with a mental health disorder or whether you simply feel desperately sad, just like I did – you are not alone. It can get better. It will.
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About SOLITAIRE

My name is Victoria Spring.
Sometimes I hate people.
This is probably very bad for my mental health.
Tori has friends. She has brothers. She has parents. Sometimes she can be bothered to talk to them. Most of the time, though, she would prefer not to have to deal with other people.
Until the day she follows a trail of Post-its from her locker to a deserted computer lab, where she finds a message from a mysterious group called Solitaire. It’s also where she meets Michael Holden. Irrepressibly cheerful, weird, and determined to be her friend, Michael is everything Tori normally hates.
And that’s it. That’s where it starts.
Soon Solitaire has launched a series of pranks across the school. For once, Tori feels connected, like someone is on her wavelength—making jokes about her favorite movies, blasting her favorite song on repeat over the intercom. Then Solitaire’s pranks start to go too far, and no one else seems to be concerned. Tori doesn’t like getting involved. But this time, the idea of doing nothing is even worse.
Solitaire is a novel about finding friends, finding yourself, and discovering that one person can change everything.
Start reading it for free now ––>
 
 

More Mental Health Matters blog posts from our authors:

 

Michelle Falkoff: Writing About Grief
 

Cynthia Hand: Breaking the Silence on Mental Health
 

Jasmine Warga: Portraying Teenage Depression in YA