Part of what I experienced soon after I got married and realized that I didn’t present as a queer person anymore was feeling like I was abandoning my friend group. Was it super important for you to have that kind of representation in Ramona’s immediate friend group?

Those big things that we see happen on the news like hurricanes or wildfires, for those of us who don’t live that reality, that’s just one day of news, but for the rest of the world, that echoes through their entire lives. What would a teenage girl look like today if she had survived Hurricane Katrina at a very young age? How would this still have a footprint on her life? How would this echo through her everyday world? So that would happen in ways like with her mother who is no longer present but still is, in a way. That’s where I think all of the heavy past with Ramona and her sister Hattie and their mother comes from. I was really interested in what type of person that type of environment would create. Not to say that New Orleans was well-handled or anything like that, but I mean, for as much attention as New Orleans got, this part of the country got even less. It’s like this part of the country was ignored post-Katrina.

I really fell in love with the Mississippi Gulf Coast and all of the people I came across as I traveled this part of the country and researched it. How did you navigate the impact these various things might have had on her? There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think we also have to be very willing to go easy on ourselves and be willing to allow for shift and changes in that.īefore the book even begins, Ramona and her family have been through a lot because of Hurricane Katrina and then her mom leaving. So I wanted to write a book about that shift in identity and how we take such great comfort in our labels.

It was this really happy time in my life and honeymoon period in my marriage when I should’ve been really thrilled, but I was having to come to terms with this shift in identity because I would never, for as long as we’re married, experience that feeling of walking into a restaurant and holding hands with a girl, and for people to just identify me as queer. I’ve always dated both guys and girls, and when I married my husband, I experienced this really weird thing that I didn’t expect to experience in that I kind of felt like I wasn’t straight enough for all the straight community and I wasn’t gay enough anymore for the queer community. I’ve always been bisexual or pansexual or queer or whatever label you want to put on it. But I felt a lot more tied to this book in a really personal ways that people can’t see just by looking at you. People can look at me and make assumptions about how I might relate to that book. My second book, Dumplin’, is about me in very obvious ways. You’ve said this is a more personal story for you.

Ramona Blue by Julie Murphy