Teddington local, Julia Tuffs, has her first book published this month. She talked to Pippa Duncan about the themes of her Young Adult novel – teenage angst, sexual harassment in schools and, oh, being a witch
As if the teenage years weren’t difficult enough, what if you found out you were a witch? Jessie Jones isn’t too keen on her new powers – she has enough trouble being the unpopular newbie in school, dealing with bitchy girls who see you as competition and boys who score you out of 10. All she wants to do is keep her head down and be invisible.
The teenage years are such fertile ground for writing, believes Julia Tuffs (pictured): ‘You are so passionate about everything at that age – friendships, romances, music, your interests. It’s such a strong time in your life and I really wanted to focus on that.’ Hexed is the story of a girl who is forced to move the Isle of Wight by her single mother. Every time she has a her period and gets angry at the injustices she sees at school, strange things happen – a boy who laughs at a girl with acne suddenly has a face full of spots himself, another who is lying about his sexual prowess with a classmate finds his nose is growing long, Pinocchio-style and a girl who throws a ball at Jessie’s head suddenly finds it ricocheting back and hitting her in the face instead.
Tuffs was clear that she wanted to link what happens to every teenage girl – the starting of her periods – with the self-awareness of her own powers, witch or not. The book is very much about these twin themes – a girl’s right to feel in control of her own body and development of er powers. Her inspiration has been the series of events in the last few years of women’s rights being ignored, misogyny and the #MeToo movement: The fact that men like Donald Trump could be elected President after he openly admitted grabbing women’s genitals is hard her [for anyone]to understand. And if that behaviour is ignored at the top, no wonder it is filtering down into schools.
There is a lot in the news now about not only shaming girls at school but the sexual harassment that goes on in them across the country. ‘That made me think about the witch hunts and trials. It was perfectly fine for men to persecute ‘witches’. I just liked that link – that what if our periods are our power. What if you gave superpowers to a young girl in a school setting where she’s faced with that everyday misogyny and that toxic masculinity.’
While the stimulus for the book was nurtured by such big topics, it is certainly not weighed down by them. This is very much a teen novel, covering things every teenage girl faces, but written in a humorous way. In fact, I wished there was a little more witchery in this first of a hopefully long series. Tuffs has a two-book deal with her publishers and this book is definitely setting up Jessie for some exciting adventures ahead.
Before writing, Tuffs worked in television as a researcher and runner for six years on entertainment programmes before re-training as a primary school teacher and living on the Isle of Wight for a time. But feeling that she really wanted to write she did an MA in writing for children, realising that young adult fiction was her niche. She got a lot of support from the Society of Children’s Book Writing and Illustrators, who helped her find an agent which quickly led to her first publishing deal.
Writing during lockdown whilst home-schooling two young children was, not surprisingly, a challenge: ‘I was getting up at six to do some work before the kids got up, so I had that headspace, but it was really hard with the first lockdown.’ She would escape to Bushy Park or the Fallow Deer in Teddington to give herself time to think through her storyline: ‘I’m not a big planner – I find that if I plan too much it takes the energy out of it. I do a lot of background work on each character, because if you know them really well then you know how they’re going to respond.’
You don’t have to be a young adult to love YA fiction. There is something fascinating about it taking you back to the days when everything in life seems possible and you have no idea how hard the journey might be.
You can read more about Julia here.
Read about the lives of other locals here.
