Shelia Burt

Sarah Grace McCandless began writing her second novel, "The Girl I Wanted to Be," even before her first book, the endearing "Grosse Pointe Girl," was ever published. She remembers sitting in New Mexico in 1997 for a writing workshop and thinking about childhood.

"I had this idea, thinking about perception where you stop seeing things as a kid and start seeing them as an adult," the 31-year-old McCandless says. She started thinking about her own family, too--a seminal family reunion in fourth grade, her aunts and cousins, slowly realizing "their lives weren't perfect and they weren't perfect."

Although after the workshop she stopped working on the story to finish "Grosse Pointe Girl," the characters she briefly outlined stayed with McCandless for nine years, and she picked up the story again full force last spring and wrote throughout the summer.

Like her first novel, "The Girl I Wanted to Be" takes place in Michigan, where the D.C.-based McCandless spent most of her youth, although she was born in suburban LaGrange.

In the story, Presley, a high-school freshman, idolizes her free-spirited yet occasionally reckless young aunt Betsi. The book follows Presley as she learns that even your idols can have rather large imperfections.

"I really wanted to tell this story from a younger perspective, to capture that transition," McCandless says.

And in many ways, Presley's tender observations--from the way Betsi smokes and smells to the way she can wrap a towel perfectly around your head to dry your hair--make "The Girl I Wanted to Be" an affectionate story. Without being overly sentimental, the book shows Presley overcoming family tragedy while also losing part of her childhood.

Although McCandless nails the pain and humor of adolescence in her first two books, that awkward time period may not be the focus of her third novel.

"I'm thinking of graduating with my narrator," she says. "I love writing from a teen perspective, and sometimes they have the clearest observations of what's going on, but I also feel like I'd really like to try my hand at the time right after college. It's like a second adolescence, you think you know what you're going to do next but you don't really know."

Sarah Grace McCandless appears June 3 at the Printers Row Book Fair's "Coming Into Their Own" fiction panel, 12:30pm at the Harold Washington Library.

(2006-05-30)

Also by Shelia Burt

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