man who is a lover of books and does such important work in
Haley! I’m a bisexual writer living in Brooklyn and my LD ENOUGH, comes out this June. I’m just – over the moon m so excited to tell you about it, but first, I have a little why writing to you feels very tender and special to me.
y shy as a kid. Being an only-child with a massive gap nt teeth and glasses that my mother insisted I wear a CHAIN n’t trendy then, ok? Not. Trendy.) – it didn’t bode well for id department.
I was not so athletically inclined and I had many allergies and so it took a while for me to find my stride as a person with interests and confidence. So, like many shy kids do, I took to books. Books that my grandmother brought me – piles and piles of books from the library she worked at. From the library she still works at –she’s 97. If that’s not a testament to the power of literature I don’t know what is.
I’m a writer because I was a reader. I read everywhere – constantly – upside down on the couch, in the bathtub, during recess, and out to dinner. I was voracious and hungry and I earned the nickname the girl who reads a lot and I was okay with that, actually, I was pretty proud. I grew up in a house where books were precious and special and I thought writing was just about the best thing ever. All because my grandmother taught my Mom the power books can hold, and then she taught me.
My grandmother is also Catholic. So there’s certain things that we don’t quite align on. The me being gay thing in particular. But she’s old and religious and Italian and it is what it is.
So as the story often goes in a religious household: Mom grew up with a lot of rules. She went to Catholic school with nuns and their rulers. She lived in a tiny town where things were done a certain way and she would have continued to believe things should be that way if she didn’t have the one rule that changed it all for her. The rule was that she was allowed to read anything she wanted. So despite my grandmother being, um, particular, she never shielded my Mom from any books. And so my mother learned about the world outside her tiny town, she learned that there was no certain way to live, that so many people had their own way. She learned about queer folks and hippies and rockstars and scholars alike. She read it all. She was voracious and she was hungry, and her mother taught her to be that way, and my mother taught me the same.
So I grew up reading anything I wanted. And I grew up in a house where I could be anything I wanted. And now I am a writer, who wrote a queer book, a book about a girl who is learning that she can find her own way.
All because my grandmother works in a library.
And that’s where you come in. Because you’re the person at the library who can change the minds of people who have learned a certain way by recommending a book that can alter the course of their life, just like it did my mother’s.
So, if I may, I’ll tell you a little about mine – and if you like it, perhaps you’ll recommend it when it finds a place on your shelves this summer.
Savannah “Sav” Henry is almost the person she wants to be, or at least she’s getting closer. It’s the second semester of her sophomore year. She’s finally come out as bisexual, is making friends with the other queers in her dorm, and has just about recovered from her disastrous first queer “situationship.” She is cautiously optimistic that her life is about to begin.
But when she learns that Izzie, her best friend from childhood, has gotten engaged, Sav faces a crisis of confidence. Things with Izzie haven’t been the same since what happened between Sav and Izzie’s older brother when they were sixteen. Now, with the wedding around the corner, Sav is forced to reckon with trauma she thought she could put behind her.
On top of it all, Sav can’t stop thinking about Wes from her Gender Studies class—sweet, funny Wes, with their long eyelashes and green backpack. There’s something different here with Wes and with her new friends (who delight in teasing her about this face-burning crush); it feels, terrifyingly, like they might truly see her in a way no one has before.
With a singularly funny, heartfelt voice, Old Enough explores queer love, community, and what it means to be a survivor in a post #MeToo world. Haley Jakobson has written a love letter to friendship and an honest depiction of what finding your people can feel like for better or worse.
So that’s the book. And that’s the story. And here comes my favorite phrase, the one that guides my life: I hope you enjoyed reading.
Warmly, Haley
Jakobson