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Abby and I meet at Cafe Cino one recent, temperate day. As the noontime traffic trickles by, we chat about her debut novel, writing for younger audiences, how nostalgia shapes our reading habits, being a Jewish writer, and her aunt who “used to have wolves.”
Samuel: What brought you to the DMV?
Abby: I moved here right after college in 2019 for a job at a speechwriting and communications firm. I was there for 5.5 years, had a lot of great experiences, and met great people. I left that job earlier this year, but I just love DC, so I’ve stayed around. It’s a great city to live in.
Samuel: You had a book come out recently. Tell me about it! Why this book? Why you? Why right now?
Abby: So, D.J. Rosenblum Becomes the G.O.A.T. is a younger YA novel. It’s about a 14-year-old Jewish girl in suburban Ohio who is investigating the mysterious death of her older cousin Rachel while navigating a new school and friendships, crushes, trying to support her messy family, and studying for her belated Bat Mitzvah. I’m very lucky; people who aren’t me like it. D.J. is the book of my heart.
Samuel: What do you mean by “book of my heart”?
Abby: D.J., both the character and the book, came out of a very personal experience that I had, and my personal processing of it. So the question of “Why me?” was answered from the outset; I was writing initially as part of processing this difficult thing.
Then, starting pretty far back in my life, I’ve always said I wanted to write for kids. Writing D.J. was the time that I let myself do it. When I think about what made me who I am today, the stories that I consumed as a young person are second only to my parents in terms of direct influence. When I think about values I have, when I think about the nest I came from, it all goes back to stories — books, but also TV, movies.
I see stories as a really important way of communicating difficult concepts like empathy that can’t be imparted didactically. Those values are the bedrock of a functioning society, and I feel I can have some utility, leave some small trace of goodness in the world by helping to impart values and ways of seeing the world to young people in the same way that stories did for me when I was young.
Samuel: Young Adult Literature is having a sort of cultural moment right now where it’s very, very prominent and popular. Why do you think that is?
Abby: I think the cynical answer is that it comes from nostalgia for a time period when adults feel like they had the most friends, or had this whole spectrum of possibilities before them in terms of who they would be, who they would be with, how they would be in the world. I do think a lot of people are drawn to that, and I don’t think that has to be a bad thing. In fact, I think something that’s very special about writing for kids, especially teenagers, is that you’re writing for people who are on the precipice of becoming. There’s an implicit potential that I think a lot of people are drawn to when they don’t feel that as much in their day to day life.
As adults, we’re so often told that our possibilities are done — get on the career track, get your job, find your person, wrap it up, you know? There’s a lot of room in YA for fantastical elements — monsters, romance — to be part of a coherent coming of age story, and I think people like the fantastical.
Samuel: How do you approach speechwriting, which you did in your previous job, compared to the kind of writing you’re doing now?
Abby: I think of writing as both an art and a craft. At a craft level, it’s the practical work of putting together sentences, figuring out how to create the tone or effect that you want from the combination of words. That’s something you can become really good at with practice, reading other people, intention. What I think of as the art of writing is the vision you are moving towards. What effect are you trying to have, what meaning do you want the writing to have for yourself, for the reader?
Speechwriting and writing for other people — I also wrote essays and op-eds and memoir — that was a wonderful way to hone my craft, because I was writing all the time. I was being edited all the time. I was taking on different voices for different people. I had to really hone: How do I make this op-ed sound different from that op-ed? What are the craft-based writing tools that I can use to make this person sound authentic to themselves and different from this other person I wrote as yesterday?
But, for me, that was really divorced from the art of writing. It was my job, in a lot of ways, to not have my own vision for what the piece would be, or what its effect would be. I’m meant to embody another person when I’m writing for them. They had a set idea for what they wanted, they weren’t thinking of [writing] as an art — it was related to their business or professional life.
Having that craft-centric writing outlet was great for a long time. But now I have this other outlet with my own books, where I’m using all those craft elements, but am really attuned to my own artistic ambitions and vision for what the work will be, and a really mission-driven sense of writing for young people especially. I feel so much more engaged and passionate about that.
Editor’s note: We were sitting on a patio on 18th Street with a lot of foot traffic, and so the next 7 minutes or so of the interview consisted of an author friend of Abby’s walking by and saying hello, followed by a truck driver telling us about news he’d just heard on the radio.
Samuel: I have no idea what I was about to ask. Let’s go here: Did you think of D.J. as a specifically Jewish book? Where does this project feel particularly Jewish to you?
Abby: I’d always conceived of D.J. as being about a girl preparing for her Bat Mitzvah, so from the get-go it was going to be a very Jewish book.
Samuel: How much is D.J. the character a self-insert?
Abby: Initially a lot, but I reached a point in the process where I had to make a chart of things that were D.J. and things that were me, and make them more different. I’m not interested in writing about myself. I’m not interesting in that way. And that’s not self-deprecating, it’s like…an interesting protagonist is someone who takes full agency over their own life. And, as a child, I was not that person. So for there to be any story about D.J., she would have to be very different. That was one of the joys of writing the book, creating this character who was similar to me but wholly herself.
I think society-wide, we have a really narrow view of what it means to be a Jewish writer. That’s often interpreted as: Judaism is the biggest part of your life, or you only write about Judaism in a head-on, explanatory way. That’s not what I intend to do. Everything I write is going to end up at least a little Jewish, even if it’s not about Judaism, because Judaism is a big part of who I am, how I grew up, and how I see the world.
Samuel: Okay, a couple quick ones to close. You can invite any three people to Shabbat dinner. Who are you bringing?
Abby: My favorite historical figure, Alma Mahler. Then, Neil Cassady, who was one of the great muses of the Beatnik movement. And my Aunt Sue. She used to have wolves, and she’d ask great questions.
Samuel: Finish the sentence: When Jews of the DMV gather…
Abby: We debate!
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