Grief and Loss in Middle Grade: An Interview with Debbie Fong

I’m grateful to School Library Journal for always giving me so many opportunities to dig deep into topics that interest me and interview so many wonderful authors. I wrote the cover story for SLJ’s October issue, “Good Grief: Middle Grade Authors Normalize Loss.”

SLJ and all the authors I interviewed were kind enough to allow me to share these interviews in whole here on TLT, which is so exciting to me because everyone had such great things to say and I could only share small snippets of these conversations. This article features interviews with K. A. Reynolds, Jess Redman, Gary D. Schmidt, Emily Barth Isler, Debbie Fong, Lisa Stringfellow, and Christina Li.

Please enjoy this interview with Debbie Fong. Be sure to check out the article in SLJ and come back to TLT for the rest of the interviews in the upcoming days.

MacGregor: What inspired or influenced the idea to center grief and loss in your story (or stories)?

Fong: I was interested in telling a story where my main character Pia experienced an emotional journey in tandem with the road trip journey she was taking, and I felt that giving her a backstory that involved loss would help to define that emotional arc for her.

MacGregor: A hallmark of middle grade books is offering hope to both the characters and the
readers. Was this particularly challenging for you to do while tackling grief/loss?

Fong: I personally love stories where the main character experiences a hopeful catharsis, so it was my aim from the very beginning to end the book on an uplifting, albeit bittersweet, note. I built the story backwards with that in mind.

MacGregor: Why is it important to address tough topics like death in middle grade? (I’m thinking of all those who say things like, “Why write sad or hard books when life is hard enough?” or those who would like to “protect” children from these storylines, as though they don’t happen all the time to real actual children.)

Fong: I think the best stories are a reflection of life, with all of its messiness, pain, and beauty. I was one of those kids who loved the books that made me cry, and I think I learned the biggest lessons of empathy and acceptance from the books that challenged me the most.

MacGregor: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

Fong: I hope readers come away from the story having felt a bit of the magic inside the pages, with a sense of reassurance that no matter how hard things get, there’s always a reason to keep going.

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