In Lucy, Uncensored, a transgender high schooler named Lucy finds freedom by taking a secret road trip with her best friend and fellow drama nerd, Callie. We—Teghan and Mel—were searching for our own kind of freedom when we wrote this book together. Co-writing was our way to connect while Teghan served five-and-a-half years in an Indiana state prison.

Co-writing across opposite sides of a barbed wire fence is not especially efficient. Teghan had to handwrite chapters and mail them to Mel in Wisconsin in state-issued envelopes. Mel typed up her own scenes and sent them through the prison’s clunky email system, which broke up the chapters into chunks and delivered them days apart, usually out of order. Every so often, we were able to spend two hours together in the prison visiting room, talking about the manuscript a little but mostly joking around, sharing stories from our lives, and eating vending machine hamburgers.

Teghan’s incarceration was a hard, scary time, especially because Teghan, who is a proud trans woman, was forced to serve time in a men’s prison. The corrections officers weren’t even allowed to use she/her pronouns to refer to her. For Teghan, incorporating her own life experiences into the book helped protect her sense of identity in a space where the default assumption was that all inmates were men. For Mel, writing gave her something to do besides falling into an anxiety-spiral about the U.S. prison-industrial complex. More than anything, working on the book gave both of us a way to spend time together.

We didn’t have a roadmap for Lucy, Uncensored when we started working on it in 2017, which meant we did a lot of writing, rewriting, and scrapping entire storylines. During those early months and years, we just wrote the scenes that felt fun and important to write. Even though prison prevented us from being together in person, we could snack on gummy worms and jam out to a road trip playlist right alongside our characters. Lucy and her best friend Callie are loosely inspired by both of us, which made writing about them feel like we were living their adventures ourselves. Lucy, like Teghan, is the more contemplative, thoughtful, and snarky character of the pair. Callie is more loud, impulsive, and carefree. They balance each other out, just like Teghan and Mel do in real life. Lucy and Callie even co-write together—a queer retelling of The Tempest that they direct for their senior showcase performance.

After a couple years of fun, messy drafting, we got serious. Maybe we could actually publish this thing! Readers needed more stories like the one we were writing, didn’t they? One of the few things Mel was allowed to send Teghan in prison was books (as long as they were paperback, directly from Amazon, and without any fun stuff like violence or nudity) and it didn’t take long to run out of stories featuring trans women protagonists. So, we hammered down a compelling plot that would be fun, meaningful, and full of trans joy: Lucy and Callie would take a secret road trip to a women’s college in search of Lucy’s fresh start.

Writing Lucy and Callie’s ride-or-die friendship brought us closer together than ever. As we mailed each other manuscript chapters, we found ourselves including long letters to each other, talking about experiences from our pasts, updating each other on our current lives, and dreaming about all the foods Teghan would eat when she came home. Some of those letters inspired scenes in the book. For example, Teghan told Mel about a protest she helped organize in college, when her school failed to make a statement against anti-LGBTQ legislation being proposed in Indiana. This story inspired a scene in which Lucy attends a protest to support trans and nonbinary students at Botetourt University, the women’s college based on Mel’s own alma mater. Because of our age gap, and because Teghan didn’t come out as trans until after high school, we’d never talked about Teghan’s experience coming to terms with her gender identity, or that she herself dreamed of attending a women’s college. We’ve always been close, but it turned out there was still a lot to learn about each other.

Each of us brought different strengths to the manuscript. Mel had experience as a writer and editor at American Girl, so she focused on elements like plot progression and character development. Teghan had writing experience and had enjoyed a creative writing class she took in prison—but more importantly, she brought her lived experience as a trans woman. She focused on making Lucy’s journey as authentic as possible, even when doing so complicated the plot and required big rewrites. For example, there’s a moment in the book when Lucy is outed in front of new friends. Originally, Mel sketched out a scene in which Lucy drops her wallet and her driver’s license falls out, revealing her dead name. But Teghan insisted that the scene would be more meaningful and authentic if Lucy was forced to reveal the name on her driver’s license by someone in law enforcement. The revised scene was much, much stronger.

Despite the somber circumstances under which we were writing, Lucy, Uncensored is full of humor, trans joy, and cheese puns. Lucy experiences the thrill of a new romance, her first college party, directing her own play, and defying a transphobic school board. She gets to wear bold, hot outfits and try out makeup techniques she hasn’t been brave enough to try at home. There’s a cute chihuahua named Meatball and a lazy iguana named Queen Elizardbeth. There’s a ridiculous blueberry-cider-induced poop scene, inspired by a real story Teghan told Mel in person in the prison visiting room. (What an odd picture: us falling out of our chairs laughing in that dreary, tile-floored room.)

For us, Lucy, Uncensored will always be more than a fictional coming-of-age story; it’s an act of resistance. Writing Lucy was our way of coping with the years Teghan lost: both the years trapped in self-denial about her identity and the years she spent in prison. The book is a badge of honor for those tough years we survived, and it’s a love letter to each other. Our wish for Lucy, Uncensored is that it helps young queer people find their truth and lets older queer readers heal their inner child. For all readers, both within and outside the LGBTQ+ community, we hope the story can inspire folks to find or create spaces where they can express their full selves, plus be fearlessly and selflessly supportive of the people they love.

Meet the authors

Teghan Hammond and Mel Hammond are sisters who grew up punching each other whenever they saw a P.T. Cruiser, dying their hair blue together, and fabricating a fake band in which their middle brother was (allegedly) the lead singer. Writing Lucy, Uncensored was their first time co-writing. Unless you count the summer they spent scribbling down recipes for the strangest sandwiches you’ve ever heard of, like the Tax Exemption Wrap (Teghan) and the Nail Gun Sandwich (Mel).

Today, Teghan lives in northern Indiana, where she drinks excessive amounts of coffee and volunteers for LGBTQIA+ causes. When she’s not tearing down gender norms, Teghan is probably watching cartoons or gaming. Mel lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she writes books in a tangerine-colored office. Besides writing, she loves walking in the woods and eating dairy-free ice cream. Between the two of them, Teghan and Mel have five adorable cats.

Links

Website: www.melhammondbooks.com

Instagram:

• Teghan: @teghanandromeda
• Mel: @hamsandwichmel

TikTok: @hamtasticduo

About Lucy, Uncensored

A road trip through gender identity, self-expression, and the thorny process of figuring out where you fit after high school as an out-and-proud transgender teen.

Lucy imagines college as more than a chance to party with other drama nerds and be roommates with her best friend Callie. College will be her fresh start. For the first time, she’ll be able to introduce herself as Lucy to people she hasn’t gone to school with since kindergarten. Plus, she happens to live an hour away from one of the most prestigious theater programs in the country. She’s always dreamed of going to Central, but when she finally has a chance to visit, it’s not what she imagined.

While Lucy and Callie are on their campus tour, two kids from their high school make the typical transphobic comments Lucy’s gotten used to in her small town. She starts to worry that her dream school might end up being High School 2.0. What if she belongs somewhere else? Somewhere that she can truly have a fresh start?

When Lucy finds a beautiful school with a great theater program on a list of the most LGBTQ+ friendly colleges, it seems like fate—except that the school is hundreds of miles away. And there’s something unexpected about it: it’s a women’s college. As far as she can tell, they’ve never admitted a trans woman. Will they let Lucy in? There’s only one way to find out: road trip!

ISBN-13: 9780593814055
Publisher: Random House Children’s Books
Publication date: 10/08/2024
Age Range: 14-18

Filed under: Guest Post