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AE: In Jailbait, you have worked in literary allusions to Kerouac and Ginsberg (p. 85, 155, 233), as well as an example of a poetic form (found poetry on p. 129). Do you feel it is your responsibility as a writer to include such things for the purpose of expanding the minds of younger readers?
LN: I wasn’t really thinking about it in that way. I was so into the character Mike, who is Andi’s older brother, and he’s this hippie wanna-be. Bob Dylan is his idol, and he just idolizes Ginsberg and Kerouac and all those people, so it just really came out of this character. I mean, if young readers went and looked up those writers because of reading my book, I would absolutely be thrilled, but it’s not something I was really thinking of consciously. It just really went with his personality.

AE: Another important message in the book is to never have sex without condoms (p.144). Was that your way to work in a necessary safe sex message in this day and age?
LN: Again, that scene really came out of the personality of Frank, who is Andi’s perpetrator. He’s a real creep on many levels, and he’s also got this side of him that in some perverse way really cares about Andi, and thinks of himself, in a way, as her mentor. So, he is imparting this wisdom to her that she should never have sex without a condom, and again, I wasn’t really thinking message, because that’s not the way I write. I was really just completely immersed in that scene, and I was actually very surprised that he did that, and pleased.

Somebody once told me that nobody is one hundred percent bad, and nobody is one hundred percent good, and Frank really is about 99.9 percent evil. There are still one or two tiny things that made him human, because he had to be human, he couldn’t just be a stereotypical perpetrator. There are other things that he does. The way he actually celebrates Andi’s sixteenth birthday; he gets her a cake, he does things that are pretty surprising to me, plus I don’t think she would have stayed involved with him unless he showed her tiny little touches of kindness.

AE: In the book, which I imagine will have a considerable female readership, you also address the theme of body image, something with which both Andrea and her mother struggle.
LN: I’ve been writing about body image for a very long time. In my first novel, Good Enough To Eat, which came out in 1986, that was pretty much the theme and the topic of the entire novel, and I think that every teenage girl is acutely aware of her body; whether it’s too big, too little, if certain parts of it are shaped “wrong.” I think that in some ways, especially during the teenage years, biology is destiny and girls certainly know that.

Also, the way the media portrays young women and the ideal that young women try to live up to are impossible, the start of Andi’s torment is because she has a very large chest and that really shapes her life in many ways.

AE: The central piece in this is Frank and the pervasive theme of pedophilia. At the very end of the book Andrea has this amazing line where she says “Long Island is chock full of perverts,” which sort of sums up the suburban experience, especially in the seventies. The flight of urban families to the suburbs to raise children, because they thought it would be safer for their children, when in fact it wasn’t necessarily safer.
LN: The book was really inspired by the Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco situation. I became completely fascinated with that because I did grow up on Long Island during the second half of my childhood. I looked at that situation and especially the way she was portrayed. Just the phrase “Long Island Lolita” made my blood run cold. Nobody, not even the feminists were portraying her as a victim.

I really felt like she was a victim and that Joey Buttafuoco was the seducer. He really was the Long Island Lolita, in my opinion. Of course, Amy Fisher never should have shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the head, and I never would have condoned that in a million years.

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