Archive

Maggie Thrash details her love affair with an older camp counselor in “Honor Girl”

As a teen, Maggie Thrash spent her summers at an all-girls camp in Appalachia. She was sent because her mom went at her age, and like most elements of the South, tradition trumps everything. When Maggie was 15, her life changed significantly while at Camp Bellflower, as she fell for an older counselor named Erin. It was the first time Maggie realized that she might not be like her peers, who spent their summers lusting over the guys that work at the camp, and the boys their age that make the annual visit from across the lake.

Honor Girl is Maggie’s new graphic memoir, telling the story of that fateful summer with the details of her self-realization and romance. Relatable, honest and well-drawn, the book follows Maggie’s internal thoughts and feelings about the world she inhabits, surrounded by nature and other teen girls who participate in gossip and boy band-themed talent shows, as well as the camp’s customary Civil War re-enactments and Christian song singing.

We spoke with Maggie about writing Honor Girl and how her experiences helped to shape her as an adult who now writes for a popular site for teen girls.

AfterEllen.com: I loved this book, and read it all in one day. Have most people been telling you something similar?

Maggie Thrash: Yeah, a lot of people have been saying they just shoot straight through, which I really love. I’m happy that I made something that makes you want to keep turning the page. I actually feel like “Ah, yay! My plan worked.” It was sort of manipulative and always on my mind how to get them-I want to put the action in the lower right hand corner so they’ll have to turn the page to see how it resolves.

AE: I imagine this story has been kicking around in your head since it happened, so most of your life. How did you finally come to decide to put it down in the form of a book?

MT: I see my life really visually, and so when I look back, I can just see this line in the 15 years that came before. Like this is the moment where I stopped being a child, and I think it’s pretty timely and ironic because I just turned 30 so this happened at exactly the center point of my life so far, and it was just time. Especially turning 30-I’m finally an adult now, or at least I should be an adult now-I need to deal with it. It can’t just keep lurking in my past. It’s this sort of specter that changed me so deeply and yet I never talked about it, even to the people that know me best-I hardly ever talked about camp. So it just seemed really important to finally deal with it.

AE: As much as I know that I would have hated some of the things you describe having to do at the camp, I’m also kind of jealous of that experience. Do you remember them all as positive now when you look back at camp memories?

MT: I do get sort of a visceral feeling when I think about camp that is positive, which mostly had to do with remembering how it felt to be in nature all day and remembering feeling the breeze and the sky over my head as a room and the only walls being trees and just missing that so much. But so much of camp I spent being bored, and it’s very easy to romanticize boredom later. A lot of times I’d think “Oh, I was so happy!” But if I really examine the memories, it was no, I was just bored. Bored in nature, kind of relaxing. Especially today, kids are under so much pressure I think being bored can be a wonderful thing. We’re filled with way too much stimuli. I hated those Civil War reenactments, screaming grey and blue. I hated that. But there’s a certain comfort of that routine that I miss now that I’m an adult, like “You have to do all this stuff, you have no choice!” and that’s annoying, but it’s also this incredible freedom and liberation in “I have no choice! I just have to do this weird stuff.” Once you’re an adult, knowing that your happiness is in your own hands can be incredibly overwhelming. I miss being a teenager and sort of that feeling of like, “Well, I can’t do anything about my life right now so it doesn’t really matter if I’m happy, because I’ll be happy when I’m an adult and I’m in charge.” Now it’s like, the time has come-I’m in charge! When is my happiness coming? [laughs]

AE: I was really disappointed that you were such a huge Backstreet Boys fan because I preferred NSYNC. [laughs] How did you become a Backstreet Boys fan?

MT: Well, it was mostly at first a connection to the music. “I Want it That Way” is the song. I’m of the party that believes it’s the best pop song ever written. And then I liked other songs. “The One” is another amazing song on that album that no one ever plays. I never liked Justin Timberlake’s whiny voice. I just find it irritating.

AE: How dare you! [laughs]

MT: [laughs] My love of Backstreet Boys just got cemented in their styling. They were always wearing black, they were always a little moodier. They always looked like they’d been styled like the Columbine Shooters.

AE: Especially Kevin.

MT: Especially Kevin. If you Google images of NSYNC, they have the most bizarre and hideous, in my opinion, styling. There’s this one picture of them where they’re all covered in show and have white lipstick on. I really found the Backstreet Boys to be more aesthetically related to-as someone who is more on the moody spectrum.

AE: That whole early 2000s was a terrible era for fashion.

MT: Yeah, it was a bizarre time. The millennium was so weird, like a crisis in fashion, everyone thought all the lights were gonna go out when the clocks hit midnight, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It was a bizarre time. There was all this expectation in the air, like “What will the new millennium be?” and of course, under all that pressure, no one knows. No one knows, but everyone was asking the question and being really self-conscious. I guess I can relate it, somewhat self-importantly, to being a teenager because everyone’s asking you, “Who are you? What are you gonna be when you grow up? What college do you want to go to? You’re different than you were three years ago-who are you?” I don’t know! And I can’t answer it right now, while you’re looking at me.

AE: What do you think it is about boy bands or like, now, Justin Bieber, that has queer women drawn to them?

MT: First of all, Justin Bieber and One Direction-I find them very different from the bands of our age. Because those boys-Justin Bieber and One Direction-they’re boys. They’re adorable, cute boys. And when I think of NSYNC and Backstreet Boys and the ones we loved around the turn of the millennium, they were men. It’s creepy that we loved them so much. That I, as 14 year old girl, was imagining Kevin Richardson to be my boyfriend. He was, like, a man. Our relationship would have been incredibly inappropriate and illegal, whereas I could see these girls look at One Direction-they look like boys that could be in their high school and could actually, like, date and project these romantic fantasies upon. But I do think that, basically, there’s something very empowering to girls about boy bands because all of their songs are about worshiping girls. And in middle school and high schools, boys are super immature and ignoring them and acting like jerks and the girls are smarter developmentally, by and large, than boys of their own age at that stage in their development. It’s just incredibly nice to go home from school being surrounded by idiot boys and put on your Backstreet Boys CD or your Justin Bieber CD and it being about how much they love you and want to give you flowers and honor you. They’re so romantic and girls feel honored by these signers in a way that they are not feeling honored by the boys they are surrounded by at their school-these twerpy dumb asses.

AE: It’s ironic because Kevin Richardson is at least 10 years older than you, I’m sure, but Erin is only a few years older than you when you meet her.

MT: She’s four years older than me.

AE: But it’s almost more taboo, and of course her being a woman factors in, too. But it seemed to me that even though you were worried about it getting out to people, but that you weren’t that scared about what it meant for you to have feelings for a woman. Is that fair to say?

MT: I’d say that’s pretty fair. I was definitely trepidatious about how people would treat me differently, but there were already these hints of messages that it didn’t have to be the end of the world. Like I think the lesbian character, Tara, on Buffy was happening at that point. There wasn’t much, but there were these hints that it could be okay. I think Bethany has this line: “You could pull this off.” In my mind, I thought “I can pull this off. This doesn’t have to be the end of the world. But I’m not sure.” I was just kind of testing the waters on that.

HONOR GIRL. Copyright © 2015 by Maggie Thrash. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

AE: When you’re that age, you think that person is the one-you don’t tend to thin practically like “Oh, we can have a thing and we’ll eventually break up and move on.” What did you think Erin’s place was in your life at that time?

MT: Yeah, it was she’s the love of my life. After I got home from camp, I would just put on music-I was listening to a lot of Enya that year, I just really loved Enya. Enya’s always there for me. So I would listen to Enya and have these elaborate fantasies about going to Colorado and finding her and meeting her and then sort of a vague idea of us living in a cabin until we were old. I thought we were gonna be together because you experience love for the first time, you’re like “Oh well his is love. That means we’re going to be together forever.” There’s no understanding that it would come and go and that I would experience it for different people. It’s just like “Oh, that’s love. Now we’ll get married.” I thought she was the one.

AE: Are you and Erin friends now? Do you think she’ll read the book?

MT: She has read the book and I think she’s still kind of processing it. I don’t really want to talk about it too much because I feel like I already put her life out there to such a great extent and then I don’t also want to broadcast her processing of the book, too, even though I doI want to process it; I want to talk about it. But I feel like I need to give her some space. But basically, yeah, she’s read it and she’s thinking about it. And she’s been supportive and very cool. Anyone who’s read the book can imagine how cool Erin would be. She’s such a chill, cool person.

AE: Well, if you’re being portrayed as a cool, chill person, how can you argue with that?

MT: Yeah, so she’s been pretty amazing. We haven’t had that much contact. It was just sort of awkward because I had to approach her initially a year ago because the lyrics in the book-“Untouchable Angel”-that’s a real song. So the first step was saying “I’m writing a book about you. Can I have the legal rights to your song lyrics?” She’s just like, “Sure, whatever.” I don’t think she really understood a lot of people were going to read it and there was going to be a New York Times review-that it was going to be a real book. So we’ll see. That’ll be ongoing. But she’s been cool.

AE: I can’t wait for the sequel of this to come out, and her accompanying album.

MT: Yeah, seriously. It’s a beautiful song; it really is.

AE: Her playing music had to factor into your obsession, I imagine.

MT: Oh yeah, when I got home from that summer, I begged my mom to buy me an acoustic guitar and I got guitar lessons and I wrote some really horrendous songs about Erin that will never see the light of day. They were so bad. I wanted to be her, and I realized I’m not a musician. I’m terrible at music and it gave me an immense respect for people who can write songs and who can play the guitar. I cannot. I took a year of guitar lessons and it never clicked. I was very bad.

AE: Yeah, I tried and took lessons and I gave up because I was not a natural. I think with some things you have to try, but others you just know, “This is not for me.”

MT: Yeah, I was just not a musician and I wish I were, probably because I wanted that creative outlet. I wanted to be able to sing about my feelings. I was so envious about people who could sing about their feelings. But I had to keep them inside until I could write a book about them 15 years later.

AE: I was going to ask, were you writing and drawing at that time or did you discover that later?

MT: No, I discovered that later. I was definitely still figuring out how it felt good to express myself, so that came later.

AE: Since it’s a coming-of-age book, teens and adults could both enjoy this book. Did you have a specific reader in mind when you were working on this?

MT: So I write for Rookie and basically the girls at Rookie were kind of my collective muse because I couldn’t write it for Erin, I couldn’t write it for Bethany; I really would have just been paralyzed if I was writing it for Erin-what is she going to think about it? What is she going to say? So I was thinking about the girls at Rookie. I was writing for them. I’ve gotten some really sweet responses. It’s been really touching.

AE: What do you have planned next?

MT: I’m making a pretty dramatic switch to fiction for the moment. Just prose fiction. So the next thing you’ll see from me is all words and all made-up stuff. It’ll be pretty different.

AE: Do you think your work will continue to have a queer bent to it?

MT: I think so. What’s interesting, without saying too much, my next thing that’s coming out is very much reflective of the prison of the heteronormative police state. It will, definitely-it will infuse everything I do. Honor Girl was about it in a very overt and obvious way, I think a lot of the stuff I write will be less pointed. It’s not the focus, but I’ll be writing more about repression. So it’s still a main focus. Even though I’ve had this catharsis of having this story and putting it out there, I can almost see myself immediately reverting to this sort of closeted repressed approach, so that’ll stay with me for a while. But yeah, queer themes are going to be a part of everything I do.

Honor Girl is available now. Follow Maggie on Twitter and Instagram.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button