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Guest Post: Malinda Lo

On Reader Feedback
By Malinda Lo

When I was 12 years old, I wrote a fan letter to my favorite author, Robin McKinley. I sent it to her via her publisher, and about a year later, I was astonished to get an actual response. On one side was a form letter, but on the back she had typed out a personal response to my letter, answered my questions, and signed her name.

I kept that letter in a special place for a long time, and I'm pretty sure I still have it, even though I no longer know exactly where it is. But I will always remember how it made me feel to read it: like I was an adult, and she was talking to me like an equal. I felt heard.

When you're 12 or 13, that can be a rare experience. When my novel, Ash, was published last year, I knew that if I ever received any letters from readers, I would make sure that I responded to every one, as sincerely as I could.

I've been amazed by the reader feedback I've received.

Some of it is from adults — mostly lesbians or bisexual women — who tell me that they wish they had been able to read Ash when they were teens. I also get email from readers who say they were initially surprised that Ash fell in love with a girl rather than a boy, but they liked the story better because of it.

I also get email from LGBT teens. Some tell me that they loved Ash because it made them feel normal for being gay. One said she wished her parents could accept gay people; another told me the book helped her understand her own sexuality. Recently, I received an email from a reader that articulated perfectly some of my own reasons for writing Ash. Here is an excerpt:

"I’ve read a lot of young adult lesbian love stories (primarily because I can only find love stories), and all them have the same plot with some variations—always 17 year old girls, one usually considers herself gay (to some degree) when the story starts and the other (often the main character) has to deal with questioning her sexuality. Eventually they fall in love without telling anyone, and eventually someone finds out they’re in love and gives them shit for it—either parents or peers. But in the end they decide not to care and stay together. I’ve read some amazing versions of that plot, but by the time I found Ash I was really sick of it. 'Why,' I would ask myself 'isn’t there a book with a lesbian main character that isn’t about the main character being lesbian?' So of course I absolutely adored Ash. Finally, there is a book about a girl dealing with her life and part of that life is—not overly dramatically—falling in love with a girl and the focus is not on the fact that the object of her affection is, in the end, a girl, but that on the fact that she’s falling in love and continuing to deal with her life."

Every one of these emails is precious to me because it reminds me of how intimate and life-changing reading can be. When I read a book, that author's words come alive in my mind. I live, for a brief period of time, in a world that someone else invented — a world that is even more engrossing, to me, than a movie or a TV show.

I am always honored that readers are willing to give my words time and space in their minds. I think it creates a kind of shared experience — an intimacy — that makes it easier for readers to share their personal stories with me in a letter or an email.

To everyone who has taken the time to read my book and tell me about, I say thank you. Thank you for the privilege of allowing me to learn a little about you and how my work has affected your life. And to those of you who might write to me in the future, I promise that I will write you back. It may take a while, but I know how much it meant to me when the author of a book I loved answered my letter. I'm determined to return the favor.


Malinda Lo is the author of Ash (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), which is a nominee for the Andre Norton Award, was a finalist for the 2010 William C. Morris Award, and was a Kirkus Best Young Adult Novel of 2009. Formerly, she was an entertainment reporter, and was awarded the 2006 Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for Excellence in LGBT Journalism by the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and has master’s degrees from Harvard and Stanford universities. She has lived in Colorado, Boston, New York, London, Beijing, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but now lives in a small town in Northern California with her partner and their dog.