All my life, I’d wanted to be a writer. As a farmer’s daughter from Ohio, I had no idea how a person went about doing that. But I’m nothing if not determined, so I figured it out. However, there was a huge transformation that occurred between the time I set the goal and when I actually achieved it. That change was mostly instigated by the fact that I became a young adult librarian.

At first, I was determined to write for the adult market—and I tried. It didn’t go well. There were a lot of reasons for that. At 21, I was barely an adult myself. Also, I had never written a novel before, and practice makes perfect. I had a lot of self-confidence, but not so much practice.

When I took a job in the library at the high school that I had graduated from, I expected it to be more of a stopgap measure, not a life changer. It was the early 2000s. The last time I had been exposed to Young Adult lit was with Sweet Valley High and The Babysitter’s Club. I wasn’t wading back into it with a ton of respect; I just needed a job.

But I found out things had changed in YA lit from the stories I remembered. Characters in young adult books now had sex, swore, drank, and basically acted like real people. It was refreshing on that count. But what wasn’t realistic for me were the settings and lifestyles of most of the popular titles at the time. A lot of the books featured rich kids with rich kid problems—which isn’t to say they weren’t real problems. They just weren’t the same kind of problems that my students were facing. My district is rural, with roughly a third of the student body qualifying for free and reduced lunch. They might enjoy the escapism of reading about a fellow teen bemoaning their choices from the comfort of their penthouse, but the fantasy won’t keep them warm when their electricity is turned off.

This was when the first seed was planted. I had never considered writing YA, because my understanding of what YA was meant that I wasn’t interested. But things had changed, and I had developed a desire to not only write books for the kids whom I served, but to write the books that I wanted to read when I was younger: books where real life happened to real people. Books where people get hurt, people die, and people hurt each other—accidentally or on purpose. Books that didn’t shy away from the difficult things I knew for a fact my students were dealing with—poverty, sexual assault, mental illness, and addiction.

But more important than the hot button issues, I wanted to write books where the characters dressed and behaved like me and my students. Characters who are more familiar with Carhartts than Coach. Characters who have a job not because it will look good on college applications, but because they need the money. Characters who don’t have options, choices, or paths that don’t feel predetermined.

I love doing school visits, largely because what I write about are (sadly) universal themes. I can’t tell you how many heads I see nodding up and down when I talk about depression, anxiety, emotional abuse, and the crippling effects of social media. Those topics hit everywhere I go, regardless of median income.

I can’t say for sure that I never would have become a published author if I didn’t work in that library, but I can say that what I write and who I write for would have been very, very different. 

Mindy McGinnis's latest book, How Girls Are Made, was published November 18, 2025 by HarperCollins.