First-time author Coe Booth follows a teen’s struggle to stay alive

Tyrell is about a 15-year-old Bronx boy whose family is homeless. Before you became a writer, I read that you worked with families in crisis.

My technical title was child protective specialist. For three years, I worked only in the Bronx, and I investigated and worked with families who had something to do with sex abuse. Then I did one year where I worked just crisis, from midnight to eight in the morning.

What did you deal with?

Anything that involved potential harm to a child. So if the police raided a home or a child was brought to the hospital with an injury that was not consistent with what the parents were saying happened or a child tried to intervene in domestic violence and got hurt—I worked on all those kinds of things. For the three years before that, I actually worked more closely with families, more intensely, with therapy, family counseling, teen counseling, everything you could possibly imagine.

So Tyrell grew out of your experiences as a caseworker?

Absolutely. I didn’t know about a lot of things like that until I started working with the [Emergency Children’s Services]. I didn’t know about the shelter system. As part of my job, obviously, I went to many, many, many Bennett-type motels. But I really didn’t even know they were there, and I’m from the Bronx.

You started writing the novel a few years ago, as an assignment for a creative writing program at the New School.

It was really weird. I was working on something else at the time, and then halfway through the second semester, I was just so frustrated with what I was writing—I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Every few weeks, we had to hand in 20 pages. I started two days before the assignment was due. I thought it was going to be a middle-grade idea about this boy in a shelter. Then I wrote the first sentence, and he was cursing. So I realized he’s probably not a middle-grade boy; he’s a little older. Then I wrote the first chapter or two. It just flowed out in one take, almost exactly like it is in the final version. I just figured I would use it for that week, and then I would go back to the book I was working on before. But everyone was so excited about Tyrell; they were like, “You have to keep writing this.” I didn’t have any direction for it. I had no story. But I said, “OK. I’ll see what happens.” And inside I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to write a book from a boy’s point of view. This is not going to work.”

What do you hope kids learn from reading Tyrell?

I hope they realize that the situation Tyrell is in is not right, not fair, for him—and even at 15, you can make decisions for yourself and try to create a life. Also, I don’t know if this is for the kids or for the adults who read it, but if you see these kids walking up and down the street and their pants are hanging off their behinds and they have this bravado and they act tough, it’s important to keep in mind that they’re real people. Some adults react to them like they’re bad kids—“Let me just stay away from them” or “Let me hold my purse closer to me.” Instead, I hope they’ll think, “This is a real person; he has a real background. All of this stuff he’s doing—acting all tough—maybe that’s just a cover for feeling vulnerable or being in a situation he doesn’t know how to control. Maybe this is the way he’s just covering up that insecurity.”