Libba Bray
Libba Bray
Libba Brayis an American writer of young adult novels including the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, and The Diviners...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth11 March 1964
CityMontgomery, AL
CountryUnited States of America
classroom daunting front school standing students tool weirdest
It's so daunting to walk into a classroom or a school auditorium. It's like the world's weirdest blind date. I know all the students are thinking, 'Who is this tool standing up in front of us?'
school exercise class
...we're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works-- groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless-- have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.
pregnancy school class
So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.
talking class humanity
What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up—Ho-HO! Now you’ve got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You’re not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I’m talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it.
class tables needed
I invited myself. Thought this table needed some class.
dad dreaded
My dad was a Presbyterian minister. Yes, I am one of those dreaded P.K.s - Preacher's Kids. Be afraid.
speaking
I feel like I'm speaking with my therapist.
became fact forces life people secrets sector
(It was) the fact that he had to keep secrets -- and I became a secret-keeper, ... You can't really marginalize or ghettoize a whole sector of the population, because it forces people into a life of shame. That, of course, trickles down.
counted ghost girl invited love parties scare slumber smell surprise tale
I love to be scared. Not, 'Hey, I think I smell smoke...' scared, but creepy, paranoid, what's-that-out-there-in-the-dark, ghost story scared. It's no surprise that I was the girl who got invited to the slumber parties because I could be counted on to tell a tale to scare the bejesus out of you.
hit jonathan paul throw
When you live in Brooklyn, if you throw a rock, you'll hit a writer - Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Auster.
catcher somebody
'The Catcher in the Rye.' When I was a teenager, that was my book; yes, somebody gets it, somebody gets adolescence.
favorite feels
Naming my favorite books feels like naming a favorite child - impossible.
mom related
I'm related to Davy Crockett on my mom's side. Honest.
inside living reader
I was a big reader as a kid, but it was 'Charlotte's Web' that showed me you could feel as if you were actually living inside a book.