Young Adult Books Central Interview with Elizabeth Harlan

Young Adult Books Central interviewed Elizabeth Harlan about her coming of age novel, Becoming Carly Klein.

What gave you the inspiration to write this book?

While growing up in NYC, where my story is set, I visited a therapist who worked out of a wing of her own apartment. I would occasionally cross paths with her young children in the hall by the elevator, and many years later, my curiosity about what these youngsters thought of their mother’s patients morphed into my high school character Carly’s curiosity about Daniel, the handsome, blind Columbia College senior who’s in therapy with her mother, who works out of their home. Writing Becoming Carly Klein has been inspired in many other ways by my life in New York City, whose neighborhoods I know and love well, and by my years at Barnard College and Columbia, where Carly’s story also unfolds.

Read the full interview here.