The Hero of Her Own Life

Author J.A. Wright wins the BookLife Prize for 'Eat and Get Gas.'

"One large frying pan. Twenty cleaned razor clams. Peanut oil. Flour. Saltines. Eggs. Milk.”

So begins Eat and Get Gas, in 1972, with a recipe for Grandma’s Fried Razor Clams. This is ironic because, as the novel’s 13-year-old heroine declares, “I’d only eat a fried clam if I was starving and had an entire bottle of ketchup to pour over it.” 

J.A. Wright, who lives in New Zealand, also wrote the novel How to Grow an Addict. Both books were published through She Writes Press. When she’s not writing, she works as an event producer and festival director. 

In an exclusive announcement, Ron Charles of the Washington Post shared the news of Wright's win. "Teens (and adults) will be pulled along by Wright’s brisk plotting and Evan’s energetic voice," Charles wrote in the Book Club newsletter. "She’s an immensely sympathetic narrator, and it’s impossible not to feel that we’re running alongside her as she adjusts to new circumstances and stumbles upon long-buried family secrets."

Eat and Get Gas is only the second novel from the YA/Middle Grade category to win the BookLife Prize. Interestingly, the author did not set out to write a YA story. “I’m not a writer who creates and follows a set plan,” Wright explains, “and I rarely know where I’m heading until I catch the main character’s voice. Once I knew where the story was going, staying in touch with Evan was easy.”

Evan (Evangeline, but everyone calls her Evan) is curious in all the best ways, and her coming-of-age story highlights her world of unresolved familial conflicts and the reverberating impacts of war. To say she’s under prolonged stress is laughably inadequate. Specifically, Evan must deal with Teddy, her special needs brother, and her damaged father, a resentful Vietnam War veteran who is either entirely absent from her life or loudly haranguing her—there’s no middle ground.

Then there’s her draft-dodging brother, Adam, and her mother, with multiple sclerosis, who whisks Adam away to Canada, and is in no hurry to return, to the surprise of few besides Evan. And there’s another of Evan’s (justified) pet peeves: nobody tells her anything, so she’s forced to snoop.

Evan’s father deals with her mother’s absence by uprooting his splintered family and hauling them to Hoquiam, Wash., where he tasks Evan and seven-year-old Teddy with digging for clams on frigid mornings. Evan meets a gaggle of problematic relatives, each loaded with baggage and quirks, and learns any number of family secrets, including one that doesn’t simply change everything but crushes her world and forces her to remodel her life.

When asked why she chose such an intriguing setting—small town Hoquiam, Wash., amid the turmoil of the ’70s—Wright elaborates: “I was a teenager in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s when a few boys in our area were drafted. Several of them returned in bad shape, including my stepfather, an Army officer who fought in Vietnam for several years and suffered from PTSD the rest of his life.”

Like Evan, Wright had to conquer her own struggles as a teenager, a time in her life she views as “a gift in disguise. Without the experience, I couldn’t have created a realistic Evan.” It was these very challenges that led her to become a writer in the first place. "When I left rehab in 1985, I struggled with sobriety until I met a wise, gracious, and kind woman who took me under her wing. While whining about my problems one day, she suggested I adopt the discipline of writing a letter to myself every morning. ‘We can write ourselves well,’ she said."

Small wonder that Wright plunges her characters into turmoil on page one and spends the next 230 pages cranking up the heat. As she sees it, everyone—not just book characters—must “find a way to adjust to unpleasant situations.”

In doing so, the author also deftly blends humor with heartache, no small feat given the subject matter. “I’m drawn to fiction that makes me cry and laugh. It’s the kind of novel I wanted Eat and Get Gas to be.”

Evan’s confusion and abandonment issues are brought to life with evocative prose and realistic dialogue. Wright's approach to craft, she admits, isn't perfect. "I rarely follow 'the rules,' but my daily practice, which includes rewriting much of what I wrote the day before, is okay with me. As the wise woman often said, ‘It’s progress, not perfection, we’re after.’

Wright also has a practice of reading everything she writes out loud: “I never really know what I mean until I hear myself say it. I wanted the story to flow easily, so I had to smooth out the edges, and reading out loud helped me find those edges.” 

The book’s remarkable heroine was based on a mix of the author, her sisters, and her friends. “As teenagers, we were naive, silly, and awkward. I took a chance and gave Evan some of our characteristics, hoping to make her an interesting and likable character. I think it worked.”

Wright drew on events from her life to shape her notable work, which has not just reaped accolades but serves as an example for aspiring authors. “My experiences provided the setting for a family in crisis story, with a protagonist who needed to become resilient and eventually the hero of her life.”

Or, in other words, write what you know.

Bio: MaryJanice Davidson is the bestselling author of several novels published across multiple genres.