For fiction writers, sometimes a story just stays with you.
It may take a while to formulate in the head, then spread to the fingers on the keyboard. And then the seemingly endless revisions before a finished and bound book pops out of the proverbial literary oven. And while authors may flirt with or produce plenty of other stories, the one they can’t shake inevitably comes back, taps the shoulder, and says, “Hey, what about me?”
By any account, Libba Bray is a very successful YA (or “Young Adult”) writer. She’s already written 10 novels, including several in two series: The Gemma Doyle Trilogy of historical fantasy novels, and the supernatural thriller Diviners series of books set in the 1920s. She’s also reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for the YA category.
But the idea and plot for her latest book, Radio Free Texas (400 pp., $21.99, Scholastic Press) has been germinating in her head for about 25 years. Something that strikes even her.
“It was such a heartfelt and personal story, I couldn’t quite get there. I would start it, but it didn’t get under my skin, I couldn’t feel it. I just sat on it,” she says via Zoom. “But it was very insistent! And it finally just came out of me. And having enough distance from that time helped me understand.”
Libba Bray will have a discussion and sign copies of the book on October 8 at the Half Price Books location in Humble.
Set in the fall of 1980 in deep eastern city of Crockett, Radio Free Texas tells the story of a high school senior named Bowie (pronounced BOO-EEE, like the Texas frontier hero/admirer of knives, not BOW-EEE like the androgynous singer). He’s got the hots for a non-conformist classmate named Comet, who literally sets off fireworks on campus during the first day of classes.
Motivated to get noticed by her, Bowie claims responsibility and is “sentenced” by the principal to perform community service at a local radio station, run by an iconoclastic booze-and-drug fueled passionate music fan/father figure. The station itself is hanging on for dear life as the money dries up and real estate investors begin to swarm.
Eventually, Bowie, Comet and much of their group of friends end up working at the station. All while learning about life, love, ambition, post-high school plans, maturing, the garage rock classic “Louie, Louie,” and a whole lot of bands who get namechecked.
“Growing up is tough, and all we have is each other,” Bray says about one of the book’s main themes. And she recalls an incident from many years ago when she took her then nine-year-old son to see the film version of beloved children’s book Where the Wild Things Are.
“During the movie, he started to sob. I asked what was making him cry, and he looked at me and said, ‘It’s just so hard to grow up!’ Ugh, it was like an arrow to my heart!” Bray says. “And it never stops. We never stop coming of age.”
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Bray moved to Texas and Corpus Christi when she was three, and then to Denton at age 11. She developed a fondness for rock and roll music (especially punk), Monty Python, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The bio on her website reads like a wild ride of adventures, revelations, and detours including: finding out her Presbyterian minister father was gay, a horrific car accident that left her with a mangled face and the loss of her left eye, and—perhaps most scarily—writing copy for fitness guru Richard Simmons.
Music is practically its own character in Radio Free Texas, adhering to the adage that it’s during the high school years that many discover the songs and performers that are most meaningful to them and carry on throughout the decades. And several plot and character points here will be familiar to viewers of movies like FM, Empire Records, Dazed and Confused, and The Breakfast Club.
“It’s the time you are forming yourself, and music allows a window into yourself and expresses things that might be difficult to put into words. Music helps us truly feel,” Bray says.
“And we hold onto memories that are emotionally coded. Music ties us to time and place. I can’t hear a certain song without remembering being in a car with my boyfriend making out, or another sitting on my best friend’s floor. It ties us to other people. It’s the beginning of the expansion of our hearts.”
As befitting a book set in 1980, Bowie makes a cassette mix tape for Comet and presents it to her. Mix tapes, of course, were practically required to be made, studied, and pored over in teen romantic relationships in this time period, prior, during, and after. It was to the creator a carefully curated playlist, sequenced in a very specific order, and cautiously dubbed from the radio or a vinyl record to a blank cassette.
Today, teens just send each other Spotify playlists. From phones on which with the tap of a screen one can access any song every recorded in the past century. Convenience, it seems, has overshadowed genuine discovery.
“The work and care with crafting a mixtape took a lot. And there was something about the physical media. You’d scrawl and use different pens and draw on it and then hand a tape to someone and like ‘Hey, it’s no big deal!’ But it’s really ‘I’m so in love with you and this explains everything!’” she says. Hint: Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song” soundtracks a pivotal moment in the book.
While she currently resides in New York, Bray still keeps tabs on Texas politics. And no topic is more important to her than the push by conservative political, social, and parental forces to ban or remove books from the classroom.
Just recently, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick made a big press conference splash hawking his total of 2,198 books on a hit list in the wake of last year’s passing of Senate Bill 13. That granted school boards the authority to approve and remove books based on complaints from parents or advocacy groups. “And we’re coming for the books,” he declared last month in a push to get school libraries to remove them voluntarily.
Bray is well aware that Radio Free Texas—with its (brief) inclusion of sexual scenes, nod to alternative lifestyles, and character drug and alcohol usage could make it the 2,199th book on Patrick’s list.
“It’s so disheartening. I’m not being nostalgic, because that’s the worst form of tourism. But I remember a much more inclusive Texas. The politics are not just dispiriting and demoralizing, it’s obscene,” she says. “And of course they want to squash books. They want to get rid of ideas. And you can’t get rid of ideas. They can try, but they will not win.”
There are some Houston-adjacent references in the book in the form of mentions of beloved Pearland-based punk rockers The Judy’s (“Guyana Punch”), Sound Warehouse chain of record stores, and even sheet cakes from Kroger.
“I love the Judy’s! They should be resurrected!” Bray offers.
In addition to writing YA novels, Libba Bray is also a playwright, with full length and shorter productions on a wildly vast array of topics, times, and characters. Coming soon is The Vampire Movie Musical, which she describes as “Rent meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a sprinkling of Sweeney Todd.”
That of course, brings to mind the recent death of Tim Curry, who portrayed the diabolical “sweet transvestite” Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the 1975 Rocky Horror Picture Show film. Attendance at a midnight screening of said movie was practically a rite of passage to many 1980s Texas teens. And likely unlike anything they’d ever seen before in a movie theater in terms of offbeat sexuality.
Bray first experienced the film at age 14 while living in Denton, Texas (the film actually opens in the similarly named Denton, Ohio). “It was so mind blowing at the time. He was such a liberating character, and at the same time it was like ‘Oh, I feel things for this man!’” she laughs.
“The music was banger, and when they got to ‘Don’t Dream It, Be It’ that hit me to the core. I went every weekend and even dressed as Columbia! It was a huge part of my identity and development. I’ve thought about that a lot this week.”
Libba Bray will speak and sign books at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, at Half Price Books, 9743 FM 1960. You can purchase a ticket to the talk that includes a copy of the book HERE.
For more on Libba Bray, visit LibbaBray.com
