Mark Oshiro on the impact of Anger Is a Gift, the importance of representation, and transitioning from contemporary to fantasy
Mark Oshiro took the book community by storm with his 2018 debut, Anger Is a Gift. He discusses the impact the story has had on young audiences and what he has in store for readers next.
Mark Oshiro’s debut novel, Anger Is a Gift, hit shelves back in 2018 — but almost two years later, people are still talking about it (and for good reason). The novel follows high school sophomore Moss Jefferies as he navigates both his anxiety and the systematic oppression that’s running rampant at his school and within his community, highlighting the struggles he and his loved ones face while trying to enact change. It’s a timely and emotional book, and it’s really no wonder it’s had such an impact on readers that it remains so frequently discussed.
In fact, prior to Culturess sitting down with Oshiro, he had been attending a book festival and speaking at schools in Washington D.C. The topic at hand was still Anger Is a Gift, despite the fact that it came out over a year before.
“It’s still Anger Is a Gift, which is amazing to me because it’s been out almost a year and a half,” Oshiro said. “And I just sort of figured, you know, this will be a book that’ll be in the public’s consciousness for a month and then it’ll just fade. And no, it hasn’t died down.”
“You hope that something that you create and put out in the world will still be talked about for a time to come,” he added, “but it’s been particularly cool to see how the book has landed in schools. The kids I talked to in D.C. this week, a lot of them read it for a school project.”
The author also added that your novel winding up on a school curriculum isn’t something you necessarily expect while writing a book, but young adult stories are becoming more commonplace in schools as educators realize their importance in getting kids to enjoy reading.
“I figured it’ll be five to 10 years before this book shows up in school, and the first — you know, my book came out in May 2018, and by September, I was already in school curriculums,” Oshiro explained. “And that is to the credit of many librarians and English teachers and professors who are now taking charge and saying, ‘Hey, we have to find a way to connect to kids, and we can’t keep teaching A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies.’ A lot of schools still do that, but they’re pairing them with modern books and conversations and saying, ‘We want to get kids to read, and they need things that are contemporary and that they can relate to, or [that are] written in a language that they understand.’”
For anyone who recalls forcing themselves through literary classics at the age of 13, this is an exciting prospect that opens up a world of opportunities to create lifelong readers. And to get kids reading the sort of subject matter that appears in Anger Is a Gift could also help them understand the world in new ways — or perhaps help them make sense of things they’re already experiencing.
When asked what he intended for readers to take from his novel, Oshiro answered, “Here’s the thing: There are intentions you have when you write a book. And I wrote the book hoping that kids of color — particularly queer kids of color — could see themselves in this story, in a story where they get to be the heroes, where they’re the center of the action, in stories that feel important, in stories that are about things I hope they go through.”
The author recalled an experience he’d had in 2018, one that showcases exactly how important this sort of representation is: “I did a school visit last year in Illinois, and I had a kid come up to me … he literally said, ‘I didn’t know we could write.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He’s like, ‘Latinos, I didn’t know we could write.’ When it’s spelled out that way, when it’s made that clear, you don’t think about the impact that being yourself is.”
In the same vein, Oshiro hopes to challenge the young people reading his stories. He’s not holding back because the events in the book are difficult to cope with.
“One of the things I talk about in my school visits is this notion that kids can’t read difficult books,” he said. “ … a small minority [of teachers and librarians] feel that you shouldn’t give books that are challenging or difficult or upsetting to kids because they don’t want to expose them to ideas that inherently make their lives worse. But I think about how I wrote this book for those kids who don’t have a choice about the difficult adult decisions they had to make.”
Just because the subject matter isn’t easy, though, doesn’t mean there’s no balance between light and darkness in Anger Is a Gift. In fact, the author intentionally tried to maintain that mixture of both when writing the story, emphasizing that he did so for both himself and his readers.
“Some of it came from self-care when you write something traumatic,” he said. “And because a lot of the book is autobiographical, it wasn’t that I was researching something that was difficult and challenging and I had that distance between it. And particularly with my editor, Miriam Weinberg, she sort of pushed me to say, ‘You’re close, but just be honest. Don’t hold back. Don’t feel like Oh, I have to sanitize this or I have to make this moment educational. Just let the reader be in the moment.’ And I felt a freedom when I got that in one of my editorial letters to just let these moments be, particularly with Moss’ panic attacks and some of the scenes later in the book where there’s protesting.”
He added, “I knew from the beginning this was going to be a difficult book to write and read, but I wanted to never feel like it was hopeless.”
And while it seems many have responded to the author’s writing in exactly the ways he’d hoped, there are also reactions he didn’t anticipate — namely, that so many readers who haven’t found themselves in his characters’ shoes have still connected so strongly with this story.
“I think what’s been interesting is the kids who read it who don’t relate to Anger at all,” he explained. “They don’t relate to the main character, they have none of these experiences, and for them, it’s like a window into someone else’s life. It’s an act of empathy. They get to understand what someone else’s experience is like.”
What may surprise fans of Anger Is a Gift more than its impact on readers is the fact that it was once meant to be the beginning of a science-fiction trilogy. Citing Star Wars, The X-Files, and The Twilight Zone as some of his major influences growing up, Oshiro admitted he’d originally penned the first draft as a sci-fi novel. But after numerous rejections and a particularly helpful response from an agent, he realized this story needed to be a contemporary one.
“It wasn’t hitting,” he said. “Something was missing. It was not connecting with these people I sent it to. And I was very lucky to have an agent who sent what is called a ‘rewrite and resubmit,’ which is ‘I’m interested, but here is some feedback.’ And his feedback was, ‘You wrote this amazing start to a science-fiction trilogy and you wrote this searing, very intimate young adult contemporary book. Pick one of those books and only write one of them. Because, right now, you have two books sitting on top of one another, and they’re so enmeshed that neither one is as strong as it should be.’ And that was how I made the very difficult decision to pursue contemporary instead of the science-fiction angle.”
That said, the author will be shifting genres for his second novel, which will be a young adult fantasy story from Tor. When asked about the challenges of jumping from one genre to the other, Oshiro stated that diving into fantasy was more difficult than writing either contemporary or science-fiction for him.
“My second book comes out in about a year — actually, less than a year now — and it’s fantasy and magical realism,” he said. “It’s a huge genre change. The book reads nothing like Anger Is a Gift. We’re hoping to announce it very soon … And I found that actually more jarring. The thing is, the original drafts for Anger Is a Gift were still contemporary. Like, I would say it’s set a year in the future. So, there were little bits of elements until the end of the book that it still felt like our world.”
When it comes to fantasy, however, Oshiro explained that part of the challenge is how many little details one must consider — making the world building feel far less like simply conveying reality.
“You have to think about so many things,” he explained. “Do they wear pants? What kind of material are they? What kind of clothing do they wear? … I don’t want to minimize the amount of work that goes into it, but those little details actually end up mattering and make up huge parts of character actions and story. So, I found that genre difference to be an immense challenge.”
When asked about what readers can expect from his upcoming fantasy release, Oshiro gave a quick description of the book and its plot: “My second book is a standalone. It is a secondary fantasy. The magic in it works like magical realism, though instead of a system with rules, there’s really only one type of person who can control magic, and even then, it’s still mysterious. It is also young adult. It is about a young girl who has a magical ability to pull stories out of people’s bodies, and she does so as a pact between her and her god to cleanse the people of her village. She’s had this power. It was passed onto her when she was eight years old, and she cannot leave her home because she has to keep her village safe and pure. And one day, she takes a story from someone in her village and discovers maybe the myth she was told about who she is is not true.
“It is my story, both literally and metaphorically, about what it’s like to be young and queer and a person of color in a small town, and feeling trapped and isolated, and knowing that there’s a big world out there but knowing you don’t know anything about that world.”
With its plot and autobiographical component, it certainly seems Oshiro’s second book will be just as compelling as the first. Details like the title and release date have yet to be released, but we’ll be waiting to hear more about his new world.
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