I Kissed Alice author Anna Birch takes us through the looking glass

I Kissed Alice delivers an unexpected LGBTQ+ spin on one of the most popular rom-coms ever. Read our interview with author Anna Birch to find out how.

There haven’t been a lot of wins for the American people in 2020. I think I can safely say it’s been a hard year for all of us. So when a book as lovely as I Kissed Alice, Anna Birch’s debut young adult novel, pitched as a LGBTQ+ retelling of You’ve Got Mail, comes along, you have to celebrate.

I Kissed Alice follows two female high school students, Iliana and Rhodes, who both attend a highly competitive art school. In their day-to-day life, they are nemeses, with only art and their mutual best friend, Sarah, to tie them together.

But little do they know that they share a secret connection. Both of them love Alice in Wonderland so much, they are working together on an Alice fanfiction called Hearts and Spades via their online alter egos. Iliana and Rhodes have no idea about the other’s true online identity.

I Kissed Alice has everything you could want in a summer YA book–romance, competition, complex friendships, discussions of class dynamics, and even beautiful illustrations (by Victoria Ying) within the book. Hop on over to Imprint (or any bookseller) to get yourself a copy today.

While you wait for it to arrive, enjoy this incredible interview with the author herself, Anna Birch, in which we chatted about the realities of female friendships in high school, the complexities of worldbuilding, and the importance of fanfiction.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Culturess:   Where did the idea of a queer YA retelling of You’ve Got Mail come from?

Anna Birch:  I love this question! Like many ideas, this one was born from a conversation with a good writing friend of mine. There seemed to be an absolute avalanche of ’80s – ’90s movie remakes in 2016, but none of them were updated in ways that diversified the stories or made them interesting.

Where were our Black-centered movie remakes? Queer remakes? What about a modernized queer remake of You’ve Got Mail?

Culturess:  On a related note, using Alice in Wonderland as a theme throughout the book feels quite timeless. What led you to choose that as the fandom for Rhodes and Iliana to work with?

Birch:  Honestly? It was a total craft choice. When I began writing Alice, books like Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell and Gena/Finn by Hannah Moskowitz & Kat Helgeson already existed – and featured fictionalized versions of real fandoms.

I felt that using a real fandom would anchor the story in reality in a very specific way – and would exempt me from the exhausting work of creating a whole fandom from scratch! This left me with one option:  public domain.

I played with several ideas along with Alice in Wonderland (Pride and Prejudice and Little Women, to name a few) but Alice’s story gave the story the edge I was looking for.

Culturess:  There are a lot of vivid and specific references to both artists and art as a form. How much research did you have to do to accurately world build? Or do you have a background in fine art?

Birch:  I studied art in college! I pulled heavily from my own craft in writing Rhodes – I love to draw, and my thing in college was drawing live models (life drawing).

Rhodes’ creative process as a whole is a close reflection of my own, particularly before I was diagnosed with ADHD and an anxiety disorder. My dad died when I was 19, just a few months before I transferred into my program, and trying to create while working through my grief was just…so much.

I did have to do a lot of research on Iliana’s process. Originally Iliana was a potter, which was something I knew absolutely nothing about! I talked to a ton of people and visited a few makerspaces here in Birmingham to watch people work and watched probably a billion YouTube videos.

In the end, it just didn’t seem to fit with Iliana’s character – it requires too much patience! I was attending Moss Rock Festival, an awesome eco-creative festival, and met this absolute powerhouse of a woman whose work featured these really cool papercuts suspended between layers and layers and layers of glass.

She talked about how much she loved working with knives and I was like… yes. My girl is all about pointy objects.

Culturess:  I found the relationship dynamics between not just Iliana and Rhodes, but also Kiersten and Sarah to be fascinating. I am always happy to see well-written conflict in YA as a lesson for what “hate” can really mean sometimes.

What do you hope young readers will take away from the book as a whole and Sarah’s character in particular?

Birch:  I really appreciate this! I’ve struggled so much with this narrative in YA that girls are only allowed to be ‘unlikeable’ in certain acceptable ways, friendships always have to be supportive, and anything outside of that is heavily criticized.

You know what? My friendships in high school were hard. The girls around me were jealous and passive-aggressive and messy and hurting. I was a teen in the ’00s in the South, and purity culture meant so many of us were seriously grappling with our bodies and our sexualities and serious–serious– issues with our self-esteem.

I work with high school students, and even if it’s been 20 years since I was a teenager and the world is so different, so many of those issues remain the same. I wanted teens to see a reality they recognize versus some kind of idealized reality that only makes them feel isolated.

Sarah is so many girls I knew in high school. I had such a tough time with the Sarahs I knew at the time, but I look back on them with so much empathy – hindsight is 20/20, right?

I’m good friends with a lot of those Sarahs now. Later on, I learned that they were grappling with their own mental health issues, family dysfunction, a general sense of not knowing who they were, and feeling as though they were lost in the weeds with their bright, sparkly friends. Not terribly different from all the quiet things that kept me up at night, too.

As far as Kiersten was concerned, I wanted Iliana to have to look in the mirror in a super external way. In the second half of the book, she’s forced to grapple with the consequences of her actions and she grows from it.

A huge part of Iliana’s growth is developing empathy – what does she do when she’s forced to interact with someone who is similar to who she was in the first act?

Culturess:  To speak to fan culture and ideology a bit, have you ever written fanfiction? If so, what was it about? Why do you think fanfiction is important for young creators?

Birch:  Oh my gosh, YES. Like so many other authors, I cut my teeth on fanfiction! I started out reading and writing Sailor Moon fanfiction when I was in middle school, waaaaaay back during the days of internet v1.0. Later on, I spent a lot of time reading and writing Harry Potter fan fiction, then Twilight (all of the fix-it fics, please).

I’m an English teacher in my Other Life, and teachers have something called ‘scaffolding’ that we use to support young creators while they work to master a new skill. ‘I do, we do, you do’, basically – watching a mentor doing the thing first, doing the thing with the mentor, and then doing it independently.

Fanfiction is absolutely perfect for the ‘we do’ component of learning to write! There are so many skills that go into writing – character, external conflict, setting, the rise and fall of action, voice – and fan fiction is an incredible way of learning to do each of these with characters, settings, and stories that have been developed by other authors.

It takes the scary part out of it and drops writers directly into the fun stuff. Not only are they learning to do something new with support, but they’re gaining confidence while doing it! I am HERE FOR ALL OF THIS.

Culturess:  Hearts and Spades (the fanfiction within I Kissed Alice) seems to end on an ambiguous but hopeful note. Do you think Iliana and Rhodes will make a sequel during their first semester at college?

Birch: I would absolutely love to write a sequel about Iliana and Rhodes! It’s not on the docket yet, but I have a good idea of where things will go… 😉

What’s been your favorite summer read? Tell us in the comments below!