Ryan, Mary E. 1953–

(Mary Elizabeth Ryan)

PERSONAL: Born August 19, 1953, in Manchester, NH; daughter of Leo T. (an art teacher) and Lorraine (an English professor; maiden name, Joseph) Ryan; married Brent Youlden (a writer), February 4, 1989.

Education: London Film School, certificate, 1974; New York University, B.F.A., 1977; University of Washington, M.A., 1987. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Unitarian.

ADDRESSES: Home—1139 17th Ave., Apt. 6, Seattle, WA 98122. Agent—c/o Publicity Department, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Novelist, editor, public speaker, and business owner. Catalano and Gornick, New York, NY, copywriter, 1977–78; New Yorker, New York, NY, administrative assistant, 1978–80; Coldwell Banker, San Francisco, CA, in real estate, 1980–81; Andrews and Robb Literary Agency, Seattle, WA, editorial consultant, 1983–85; Seattle University, student records coordinator, 1984; Northwest Renewable Resources, Seattle, grant writer, 1985; Bogle & Gates (law firm), Seattle, legal secretary, 1985–88; Helsell & Fetterman, Seattle, legal assistant, 1988–89; Wordcrafters (word processing service), Seattle, owner, 1988–.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Author's League of America, Poets and Writers, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

AWARDS, HONORS: Hoynes fellowship, University of Virginia, 1982; Stegner fellowship, Stanford University, 1982–83; PEN American grant, 1984; Carnegie Fund grant, 1984, 1985; University of Iowa outstanding book of the year recognition, 1985, for Dance a Step Closer; National Council of Teachers of English honoree, 1991; New York Public Library Best List recognition, 1992, for My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, and 1993, for Me, My Sister, and I.

WRITINGS:

YOUNG-ADULT NOVELS

Dance a Step Closer, Delacorte Press (New York, NY), 1984.

I'd Rather Be Dancing, Delacorte Press (New York, NY), 1989.

My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 1991.

Me, My Sister, and I, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 1992.

The Trouble with Perfect, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 1995.

(As Mary Elizabeth Ryan) Alias, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 1997.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Young Miss, Co-Ed, St. Anthony's Messenger, McCall's, Face-to-Face, and Woman's Own.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist and short-story writer Mary E. Ryan is the author of a half-dozen novels for young adult readers. She is also a business owner with her own word processing and editorial service in Seattle, Washington. In addition to writing and editing, Ryan is also a frequent speaker at schools and writing conferences throughout the country.

In My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, thirteen year olds Pru and Mattie have their sibling rivalry intensified by the fact that they are twins. They squabble and fight over clothes, haircuts, and even Cameron Sanders, the cute new boy who has moved in next door. The more reserved and subdued Mattie is often overlooked in favor of the personable and cheerful Pru. With Cameron on the scene, however, she finally gets tired of always being nudged out by her more lively sibling. Mattie becomes determined to forge her own way and get Cameron's attention, even if it means shunning and alienating Pru. She learns valuable lessons, however, both in sharing sameness and in being different. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that the "story is spirited and … intriguing."

The Trouble with Perfect finds thirteen-year-old Kyle Maxwell once again unable to make the school basketball team because of his height, which disappoints both the teen and his demanding father. The highly intelligent, personable, and witty Kyle then takes another tack to please his father by preparing to compete in a Knowledge Bowl program. His preparations are complicated by family turmoil when his father's drinking problem worsens; by school problems, when a bully becomes a daunting obstacle to overcome; and by social problems, when he finds he wants to impress a girl he has a crush on. When Kyle's father has a car accident, the teen finds himself in a position to cheat on the qualifying test for the Knowledge Bowl. Kyle wrestles with his conscience and, in the aftermath of their ac-tions, both he and his father find strong sources of support in each other. Kyle is a "a multilayered, likable protagonist," commented Booklist reviewer Julie Yates Walton, the critic appreciating "Ryan's understanding of and respect for her readers."

Toby Chase, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Alias, never questions why he and his mother are constantly moving from one new place to another across the country. He loves his mother and has much fun with her, but has to respect the one rule of asking no personal questions. When the two spend some time in Donner, Idaho, Toby begins to like it there. As he settles in and makes friends, however, he also begins to unravel his mother's mysterious past, and feels the inevitable need to move on closing in on him again. "Taut and suspenseful, this is both an exciting mystery and a poignant coming-of-age story," commented Hazel Rochman in Booklist.

Ryan told CA: "My twin sister and I were writing stories, poems, plays, and even novels from the time I can remember. In fact, my first 'book' was an illustrated sequel to Winnie-the-Pooh, done around the age of four. In high school and college, I got carried away by thoughts of acting and the theater, and then by filmmaking. In 1978, having spent three-and-one-half years at schools in Switzerland and England and then graduated from New York University Film School, I decided I would take a stab at making it in the theater. I gave myself a year to 'get somewhere.' But all I got to was a summer stock playhouse in Pennsylvania and a brief stint as a chorus dancer in an off-Broadway musical. The year up, I retired from the stage. But that experience later gave me a lot of material I used in stories about show biz and in Dance a Step Closer, in which the mother is a not very successful 'trooper,' much like the actresses I observed while doing auditions and casting rounds.

"Meanwhile, my boyfriend of the time turned out to be a poet and very serious about writing. This reignited my older ambition, and on a whim, I sent off a novelette to a contest at Seventeen. Unlike acting, the doors to publication seemed to open very readily. I was called in for a story conference at Seventeen's offices in early 1980, and began the hard work of revising.

"Ultimately, Seventeen didn't take the story, and I moved to San Francisco to sulk. A few months later, however, the editor who'd liked the novelette went over to Young Miss, a rival teen magazine, and bought that story and several others.

"During my year in San Francisco (1980–81), I was seized by the need to get my stories published, and they found homes as diverse as national Catholic magazines and Methodist teen publications. I also started reading all the teen (young-adult) novels at the local library, with an eye to getting a book written and published in this genre. After absorbing lots of formulas and clichés (and basic structures of novel writing), I wrote a first draft of Dance a Step Closer and sent it to an agent whom a New York friend had recommended.

"She took it on, but the first two publishers passed. Then a kindly, sharp-eyed, optimistic editor at Delacorte saw something in it, and a year and four revisions later, Delacorte sent a contract.

"In mid-1981, I'd headed up to Seattle to start graduate school in writing. My relationship with the poet boyfriend foundered, and I took refuge in applications for grants and fellowships. To my surprise, three places—Stanford, Virginia, and Boston University—offered me writing fellowships. In August I went back to California for a year as a fiction fellow at Stanford.

"In 1983 I returned to Seattle without enough money to continue school (I finally completed my master's in writing in 1987). I sold stock, edited manuscripts for a local agent, and began work on the sequel to Dance a Step Closer. A much harder book to write, as I had to submit a proposal and outline, and then live up to this blueprint. Also, it was four years after my first encounter with my first-person heroine, and though she was the same person, I wasn't. It was hard to find and recreate her voice.

"In 1984 Dance a Step Closer was published—the story of Katie Kusik from Brooklyn, her desire to attend a top dancing school in Manhattan against her actress-mother's well-meaning wishes—and I decided to go all out to publicize it. I offered my services as a speaker to schools and libraries all over the Northwest, took buses and planes, and got to see kids up close for the first time in years.

"I also got to talk a lot about writing, how and why to do it, how and why I do it. Several issues arose. The first: many kids were surprised to discover that I hadn't made my first novel strictly autobiographical, i.e., I'd never spent much time in Brooklyn, hadn't grown up wanting to be a dancer, etc. Regarding the second, several reviewers disliked the fact that 'too much' was going on in this short novel—Katie has to deal with her parents' divorce, her mother's stuffy boyfriend and failed career, her impossible sister, her rebellious friend Jessica, peer pressure at school, her dancing, a job, a boyfriend.

"My response to the first observation is that as far as plain facts are concerned, I'd much rather make up a character and invent a setting or situation than recycle my own familiar trappings (familiar to me, at any rate). On the other hand, a lot of personal insights and experience naturally become incorporated into a novel. It's balancing one's sense of what's true with the imaginary that makes writing books such fun.

"As to the reviewers' charge that 'too much' takes place in Katie's busy life, I think kids' lives are every bit as hectic and stressful and overflowing with problems and activities and concerns as any adult's. Many young-adult books seem to pick one problem (divorce, drug addiction, a death in the family) and then, for the sake of drama, truncate everything else in the characters' lives. With Katie, I wanted to show what I thought was a fair representation of a real kid's life—highly problematic and breathtakingly busy. And hopefully dramatic and interesting, as well.

"Many assemblies and library conventions later, my message has become more distilled. Though my first two books are about the world of dance, my theme could very well represent my own career so far: aim for what you want to accomplish, keep learning the ropes, and about yourself, your own strengths and weaknesses. Don't confuse the humility of learning something new with the passivity of accepting an unquestioned judgment. Question everything. Nothing's impossible. Writing a book seems like a hard, endless project, but when it gets broken down to its component parts, it becomes quite manageable. (The genesis of my first novel goes back to when I was doing freelance typing for a typing service. One of my jobs was typing from a cassette on which a woman had dictated her not-very-good novel. Still, I was impressed to see 'Chapter One,' 'Chapter Two,' 'Chapter Three' accumulating, page after page, into a tidy pile of words. Aha, I thought. So that's what it looks like when it's taking shape.) Last but not least, don't be afraid to look—or sound—stupid, or to be yourself. Don't worry about the status quo. These are all things I think everyone can stand to hear, but particularly kids, who know enough to take people, and life, as seriously as they ought to be taken. As one reviewer put it, regarding my character Katie's tribulations, 'the best way out is always through.' I think that's true for me, true for my characters, and also true for my readers.

"These days, I have my own business, typing and editing, in Seattle. I share the rest of my time with three cats and my husband, Brent. I'd like to write for television eventually, but for now novel writing seems to be the main activity. I crave baseball games, horse racing, movies, and Haagen-Dazs. And so, sooner or later, will Katie."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, December, 1984, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 359.

Book Report, March-April, 1989, Marlin Sue Birnbaum, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 36; May-June, 1996, Karen B. Faulkenberry, review of The Trouble with Perfect, p. 40; November-December, 1997, review of Alias, p. 42.

Booklist, October 15, 1984, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 300; January 15, 1989, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 861; September 1, 1991, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 46; December 15, 1992, Carolyn Phelan, review of Me, My Sister, and I, p. 739; October 1, 1995, Julie Yates Walton, review of The Trouble with Perfect, p. 317; April 15, 1997, Hazel Rochman, review of Alias, p. 1420; April 15, 1998, review of Alias, p. 1372.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, January, 1985, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 94; January, 1989, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 133; November, 1995, review of The Trouble with Perfect, p. 105; July, 1997, review of Alias, p. 410.

Children's Book Review Service, September, 1984, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 10; July, 1997, review of Alias, p. 157.

Children's Bookwatch, October, 1991, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 5.

English Journal, December, 1985, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 55.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, February, 1988, review of Alias, p. 409.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1988, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 1816; August 1, 1991, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 1015; October 1, 1992, review of Me, My Sister, and I, p. 1260; April 15, 1997, review of Alias, p. 648.

Kliatt, January, 1989, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 16; September, 1993, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 12; March, 1999, review of Alias, p. 14.

Library Media Connection, March, 1989, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 36.

Library Talk, January, 1992, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 35; May, 1993, review of Me, My Sister, and I, p. 46.

Publishers Weekly, December 9, 1988, Kimberly Olson Fakih and Diane Roback, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 66; July 12, 1991, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 67.

School Library Journal, October, 1984, Hazel Rochman, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 170; February, 1989, Phyllis Graves, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 102; September, 1991, Katherine Bruner, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 284; October, 1992, Cindy Darling Codell, review of Me, My Sister, and I, p. 146; November, 1995, Tim Rausch, review of The Trouble with Perfect, p. 106; July, 1997, Patricia A. Dollisch, review of Alias, p. 97.

Voice of Youth Advocates, February, 1985, review of Dance a Step Closer, p. 331; April, 1989, review of I'd Rather Be Dancing, p. 32; February, 1992, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. 375; February, 1993, review of Me, My Sister, and I, p. 342; February, 1996, review of The Trouble with Perfect, p. 376; August, 1997, review of Alias, p. 189.

Wilson Library Bulletin, January, 1992, review of My Sister Is Driving Me Crazy, p. S13.