What inspired you to adapt Eve for young adults?
In my signing lines, there’s always a grandmother, a mother, an uncle, and auntie, a big brother or big sister, a cousin… always someone who would say, “I know this teenager or middle schooler, will you ever do a version for younger people?” And thankfully, now I’m able to! We all deserve to know our bodies—what they are, where they came from, how our ideas about them have changed and will continue to change the more we learn. That’s true no matter what age we are!
What was the most difficult part about adapting the book for a younger audience? What part was the easiest?
Younger readers are incredibly sophisticated these days—we don’t give them nearly enough credit! But I think the hardest part was knowing which ideas might be “new” to them and need more unpacking, and which might be something they’d already heard about (or experienced).
What element of the book do you identify with the most and why?
Oh my goodness, so much of me is already in this book! It’s like crawling into my head in my 30s—I did most of the research and writing for Eve at the same time as I was doing experiments for and writing up my dissertation for the PhD at Columbia! But I think, in an amazingly intimate way, I identify with each and every one of the “eves” in the book—their lives are still so weirdly parallel to our own, despite how long ago they lived, and despite the fact that most of them weren’t human at all!
What do you want kids today to take away from this book?
All readers are already the world’s best authorities on what it’s been like to live in their bodies. Nobody can tell them differently! What books like mine offer are new words to use to describe those experiences—new histories, new frames of understanding, and of course, new weapons to use in the good fight (because oh, we’re in such a fight for the right to live freely and without suffering in these bodies right now).
Is there anything you wished you could have added to Eve that you either didn’t have the time to write or couldn’t find sufficient research for?
Well, there’s an entire medical side to this story, much of which I couldn’t include in Eve for length (and because the research driving it is just coming out by the second, it seems). Now that we’re finally doing more (and more proper) research into sex differences in biology these days! And I’m writing an entire second book at this very moment about how that’s changing what we think it might mean to be healthy, no matter what body you’ve got, but maybe especially if you happen to be female… If Eve is how we got here, my next book is about where we’re at and where we’re going.
What are you currently reading?
Well I’ve just finished judging the PEN America awards for the literary science writing category, so I had actual dozens of books to read over the winter! So many of them so good. And I certainly can’t and won’t give away the winner, but now that they’ve announced the Longlist, I can say that I loved all those books. The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith keeps haunting my thoughts these days.
