Beloved Chapel Hill Author Sarah Dessen Takes a Look Back

originally Published: jul 13, 2022

With her daughter away at summer camp, Dessen agreed to speak from her vacation on a North Carolina beach about the Netflix adaptation of her 2009 novel, Along for the Ride, which came out in May.

Growing up, Sarah Dessen was on the quieter side. She loved having gregarious friends but mostly, she sat and listened. “I was the storyteller,” Dessen says. “I remembered everything. I was the Oracle.”

Staying in her hometown is one of the things that’s kept her in touch with those teenage voices. Being in Chapel Hill for most of her life, Dessen still has a connection to those stories.

“It’s really easy for me to put myself back in that place,” Dessen says. “It’s not always a good thing.”

She’s not a huge fan of having to hold on to the adolescent angst that defines many of her protagonists and much of her own high school experience, but it is, at least partly, what she thinks has allowed her to write more than a dozen successful young adult books.

“I remember graduating at Chapel Hill High School, and everyone had their little Class of ’88 keychains,” she says. Everyone was so excited. And I was like, get me out of here.”

She didn’t leave, though. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, she worked mornings as Chapel Hill writer Lee Smith’s assistant and in the evenings pulled shifts as a waitress at the Flying Burrito. In between, she sat down to write every day, seven days a week…

Email: shelbi.e.polk@gmail.com
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