Laura Ruby

BIO

Laura Ruby grew up in New Jersey in an era predating cell phones. She spent much of her misguided youth writing angry, angsty poems and dyeing her hair lots of colors not found in nature. She now lives in Chicago with her husband and stepdaughters. She is also the author of two books for younger readers, LILY'S GHOSTS and THE WALL AND THE WING.

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AUTHOR NOTE

September 2006

Dear Reader:

Writers are inspired to write for all sorts of reasons. I wrote GOOD GIRLS because I was furious.

Firstly, I was furious because I couldn't watch TV, open a magazine, or log on to the Internet without running into images or text that somehow demeaned women. I'm addicted to cop shows, and I couldn't watch one without hearing/seeing some lurid sex crime described in unnecessarily graphic detail. I would be happily listening to a new song on the radio until I listened closely to the lyrics, which often contained sexual slurs. MTV had a show about plastic surgery that usually featured confused girls who wanted lipo and breast implants to a) please sullen ex-boyfriends, b) pose in Playboy or c) become strippers. (Not to mention Paris Hilton and Maxim and the ads for "Girls Gone Wild" videos.) Why, I wondered, did all these women seem to think that objectifying themselves the most public way possible was somehow the road to liberation or the only way to relate to men?

The last straw was when my teenage stepdaughter came home from school upset. Another student was spreading rumors about her, and she didn't know how to handle it. I was angry --- not because the world had changed so much since I was a teen, but because it had changed so little.

Though rumors were just as horrifying as they had been when I was young, technology had made their dissemination both instantaneous and exponential. And since people could hide behind screen names, the rumors were more vicious than ever. Both of my stepdaughters, their friends, and the teen daughters of some of my own friends told me that almost every girl they knew had endured the stigma of some sort of rumor --- usually sexual --- spread by both boys and girls. People sent poisonous text and instant-messages to one another and posted awful things on blogs. When I tooled around on Myspace and a bunch of other websites myself, I noticed that this seemed to be happening to girls everywhere. It was like the whole world was conspiring to make young women feel terrible about themselves.

So, I decided to use my fury at the world and began to write. What flowed from my fingers was the story of Audrey Porter, a "good girl" who is secretly photographed in a compromising position at a party. She is humiliated when this picture is sent to cell phones and computers all around her school and eventually makes it into her parents' email.

GOOD GIRLS is as raw and as honest as I could make it. But something unexpected happened in the writing. A book about the devastation of rumors, a book begun in anger and frustration, morphed into a sometimes painful, sometimes romantic, sometimes funny story about love. So my book is also about the love you feel for your best friends, the love you feel for your family, and most especially, the love you learn to feel for yourself. I hope you will enjoy reading and discussing it together.

© Copyright 2006 by Laura Ruby. Reprinted with permission by HarperTeen, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

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