Written by:
Colleen McCaffrey
Photographer:
Lynn Grace
» Order
this Issue of Curve:
18#6
Kerrigan Valentine’s debut novel, Legacy (http://www.creatrixbooks.com), reads like a modern-day, feminist fairy tale—complete with valley girls, patriarchy, women warriors and all-women campgrounds. The characters are complex, fierce and on a mission. Valentine started the book at the blossoming age of 14 as a series of short stories, but it was post-college feminism that cajoled her into finishing what she had always felt was an incomplete story. Legacy is intended for audiences ages 11 and up, and I managed to put the book down long enough to distract Valentine from her second novel, an adult science fiction, to pick her brain and bear witness to her confession that she hid Curve magazine in her closet as a teenager.
What was your inspiration for Legacy?
When I was growing up I felt I was failing girlhood. I hated pink, I wanted to be up trees, I was acutely attuned to women in the media and [in] the 1980s women in the media were obsessed with hair and it gave me the message that the real work of the world had to be done by men, and the book Legacy was the shape that was left behind.
Legacy almost reads like folklore, is it completely fictional?
[It’s] pretty fictional. I was thinking of books I was reading [while] growing up, fairytales, and how women were being raffled off for a prince and women only functioned to get married. The best they could do in a fairy tale was occasionally play a dragon but they couldn’t really do anything else.
Is there a comparison you can make between the Ilari Warriors and modern day women?
It was the type of woman that I wanted to see and not dependent on relationships for their power.
What is Legacy’s mission?
I really wanted to tell a story that I wasn’t able to tell when I was a young age, to put it into character….[I] had to be older to be that free. The general message would be from Shannon (the protagonist) on the last page. Your life is your own and only living your life as other people want you to will never make you happy.
|
