Her parents split up and her father took the typewriter with him, but she continued writing until her second year in high school, when she sent a short story to Seventeen magazine. “About a year later I stopped – not because I had finished the book, but because I had run out of ideas.” I thought my mother would be proud I’d had the courage to submit a short story. He suggested she write about a time machine, so she sat down to “peck away” on a story about going back in time to the Trojan war. I knew it was really important to him that I tried this book thing,” she says. “Up until then it was death to touch his typewriter, he wrote the union newsletter on it. When she was 11, he overheard her telling herself stories while doing the washing up, and suggested she should try writing a book on his typewriter. He gave her Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Boy’s King Arthur, Robin Hood. Pierce credits her father with setting her on the road to writing. The very few I found were highly dissatisfactory, so when I started writing, I wrote what I wanted to read – girls like me.” I was always searching for female heroes.
“I wanted characters people would feel they could meet. “I just decided, very early on, I was going to be as real as possible … so the only thing I would need my suspension of disbelief for was the magic,” she says. Just look at Red Sonja in the comics, “sleeping in the winter out in the wilderness in a chain mail bikini”. It’s particularly true when it comes to women, she says. Where do they get the animals? Where do they get the time to cook?” And you also never see game animals, or farm animals, unless it’s in the Shire. “But as I grew older, I began to realise that nobody ever goes to the bathroom, nobody ever takes a bath,” she says. Growing up in Pennsylvania and California, she fell for fantasy after a teacher introduced her to Tolkien. This, says Pierce, has always been a key impetus behind her writing. The original 1980s covers of The Song of the Lioness series. In the 80s and 90s, there wasn’t much fantasy out there that dealt with girls who seemed real, who struggled with the same issues we did. Reading up on her before we speak, I find that most other interviewers also cite her importance in their own lives: I’m not surprised. Back in the pre-internet era, I’d check my university bookshop to see if she had anything new out, and hide it behind the Serious Literature I was meant to be studying.
Whether it was the Lioness novels about Alanna, a girl who trains to be a knight while disguised as a boy, or the Immortals books, which followed the animal-literate girl Daine and her teacher Numair, all her books were hugely important to me growing up. Pierce is probably the author I have most looked forward to interviewing. I am one of those girls for whom it mattered a great deal. “I’ve spent years with girls and their mothers coming up to me and saying ‘thank you so much for including this material’, and it mattered a great deal. Did you ever get an erection in class? Surprisingly, for an author who could be described as fantasy’s Judy Blume, she describes herself as rather reticent. What is it like having a wet dream? she asked. Pierce approached her husband and male friends for insight. I thought: ‘It’s cheating if I ignore it.’” “I had two choices: I could just ignore it as so many writers do or I could do for Arram what I do for my girls. “I’m rather notorious for talking about that,” Pierce says, down the line from her New York home.
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