The friendly, makeup-free face of Holly Smale flickers to life on my screen, smiling with a warmth that seems to radiate from her YA books. Smale, 35, is now a global #1 bestselling author of the Geek Girl books. The series follows a self-proclaimed geeky teen called Harriet Manners, who just so happens to be a part time model. Smale herself, was scouted at the age of 15 and spent the next few years in her words “falling over on catwalks, going bright red, and breaking things she couldn’t afford to replace”. Luckily for Smale, she decided to “take fate into [her] own hands” and graduated with a degree in English.
Recently YA fiction seems to have developed a trend which follows a windy realistic truth-seeking path with a dash of good old British humour. Smale, along with her good friend Holly Bourne (author of Am I Normal Yet? Series) is part of this feminist revolution of the so-called Snowflake generation. “I am surrounded by inspiring women” says Smale when I reference the best friend character in GG; she laughs “yes, I have lots of Nat’s”. But who does she look up to most? It takes her a while but her answer is decisive: “My family - I look up to my sister Tara a lot”.
Every Geek Girl book includes Harriet going on travels, the vivid imagery proof of Smale's years travelling the world, a well-travelled imagination. Now she has finished the sixth and final book in her series, she is taking a well-earned world tour, including a trip to China. But Japan remains her favourite place. “I spent two years [in Japan] teaching three/four year olds English…in Tokyo and in a tiny fishing village…it was life changing”. Smale laughingly says she has spent so long immersed in the book world that she feels it is about time to “experience life outside of words”. A new start and a new Jo Malone candle, her favourite shop, “I could spend hours smelling things!” which she buys herself as a present at the publication of each book as celebration.
“There are going to be lots of people who tell you can’t do it”, she tells me about the long process of becoming an author, “you have to make sacrifices”. Smale spent 3 years writing the first novel, but in the end “you write because you enjoy it”, not for your audience. It’s a difficult task writing for YA when the readers are very vocal about their opinions on social media, “you can’t please everyone” she says with a tone of resignation. Nowadays the process of writing a novel is much more than one person, and with a series it’s easy for an author to get wrapped up in fan ideas, but Smale asserts that although she loves hearing “how my writing has touched people’s lives”, she makes sure she writes for herself because “it is healthier that way”.
Being an author is a dream come true for Smale who says she has been writing since the age of 5, but it was a far off dream as a teen, “it wasn’t seen as being possible, coming from a very ordinary background going to a comprehensive school”. Events during her school years have taught her a lot; bullied at school for being a geek, now she says that she is proud of it, and that in the end, this loneliness taught her to be brave, which she believes is her best attribute: “A true Gryffindor!” (She even has a ginger cat à la Hermione Granger). We talked about how children’s book characters have influenced her life, Smale told me she kept going back to Anne of Green Gables, the protagonist being a bit of a “kindred spirit, me just slipped into a book”. Green Gables Author LM Montgomery is on her dream dinner party guest list as is Shakespeare and Harper Lee, but Smale tells me that Roald Dahl is her biggest influence saying he "helped me develop an imagination”.
“I’m in awe of the fashion industry…how creative and empowering it can be” however most of the comedic element in Geek girl comes from the negative side of fashion. She told me about one time when she was stuck in a lift with five other models, and then one “just started ripping into me”. A huge knock on her confidence, she wanted to “curl up and die”, but now she laughs about it, “I wasn’t very socially comfortable”. And modelling wasn’t very comfortable. She jovially talks of a shoot where they painted ash onto her face to create the effect of the resulting photos, where she was almost in tears “pain for beauty” she jokes but there is truth behind the difficulties in the industry. She isn’t very into fashion in that sense anymore, a four-pairs-of-shoes kind of woman, although she still loves creating costumes in her imagination for her books. “I like creating things… you start with nothing and end with something tangible”, she tells me she would have ended up being a carpenter or something creative had writing not worked out. She wanted to work in journalism coming out of university and applied to work in Vogue but they rejected her “I even drew a little fashion picture on my CV!” but now she laughs about this rejection, all the difficulties she has faced now culminating in a career she has dreamed since a young girl. “Everything I do is an attempt to be courageous in all ways”.
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