David Levithan on His Sequel "Someday" and the Importance of Queer YA
In a world where we begin each day in the same body, it’s hard to imagine not having that constant. If you were nothing but a soul that jumped from body to body, with no past of your own and absolutely no constraints or repercussions, how would you act? Who would you love? This premise and these questions are the driving force behind Every Day, the stunning paranormal novel published in 2012 by queer author David Levithan. His latest novel, Someday, is the highly-anticipated sequel to Every Day, building upon the fascinating world of body jumpers like A and starting new conversations about morality.
Every Day took readers on a wild ride through various identities as A, the main character, lives each day in the body of a different person. A sees what it’s like to live as different genders, economic situations, educational backgrounds, ethnicities, and more. They’re careful about these borrowed lives, disrupting them as little as possible. But a chance meeting with Rhiannon at the very start of the book has A acting outside the norm, working to stick around longer than just a day, hoping to see that spark of attraction through to its conclusion. With no body to call home, A has a rather fluid idea about gender and attraction. And as Rhiannon learns the dilemma of A’s existence, readers must examine their own opinions about acceptance, respect, self-identity, and love.
In Someday Levithan shifts his focus from the questions about gender identity and sexuality raised in the first book. While those themes are still present, he chooses to closely examine the links between morality and responsibility this go round instead.
“If Every Day is about who you would be if you weren’t defined by your body. I think Someday is about if you had the chance to escape responsibility, would you?” Levithan tells Teen Vogue. “And when you have a situation where your actions are not linked to responsibility, how do you act? Do you act in a good and moral way, or do you act in a destructive way? I think the two main forces in Someday that are in opposition to each other can take the opposing views for that.”
Keeping this in mind, Someday continues where Every Day left off, following A in an attempt to track down answers about those who jump bodies and being forced to question the moral implications of their existence. There’s a queue of alternating narrators throughout the book, exposing readers to the experiences of other body jumpers in addition to familiar characters: A, Rhiannon, Nathan, and even Poole/X, a divisive character who is a body jumper like A, but has no qualms about taking over a body and resting indefinitely.
This particular sequel is very much grounded in the idea of finding a community versus finding oneself. A focuses on tracking down X to learn more about their kind, an unnamed group of body jumpers with no communal identity. Levithan says that this lack of communal name for the body jumpers is necessary and can definitely be linked to the queer experience, a common thread in his books. “I deliberately did not coin a term [for beings like A] so there would not be a community,” he says. “The people experiencing it do not feel there’s a word for them, going back to the queer narrative.”
For those who are new to Levithan’s novels, be aware that these themes are in no way confined to this series centering on A and Rhiannon. With more than 20 books and several awards including the Margaret A. Edwards Award and two Lambda Literary Awards under his belt, Levithan has been paving the way for queer writers and readers with his writing since the early 2000s. Building on the work of YA powerhouses, Francesca Lia Block, Nancy Garden, and Markus Zusak — influences that Levithan says helped shape his own writing — he often grounds his novels in narratives that are happy, full of acceptance, and unabashedly queer. His 2003 book Boy Meets Boy subverted the common romance tale of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl," instead focusing on two boys finding love together in small town America. Likewise, Two Boys Kissing tells the story of a public marathon kissing session between two boys hoping to beat a world record. Their story is poignantly narrated by a Greek chorus of gay men lost to AIDS-related illnesses. The juxtaposition between an openly queer present with the tragedy of a shadowy, painful past serves as a stark reminder of how far we have come and how far is left to go.
Readers will be happy to learn more about who the body jumpers are and what’s become of A and Rhiannon’s relationship in Someday. They will also be thrilled that the overarching themes of queer identity and acceptance are still present, and that a casual inclusiveness pervades Someday, a fact which Levithan himself is definitely excited about. He sees this shift as a real evolution in the way readers interpret his books and YA as whole now versus when Every Day was first published in 2012. For example, many people were unfamiliar with non-binary gender.
“For many young readers, this was an entirely new concept,” Levithan says. “I had some high school and college talks early on and when I was talking about non-binary gender, many of the students had not heard the term before or even were trying to grapple with the concept. And bizarrely enough seeing it in a paranormal YA novel, helped them grasp it.”
While Someday is set to capture readers’ hearts and minds with its frank discussion of morality and self-awareness set within a queer narrative, Levithan notes that he is just one of many writers putting a positive spotlight on these themes.
“One of the exciting things about being a queer YA novelist is that all of the readers will rave to you about all the books they love,” he says. “Readers praise Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe [by Benjamin Alire Saenz] to me as much as they do my own books. Of course Becky Albertalli, Adam Silvera — there are so many young queer writers, and writers who are writing in the queer space, which is great because the dream has always been to have intersectionality, to have lots of different stories told in different ways.”
And thanks to David Levithan, that dream is most definitely becoming the reality.
Someday is currently available at all retailers.
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