My introduction to the wonder that is Maggie Stiefvater was… rough. She invited me to a writing retreat, but accidentally gave me the wrong dates. I arrived two days early, to a shut-down Midwestern American tourist town in the middle of February. I spent both days holed up, alone, in a hotel room with only a large pizza to sustain me.
Actually, in retrospect, that part was pretty nice.
By the time the retreat started, I was ready to interact with people outside of the ones living in my head, though. So I was a little bummed when Maggie mostly kept to herself and her writing partners. Only one book into my career, I was not yet familiar with the weight that comes when people arrive with fully formed opinions about who you are and what you can and should be doing for them. Maggie, having hit it big with her Wolves of Mercy Falls series (Shiver, Linger, Forever), was in the thick of it.
I wrote the retreat off as a bizarre life experience. (The date mix up ended up being a blessing in disguise — while I was back in gorgeous California, the women who stayed got snowed in. After they had gotten rid of all the food.) So it was with only mild curiosity that I picked up her next book, the standalone novel The Scorpio Races.
And I was livid. Because here was this woman I had written off as not being nice enough, and her mind was a monstrously beautiful and astonishingly talented thing. Forget being friends, no need for niceness — I just wanted to lick her brain. (In the least creepy way possible.)
I started paying attention. Her online presence is both entertaining and unusual. Entertaining in that she is unapologetically absurd in answering straightforward questions from readers. Unusual in that the Maggie you see online is the same as the Maggie that exists in real life. There is no artifice, no performance factor. Maggie is Maggie is Maggie.
Both online and in real life, so many of us have learned to tip toe to avoid dredging up the hatred lurking beneath our feet. The mere act of existing as a woman in public makes us targets. We learn to be nice, to make it easy for others to like us. But Maggie doesn’t tip toe. She stomps with steel-toed boots. She doesn’t apologise for her existence, or her success. She never frames her accomplishments in slick, easily digestible self-deprecation. She owns it.
She also engages openly and honestly with her fans—even when her creative spaces online become hostile. I once saw the absurd declaration that “she doesn’t deserve her characters.” It says a lot that some people feel entitled to her writing, but want to cut her out of the equation. Maggie meets that sentiment, she addresses it, and—just as powerfully and even more bravely—she is open about the toll addressing online vitriol takes on her emotional and mental health.
In the end, I think what makes her such a trailblazing feminist author is that she isn’t trying to blaze any trails. She’s not in people’s faces, or promoting any agenda. She’s simply herself. Her ruthlessly clever, delightfully odd, writing genius, wife and mother and friend, goat owning, road trip loving, car-obsessed self. In a world where women are constantly being told what and who we should be to make other people happy, being oneself is both radical and refreshing.
And, for the record, she can give me the wrong dates for writing retreats any time she wants. As long as I have a book of hers to read while I wait.
Kiersten White’s And I Darken is available from the Guardian bookshop.
