It is both inspiring and dispiriting to talk to
Ned Vizzini.
He's 25 and has already published his third
book. Yet, he struggles with depression severe enough to
require medication. He's humble and wants young people to keep
their personal dramas in perspective. Yet, when he describes
his own future happiness, much of it hinges on book sales.
"There is a certain perception that because I've
done what I've done, I have sort of made it," Vizzini says.
"That's not true. There's a lot more work to be done. But that
is about where the logic ends. The rest of it is illogical.
Yeah, depression is illogical."
It is also the subject of Vizzini's most recent
book, "It's Kind of a Funny Story."
The novel is about Craig Gilner, a Brooklyn teen
who studies like crazy to get into Manhattan's prestigious
Executive Pre-Professional High School. Once in, he realizes
he may have sacrificed the satisfaction of being exceptional
among average students to become average among exceptionals.
It's a feeling he really can't handle.
Of course, much depends on how you define
"average." A grade in the low 90s apparently doesn't cut it in
Craig's confused young mind. His closest peers, a bunch of
pot-smoking, hormonally raging annoyances, don't help.
School was competitive
Vizzini, a tall, dark-haired young man who grew
up in Brooklyn and carefully measures his responses, has some
special insight into the challenges facing Craig. He attended
New York's uber-accelerated Stuyvesant High School. His
experiences there have influenced all three of his books.
"I learned at Stuy," he says. "I learned about
competition and kind of the absolute nature of life. There are
winners and losers. ... High school was a brutal social arena
where you learned the way the world really works."
Vizzini acknowledges that his frame of reference
is narrow, limited to elite, highly driven students in New
York City.
Still, "It's Kind of a Funny Story" is supposed
to be an indictment of zero-sum cultures in general, he
says.
"I would like for things to be a little bit
different," he says. "I would like for people to be able to
explore their interests a little bit more as young people, as
opposed to be thrown into a cutthroat social and academic
environment from the time they're 8 or 9."
For Vizzini, being a young author proved far
more daunting than he'd expected.
His writing career began with articles about his
life that he wrote for the New York Press in the 1990s. Using
many of those stories, he published a quasi-autobiography,
"Teen Angst? Naaah ..." when he was 19. "Be More Chill," a
novel about a young man's quest for coolness in high school
followed four years later.
And the heat was on for him to produce more.
"Early on, I think I was a little bit ignorant
of what it meant to have your name in a newspaper," he says.
"I thought it was all fun and games, you know, and it's not.
It brings with it pressures and responsibilities that could be
difficult."
Vizzini worried about his ability to produce
another book. The worries wouldn't go away.
"I was having a dinner with someone and I threw
up. I couldn't eat," he recalls. "I went into the bathroom.
And I was like, 'This is a good meal. Why can't I eat it?' It
was because I was worried about my book — worried that it was
going to be a failure, worried that I was going to be a
failure."
Thoughts of suicide
One night in November 2004, the thoughts got so
intense — suicidal, actually — that Vizzini checked himself
into a hospital's psychiatric wing. Craig, too, opts to go to
a hospital instead of committing suicide.
Both Vizzini and his fictional protagonist
experienced a time out from the world. In the ward, simple
tasks mattered most. Now you wake up. Now it's time to eat.
Now you're in a group. Now you go to sleep.
"In many ways, I'm disturbed by how much I liked
it," Vizzini says. "I shouldn't look back at it so fondly,
because it's not the real world. It almost feels like cheating
a little bit to give yourself up. But it was definitely
necessary."
By the end of the book, Craig has realized his
plight really isn't as bad as that of many others and that he
may be more of an artist than an "executive
pre-professional."
But Vizzini, who will start teaching in New York
City public schools this fall, never left writing. In fact,
after five days in the hospital, he went home and within days
began writing "It's Kind of a Funny Story." The writing was
cathartic. A month later he had the draft.
"He's very savvy about the business, and he's
very mature as a writer," said Alessandra Balzer, Vizzini's
editor at Hyperion Books for Children. "Even people who don't
maybe aspire to what he does can find some solace that someone
as talented and savvy as Ned can have these insecurities and
fears."
Vizzini says the response among young readers so
far has been both empathy and gratitude. He's free with his
advice to teens feeling crushed by the burdens of the
world.
"The best coping strategy you need to have is a
peer group, a group of people you're not competing with," he
says. "They're friends. They want to see you succeed.
"I think it's really helpful to keep your own
situation in perspective as a young person. If you read up on
the way a lot of people in the world live you can realize how
much you have to be thankful for."
Still, Vizzini questions how successful he
really is.
At one point, in an awkward, almost unconscious
way, he describes how he still looks at future book sales as
one way to predict if he'll be happy. Later, he acknowledges
that's perhaps not the most healthy attitude.
He still deals with depression, and continues to
take meds.
"I'm not suicidal," he says. "That option has
been crossed out for me. That's really what this book is
about, making that decision to
live."