Transcript for Keren David on "When I Was Joe"

Keren David: It is one thing watching someone get killed it's quite another talking about it.

Jim Fleming: Young adult writer Keren David reading from her novel “When I Was Joe”.

David: When it happened I didn't even realize exactly what I was seeing.  My heart was thumping so loud I couldn't hear anything else.  My mind was whizzing around at hyper drive speed trying to work out what to do trying to sort out what was going on and run away as fast as I could, but now I’m sitting in the police station telling three officers about what happened.  They are asking so many questions about every detail it’s as if they put the whole thing in slow mo.  It’s like being trapped watching a really sick horror film not being able to close your eyes and I can’t run away this time.  Twice when I tell them how the blood splashed into the mud and then about the tangle of bodies on the ground I think I’m going to vomit.  Nikki that is my mum asked them to stop their tape while I lean forward and try to gulp it back” she puts her hand on my back and uses her best lawyer in training voice,” is this really necessary he is here to help you he is just a kid of fourteen” and the main guy asking questions says,” so is the boy who died miss Louis.” They get me a glass of water and then they start again. I’m wondering if they will ever let me leave.  They make me look at loads of photographs.  Some are just faces and it’s easy to pick out the ones that I’ve told them about.  Some are close ups of the cuts and wounds I’ve already seen, but they look different in pictures than they did at the park yesterday.  Was it only yesterday?

Fleming: That’s young adult writer Keren David reading from her novel “When I Was Joe”.  This book and its’ sequel, Almost True, chronicle the life of a fourteen year old British boy named Ty.  After witnessing a stabbing murder he and his mother are put under witness protection. Ty now Joe is living a new life with a new name a new look a new image. The gangsters are closing in as Joe and his mother start to crack under the pressure.  “When I Was Joe” is Keren David’s debut novel. She told Anne Strainchamps where the idea for the book came from.

David:  While I was doing an evening course in writing for children and at the time I thought I was going to write for younger children and nice short books, and then I saw a news item about a family in witness protection.  It was a court case they had been through a terrible ordeal they had been kidnapped and forced to take part in an armed robbery and I thought and their six year old son had actually been instrumental in saving them. And yet the whole family had to go into witness protection and I felt this was real paradox that the people who were innocent victims and who were doing the right thing were the ones who had to lose everything.  They had to lose their homes their friends their family they had to move into a new place and start again a new and this quite small child was going to have to do this at a young age”

Strainchamps: So partly the irony of being forced to tell lies because you told the truth...

David: Yes, because you’re telling the truth exactly that and also that you are suffering something almost more extreme than any criminal could be punished.  You know even if you are put in prison then you’re going to still remain with your own name with your friends you’re in contact with your family.  You remain a sense of self, but to ask especially a child or adolescent to completely start again I think is really you know a very very big harmful thing to do and yet completely necessary.

Strainchamps: Wait, you made these teen novels, young adult novels, and the whole concept of witness protection also seems like such a good metaphor for adolescence.  Which is when kids are”

David: Yes.

Strainchamps: putting on and taking off identities all the time.

David: Yes Yes that is what I thought there are two reasons why I made him a teenager rather than a younger child.  One was that teenagers have more freedom to get into trouble and have adventures, and the other one was this this metaphor, and I thought here is a boy who everything in his life is changing anyways.  His body is changing he is changing and then he gets the chance to be someone new, and wouldn’t it be interesting if this boy actually welcomed a new identity and felt quite excited about it.  What would that say about him?  What would that say about the life that he had left behind.

Strainchamps: Well tell us something about Ty. Your your hero your character and what happens to him.

David: Ty is a boy who lives in east London.  For very aspirational but poor family, and he witnesses a murder and he is suddenly taken from this life in east London and he and his mum.  Who is very young she she is only, Ty is fourteen and she is only just turned thirty and they are taken to a small town outside London and they have to start a completely new life, and when ty starts at his new school he discovers that with his new look and his new name”he’s older than the other children he is suddenly the cool sexy new boy in town and this really goes to his head and he thinks this is me and I am a new person and Joe is his new name and he really likes being Joe, but he is under a lot of pressure.  His mom isn’t coping very well and he is really haunted by the things that he has seen and some secrets that he is holding on to and gradually gradually he loses his grip on this new personality Joe and quite scary things start to happen inside him.  So, he is under pressure from the outside things that he is scared of, people are trying to get him, but also from what is happening inside him.

Strainchamps: mmm huh, how did you go about imagining the psychological impact of what it would be like to live under a new identity?

David: Well we had recently moved from Amsterdam to London.  We had lived in Amsterdam for eight years so the stress of actually moving was very very close to home.  We were all going through it you know I was watching my children starting at new schools and making new friends and I was watching how they dealt with that.  So, that was my starting point was the kind of nightmare of moving which was one of the most stressful things you can do and I also thought very much about taking on a new identity and why that would be a good thing and why that would be a bad thing, but quite a lot of it was just imagining myself into the head of this boy and he became very real to me.

Strainchamps:  The central issue of identity and the whole notion of a kid who goes into witness protection”I was thinking about identity and what an issue it is today you know going way beyond witness protection we talk, politicians talk about identity politics, you know we worry about identity theft.  I’m wondering if there is something about our culture or about our society today that makes identity a particularly resonant concept.

David:  Well I think I look at my children and I see their identities being built on facebook in a way that social media I think networking is giving us a different idea of identity because we are much more out there and I think those teenage years where you are developing in private, that used to happen, now I think that a lot of teenagers particularly are living their life much more in public and the whole question of who has written what on their status and who has put what photos up.  My daughter will go around with friends and they will spend the afternoon taking profile pictures for facebook and that’s they’re thinking much more in those terms of a kind of public identity and I think that is having effect on our culture that we haven’t even realize yet.

Strainchamps: Has to do with direction in a way doesn’t it whether your identity is being formed form the outside in you know you’re looking at yourself from the outside and thinking how will other people see me or whether it is being formed from the inside out and is based on something some truth about yourself.

David: Yes” Self-knowledge and also an understanding of what you need to survive and I think again in my book gradually gradually gradually that you know the hope for Ty is that he finds things about himself that he can live with and that he understands and he learns a lot of truth about himself and I think a lot of teenagers you know may take this as a kind of deeper message from the books about what you need to do to get through difficult difficult times you know you need to know yourself very very well and there is a lot involved in that you know it is not as simple as just changing your profile picture on facebook or putting up a status saying you know I’m happy or this is what is happening to me.  So I think it is a very interesting question of how identity will be changed by social media.

Jim Fleming:  Keren David is the author of the young adult novels When I as Joe and Almost True and Strainchamps spoke with her.