Suzy Zail talks in depth about writing her latest book A New Kind of Beautiful
Suzy Zail is an award-winning Australian author, whose latest release, A New Kind of Beautiful, explores the sudden change in a teenager’s life when a medical diagnosis leaves her lost between who she was and who she needs to become. Zail’s 2023 release Inkflower was shortlisted for the 2024 CBCA Book of the Year Award for Older Readers, and won 2024 CBCA Shadow Judging Book of the Year Award for Older Readers.
I know this book was partially inspired by the life and experiences of your husband’s Aunt Lil, but were there any major experiences in your teenage years that you were able to draw from when writing Paige’s story?
There weren’t really any major experiences from my teenage years that directly fed into Paige’s story. To write her, I drew on the stories dozens of blind and low-vision teenagers, adults and artists shared with me. Paige is a patchwork of voices, with some bad decisions and questionable romantic choices thrown in.
But of course, my teenage years informed how Paige moved through her experience. As writers we can’t help returning to the emotional landscape of our own adolescence when the world is full of possibility and our hearts feel so big they might explode. Like Paige (and most teenagers) I wanted to fit in and be accepted. I remember how much other people’s opinions mattered, how exposing it felt to be different, and how sure I was about the future I wanted. I drew on all of that when writing Paige’s need to belong, her fear of being seen differently and the devastation she feels when the future she has curated suddenly disappears.
It wasn’t hard to remember how that felt at sixteen, and how it feels now. Even as adults we’re still ‘coming of age’. I don’t think anyone ever grows out of wanting to belong.
The fire and Paige telling off her mum at the beginning of chapter 13 (aiming to avoid spoilers here) were two scenes that conveyed such deep and visceral emotions – do you have a process to help tunnel into those heavy feelings when writing scenes like those?
I don’t have any special process apart from writing in a room with bare walls, no plants, photos or posters. I like a room with no distractions or hint of a life other than the one I’m creating in my head. For A New Kind of Beautiful, the only thing to decorate the space was a painting I made during the research process and a pair of glasses with the middle scratched out, that I’d put on when I needed a reminder of how Paige might see the world.
Regarding the harder moments, I like to build slowly toward them, rather than dropping into them cold. With the fire scene, I spent a long time setting Paige up as a perfectionist, someone who wouldn’t allow herself to make what she termed ‘bad art’. I also made sure to get her to the point where she felt wounded enough to burn everything. Once Paige was there, the scene almost wrote itself, because burning her paintings wasn’t really about the paintings. It was about destroying the version of herself she no longer knew how to be.
For Paige to swear at her mum with that much venom, I had to build up years of things left unsaid. It couldn’t come from one argument. It had to come from all the times Paige had swallowed her fear and anger at her mother’s expectations, and her inability to open up or let Paige grieve. I wrote her mother as someone who retreats behind a kind of fortress whenever things get hard, only reappearing once she looks capable again, and I had Paige absorb that pattern without even realising it. Once that groundwork was there, the outburst wasn’t a snap decision.
Even though I plot heavily, writing chapter outlines, character arcs etc before I start a story , knowing what will happen to a character isn’t the same as feeling it with them. When I write scenes like the ones you mentioned, I try to live in Paige’s body and her head: what does the fire smell like, how heavy are the paintings, does her chest feel constricted as she tosses the canvases in, what does she imagine the flames are saying to her. If I’m not there, standing as close to the flames as Paige is, feeling the heat and her heaviness, the reader won’t feel it either.
I also try to let the quieter moments do some of the emotional work, so the big scenes don’t have to carry everything alone, like when Paige was young, drawing pictures for her mum, hoping they might tempt her out of her bedroom. It’s a less dramatic moment but an important one in setting up how her mother modelled coping and Paige’s belief that she might fix her mother’s sadness with a painting.
I also like to thread humour through the book, and lighter scenes when Paige is at school, with Jazz or on a date. Those scenes give readers somewhere to breathe so when I ask them to stand by the fire or watch Paige swear at her mother, they have the capacity to really feel it because they’re not worn down by unrelenting heaviness.
The relationships between Paige and her parents change in such wonderful arcs through the book in two very different ways. Was one parent-child relationship easier for you to write?
Not really. I recognised myself in each of them. As a parent, I understood Paige’s father’s instinct to protect her, to fix what can be fixed and wrap her in cotton wool. But I also understood her mother’s impulse to push Paige forward. I’ve always wanted my children to reach for whatever they wanted, work hard to get it and succeed. And like Paige’s mum, I was a pretty closed person. I didn’t excavate my feelings. I was raised to smile, stay positive and see the glass as half full. And if I did have any problems, I worked through them on my own and moved on. That’s how I’d been taught to deal with things.
Both responses came from love, and neither left room for Paige’s grief. Her father saw vulnerability and in protecting her, made her feel incapable. Her mother saw vulnerability and tried to replace it with strength and in overestimating what Paige could carry, made her daughter feel like a disappointment.
I think underneath it all, they were just trying to manage their own discomfort about not being able to fix her sight loss, or control what happened next. What was rewarding was watching them grow alongside Paige, and learning that to support her meant letting her grieve and listening to what she tells them she needs.
You write a lot about difference, but I’ve noticed your character’s journey to self-acceptance seems to have them seeing the difference more than others. Is this how you perceive difference in people – that it’s bigger to themselves than to those on the outside?
In some ways, yes. Paige spends much of the novel convinced that her vision loss is the biggest, most defining thing about her and that once people see her cane, they’ll only see ‘the blind girl’ and nothing else.
That fear came up again and again when I was researching the book. So I made Paige hyper-aware of every way her sight loss might be showing – a stumble, a missed cue, a face she can’t place. That fear wasn’t paranoia. A lot of what she’s afraid of does play out. Once it’s visible, people do make her difference bigger than it needs to be, by ignoring or pitying her, by making assumptions about what she can and can’t do, and quietly deciding things for her instead of asking. Paige’s difference looms large in her mind but it’s magnified by a world that doesn’t pay attention to the right things.
What she eventually finds, though, through Zac and her support group, are people who don’t do this. People who see her disability as part of her, not all of her. And she has to do that herself, and come to understand that, despite her Stargardts, she can still be an artist, still fall in love, still build a life… just not the one she planned.
Is there something you hope your teenage readers will take away from reading this book? Something you hope could translate into their lives beyond the end of Paige’s story?
So many things.
That disability doesn’t make someone helpless. Paige doesn’t want to be pitied or rescued. She wants people to ask what she needs, listen to her answer and understand that her sight loss is part of who she is, but not all. Her diagnosis also doesn’t make her less capable or less interesting. She’s still funny, ambitious and talented.
That being real is more interesting than perfect. Paige begins the novel caring so much about appearances. She has to paint the perfect picture, be accepted by the right girls at school, date the most beautiful boy. But as her vision changes, and she can’t keep performing this polished version of herself, she works out how to be herself. I wanted readers to recognise that the awkward, flawed and weird parts of themselves aren’t things they need to hide.
That asking for help isn’t weakness. Being vulnerable takes guts. And doing everything on your own makes you lonely. Eventually Paige learns that real independence is having the confidence to ask for help and decide what that support should look like, and that letting people see that you’re struggling gives them the chance to really ‘see’ you, show up for you and reveal who they are.
What else? I wanted readers to feel that life can still be beautiful if it doesn’t go to plan. Paige thinks losing her sight will mean losing her future as an artist. Instead, she discovers new ways to create. Her work becomes less focused on perfectly copying what she sees and more about memory, imagination, texture and feeling. Her mistakes lead her somewhere new.
I think the message at the heart of the book is to start noticing beauty in ordinary moments, and unexpected places and in people you might otherwise overlook. And to try to meet yourself, and other people, with a little less judgment, because none of us is as perfect as we pretend to be… and that’s probably a good thing.
As for what I hope carries beyond Paige’s story: I hope it gives readers a deeper understanding of what life might be like for a person with low vision. I hope it gives them the confidence to embrace their own uniqueness and meet those who are different with empathy rather than judgment. I hope they take with them a curiosity about ableism and a desire to be more inclusive, and for readers who have a disability themselves, I hope it lets them see themselves within the pages of a book and know that their stories matter.
You have written several books focusing on the stories of teenagers in Nazi concentration camps during WWII – was it difficult transitioning to writing your latest book, and I Am Change before that?
In some ways. With the Holocaust novels, I had my father’s story to draw on, and the stories of the survivors I’d grown up with. I was writing my own history, writing what I knew. When I sat down to write I Am Change, I knew I wanted to step outside that comfort zone and explore something new, something that haunted me rather than something I’d inherited.
That thing was the 2014 kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram. I found myself wondering what I could do, not just for those 200 terrified girls, but for the millions of girls around the world being denied an education. Around the same time, I met a Ugandan girl visiting Australia, and once she told me her story, I knew I’d found the heart of my next book. But Lilian’s story was only one story, one voice. I needed to learn more, so I flew to Uganda and spent a week interviewing girls in their villages, huts and schools.
With the holocaust novels I needed to get the historical record right (as well as the emotional tone of the novel). With I Am Change, I was walking into people’s present-day lives, asking them to hand me their most private and painful moments, knowing I’d be the one to shape them into a story. I knew the book I’d planned to write wasn’t enough to make up for all they’d lost, but as an author, story was the best way I knew to inspire action, to make people care enough to help create change and put an end to the systems that kept these girls silenced.
A New Kind of Beautiful asked something similar of me. I didn’t have personal experience of vision loss, so I spoke to people who did, low-vision artists and teens, tech and mobility specialists, doctors and counsellors.
What all three books taught me is that ‘write what you know’ isn’t my thing. I’d rather write what I want to know, what I need to learn. Every time, that’s meant closing the laptop and finding people who could teach me, and trust that I’d do the work, to tell their stories sensitively and authentically.
What are some books you’ve read that you draw inspiration from, either in the writing style, voice, character journeys, etc?
There are so many great YA books. To name just a few… Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun, taught me what voice can do. It’s told in two very different first-person perspectives. Twins, Noah and Jude, each narrate a different timeline and the language is so beautiful, every metaphor feels perfect for that particular character. That’s something I aim for. I want the voice to feel inseparable from the character, so that even the way they see colour, light or grief tells you something about who they are. With Paige, that meant every observation had to come from someone who thinks in colour and composition even when she’s falling apart.
Kathleen Glasgow’s Girl in Pieces reminds me not to soften things too much. It’s about a teenage girl recovering from self-harm, and Glasgow doesn’t look away from the pain, but she also never lets the character be defined only by her wounds. There’s humour, art, friendship, desire, a whole person underneath the diagnosis. That’s exactly what I was chasing with Paige. I wanted readers to feel the weight of what she’s losing, but I never wanted her reduced to the ‘girl losing her sight.’ She’s still funny and stubborn and boy-obsessed and ambitious the whole way through.
And Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park is a masterclass in writing love as something built from small, specific moments rather than grand declarations… a shared mixtape, a comic book passed between them, the particular way someone’s hand feels the first time you hold it. That’s how I hope I wrote love in A New Kind of Beautiful. Zac and Paige don’t make big speeches. Love reveals itself in the way he listens to her, the way she starts noticing what he says instead of what he looks like. That book reminded me that the small details are often where the real emotion lives.
Do you remember your favourite book/s you read as a teenager, and what are/were they? Have you read any of them again as an adult and discovered a completely new experience?
As a teen, I read the classics: Gone with the Wind, Little Women, Wuthering Heights – books that, without me realising at the time, fed me lessons about right and wrong, empathy, and respect for people and the natural world. Then I moved on to darker, more searching stories: The Bell Jar, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Looking back, I don’t think I was drawn to them because I related to their darkness. I had a happy childhood. I think I loved the way they dropped me into completely different worlds: a psychiatric ward, a courtroom in the Deep South, the mind of a boy convinced everyone around him is a phony. I think I was just trying on different lives to work out who I wanted to be.
I haven’t reread them all, but the ones I have, landed differently as an adult. Wuthering Heights was just romantic obsession to a sixteen-year-old. Heathcliff and Cathy’s love felt epic but rereading it later, I saw the cruelty and damage, and it read less like a romance and more like a warning. The Catcher in the Rye was pure escape for teenage me. Reading it again as an adult, I picked up on Holden’s grief, something I was probably too young to see the first time round.
I think the books you love as a teenager meet you where you are at the time, and then when you return to them older, they reveal something else, because you’ve grown and changed.
What do we have to look forward to next from you? You’ve said all your books are inspired by real people or events, so is there something new and different coming?
I’m still looking for the next story I want to tell. I expect it’ll jump out at me when I’m least expecting it, or at least I hope so.
In the meantime, I’ve been working on something a little different. I’m a big believer in creating environments that expand our thinking and promote tolerance and empathy. All my novels circle those themes, and this project does too, bringing them to life with real people, in real time, rather than on the page. Instead of readers meeting a character I’ve created, they get to sit across from a real person, on loan for a short conversation, someone with lived experience who’s willing to answer questions, challenge assumptions and help foster understanding. They’re given a title, much like a book on a shelf – the label the world tends to reduce them to, e.g. homeless or addict – and readers are asked to look past the label and ‘unjudge’ them. It’s the same instinct that’s driven all my books, that the fastest way to dismantle a stereotype is to put a person in front of you instead of an idea, and let them tell you who they are, in their own words.
Thank you Suzy, for your sharing your insights with our StoryLinks readers.
