“Sometimes, you don’t know how to articulate a feeling until you’ve read about it in a book,” says author Kathleen Glasgow. Glasgow made her name penning YA books that find the language to address hard topics—from self-harm to the opioid epidemic—in compassionate and approachable ways. Her latest work, The Glass Girl (Delacorte, Oct. 1), takes on the experience of alcohol addiction, following 15-year-old Bella as she navigates crisis and recovery. Our review calls the book a “visceral, weighty read”; we spoke to Glasgow over Zoom from her home in Tucson, Arizona, to learn more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was important for you to communicate in a YA book about addiction?

I wanted to capture the emotions that come along with something you don’t fully understand yet. It was important to me that Bella remain a 15-year-old, and when you’re that young, you don’t fully understand what happens to your body and your brain when you overuse substances. She has anxiety, and she’s dealing with her parents’ divorce, her grandmother’s death, heartbreak, and a changing friend group. She’s using alcohol to put her in a different state of mind.

There are things that I’ve never forgotten about what it felt like to be 15. You want your independence and yet you need your parents with you. You want to break boundaries, but you don’t know how far you should go. You want to be in the world, but the world is sometimes a very painful place to be.

The opening of the book distills that tension clearly: It’s a litany of the concerns and issues that jockey for your attention as an adolescent.

When I was in high school we didn’t have cell phones, we had rotary phones. We didn’t have this constant barrage of information, imagery, and text. The worst thing that could happen to you at my high school was someone would put your head in the toilet and flush it—give you a swirly. Now when you’re 15 and you go to high school you literally have to worry about getting shot. You have to worry about climate change. You have to worry about cyberbullying. It’s everything, all at once, bearing down on you.

My kids went to school one day in 2020, and then they came home and didn’t go back for nine months. A lot of kids don’t want to talk about what it was like, just seeing their friends on a screen, having to watch their teacher on a screen, having to stay inside because outside this virus that you can’t comprehend is killing people. You don’t have the tools to manage all of that stress at that age.

This book isn’t on its face a Covid-19 book, but the pandemic is clearly something that’s had an impact on the characters.

I think you now have to consider the pandemic when you’re writing fiction for younger readers. You have to consider how old they are now, and how old they were during the lockdown. What things might your characters have experienced during that time that informs who they are in this moment? Adults reference “lockdown” all the time when we talk about things, but I’ve noticed that kids still don’t really know how to articulate what it was like for them.

Little kids, you tell them, You have a certain amount of screen time each day. And then, suddenly it’s, Now you have be on the screen for eight hours, five days a week. It’s just crazy. And Don’t touch that, and Put your mask on, and Don’t go over here, and Are you coughing? We instilled this fear in them, and I don’t think we’ve fully seen what it means yet. You have to consider that in fiction now: Even if it’s not an obvious plot point, it has to inform your characters from this moment forward.

Bella would have been 11 in 2020. Where do you see the aftereffects of her lockdown experience in this book?

I think the isolation heightened her anxiety. She was also with her grandmother quite a bit, which spiked her drinking, since her grandmother was the one who introduced her to alcohol. Then her grandmother dies after the lockdown has ended, and Bella thinks, What was all that for, if she was going to die anyway?

It’s not on the page, but I think lockdown is also what really exacerbated the tensions between Bella’s parents. There’s a reason why you shouldn’t spend 24 hours a day with the same people, day in and day out.

The book offers different models for how people handle recovery.

After I wrote Girl in Pieces, I got letters from readers who liked the part that took place in the hospital and wondered if I would write a book that took place entirely in a hospital environment. I realized they were saying that because they wondered what it would be like if they had to go into a facility. Writing the recovery scenes at [Bella’s rehab] Sonoran Sunrise, I knew each of the kids would have their own story of what happened to them and what made them turn to substance abuse and alcohol.

I also wanted the adults who were running this place to be addicts in recovery, and for everyone to make mistakes. Adults don’t always have all the answers. Recovering addicts don’t always have all the answers. Eighty percent of it is figuring out what you need to do to stay sober, every day, over and over and over again. It’s not always clean, and I don’t want to lie to younger readers.

As you write in the author’s note, “Bella is at the very beginning of addressing her addiction. I don’t know what the future holds for her, but I have hope.”

Readers always want sequels. They want to know what happens next. I don’t do Part Twos, because I want you to imagine where the characters are and, if you identify with them, where are you right now? Are you in a better place because you read this book and you asked for help? Or because it helped you feel less alone? There can’t be any sequels because the characters are still on the road. I mean, I know where they are in my head, but I would never tell a reader, Don’t worry, they’re just fine.

Is it challenging to write openly about a topic as stigmatized as addiction?

John Mulaney, who’s been very open about his addiction issues, has a line in his special Baby J along the lines of, And those are just the things that I’m choosing to tell you. Writers and artists don’t have to be open about their own biographies to the people who consume their work; we shouldn’t have that expectation of artists. You might start a book with a little kernel of something that happened to you, but pretty soon that becomes boring: You want to live someone else’s life on the page. The one thing I put in this book is someone duct-taping a bottle of alcohol to themselves. That’s a real thing, I did do that [laughs]. I didn’t mind saying that, because it incriminates no one else and it’s stupidly funny. And those are the things that I’m choosing to tell you.

Ilana Bensussen Epstein is a writer and filmmaker in Boston.