Indie-pop twin sister duo Tegan and Sara Quin are no strangers to collaboration. They have been writing music together since junior high, and in 2019 they released High School,their co-written debut memoir. The duo recognizes that their music is a collective effort with input from producers, sound engineers, band members, and others. “Each layer of the creative process gets more exciting because you’re bringing in a new set of eyes and brain and ears [to] tell you what they hear,” Tegan Quin says. “[We] have found that to be really helpful in our exploration of our creativity.”
The Quin sisters’ latest collaboration comes in the form of Tegan and Sara: Junior High (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 30), a middle-grade graphic novel illustrated by Eisner Award winner Tillie Walden (Spinning, On a Sunbeam). The novel blends fiction and memoir to tell the story of 12-year-old twins Tegan and Sara navigating school, crushes, first periods, and more in the present day. Early readers have praised the endearing graphic novel. “Walden’s illustrations are, as usual, wonderfully expressive,” Kirkus said. It “tugs at the heartstrings like a well-tuned guitar.”
On a video call with Kirkus, the Quin sisters and Walden discussed the harmonious creative process of working on both Junior High and the sequel being drafted now. Walden says she appreciated the Quin sisters’ detail-laden script, which allowed her to play with visual elements, including jokes like a “Witches’ Parking! All Others Will be Toad” bumper sticker that the twins’ mom actually had.
The visual storytelling moves between bustling panels of busy junior high halls and a stripped-down space dedicated to the inner monologues of the young twins. “That’s all Tillie,” Tegan shares. Walden, a twin herself, came up with the idea as a way to illustrate the emotional story. “They just need to talk to each other in a separate space,” she observes, “because so much about being a twin people don’t understand.” The addition of this liminal space leads to moments both tender and funny, like the twins’ junior high rules (“Shave legs for gym class???”), while unlocking a new creative element for the Quins’ writing process. “It also allowed us to go back into the script for Book 2,” Sara says. “It gave us more texture and space to add to our own story.”
While High School was strictly memoir, Junior High pushed the Quin sisters to reimagine their own experience and set it in the present day. “What would Tegan and Sara...be like now if we were growing up?” Sara asks. “With social media, with TikTok?” This time shift allows for a playful mix of references that are both retro and current; Nirvana and Taylor Swift both get space on the page along with smartphones and PlayStation. Walden enjoyed playing with this visual specificity: “It was really fun for me to be able to draw you guys in this cartoony way, to draw modern children who have AirPods [and] to inhabit this pseudo-fictional space but then access what was important to [you].”
The contemporary setting also gives a new lens through which the twins, especially Sara in this volume, explore queerness. Setting the book in the present day gave “opportunities to explore our sexuality in a more transparent way” according to Sara. While there is still the awkwardness and confusion of realizing you’re different, “It’s totally plausible that little Tegan and Sara have...this open-minded community of adults and kids,” says Sara, who describes this openness as “aspirational”—especially as a new parent herself. “It doesn’t have to have that scary, homophobic, I’m-afraid-of-what-might-happen kind of feeling.”
The Quins and Walden recognize that the present-day setting provides more openness and opportunity for telling a story where kids can be LGBTQ+ but are also just kids. At the same time, the authors and illustrator are aware of the unfortunate threat of book banning and censorship we are seeing in the United States. (In 2021, a Texas lawmaker released a list of 850 books he aimed to remove from schools, including Walden’s Spinning.) The trio agrees, however, that this book is about more than just the elements that some people would like to censor. “I do also hope that people just see this book as a book about kids going through stuff every kid goes through,” Walden says. “It’s a book about friendship, it’s a book about sibling relationships, about being twins, about music, about school, about all of these things,” Tegan adds.
“The book to me is an opportunity for kids and parents to read like, Hey, this is just life,” Sara says. “I think it’s a way of normalizing what other people sometimes are afraid of.”
D. Arthur is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
