It’s a classic story, really. Boy meets girl. Boy has crush on girl. Boy takes the fall for girl’s first day of school prank and ends up with community service.
This is the setup for Libba Bray’s new young adult novel, “Radio Free Texas.”
As the title suggests, this tale takes place in a small Texas town and main character Bowie does his community service time at a local radio station.
Bray joined Texas Standard to talk about the new novel.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Where’d you get the idea for this book? And I’m specifically curious about why you centered it on this small-town radio station of all places?
Libba Bray: I’ve always loved radio. I set it in the 1980s because that was when I was a teenager and it was very humbling to find out that is now considered historical fiction. I’m recovering from that.
To us, radio was the internet. It was where we listened to our favorite bands. It was where we listened for concert tickets, for news about musicians that we loved, and we would sit with our tape recorders and try to catch every song.
I grew up in a small Texas town and I think that the radio was a cure for loneliness — especially as a teenager when you’re driving out country roads and you’re listening to a song and the radio, the dashboard is glowing and you are thinking, this connects me to the musician, to the DJ and to all the people out there who are listening.
There was something magical about that small-town radio station. Everyone was listening to the same DJs, the same music, and you had a common shared sense of community really, is what it comes down to, right?
Absolutely, I think community is something that I often like to concentrate on in my books. That’s a theme that comes up again and again, that we need each other. We human beings need each.
We’re flawed and all of those things, and sometimes infuriating and frustrating, but we need others.
I was very intrigued by Marlon, who’s the guy who runs the radio station. He definitely has a sort of anti-establishment, maybe even anti-social streak to him.
Marlon was such fun to write. For some reason, when I would visualize him, I kept seeing Waylon Jennings.
One of the things I love about him is that he is a mess. He is a hot mess. But he also loves music. He is passionate about it. It’s like his church, it is holy to him. And that he finds this willing audience in Bowie and starts to educate him about music… And then Bowie, of course, starts to find his own identity through music, because I think that we do, especially as teenagers, find ourselves through music.
And so I loved that about him. I loved it that he’s an absolute mess, that he is an outlaw, that he can be narcissistic, but that he also loves music so much and he wants to share that with the next generation.
You mentioned earlier that you grew up in Texas, a small town. Of course, nowadays, I understand you live in the big city, and I’m curious what role the Texas setting plays in this story. How would you describe that role?
Texas is its own character, as we all know, anybody who’s ever lived there. I will say that it’s a somewhat fictionalized account of my hometown, which is Denton, Texas.
When I lived there it was very small. There was only one high school, but it was such a unique place to be because, you know, it’s North Texas — it’s flat, there’s a Baptist church on every corner, and there’s also the One O’Clock Lab Band, because the University of North Texas is a huge jazz school. So music just permeated that town.
But I think at the time, all I could think was like, when do I get out of here? When can I go to Austin? But it is, of course, a community, and I think that there is a certain dry wit to Texas that I love that I think a lot of people don’t get right away.
You’ve written a lot of books for young adults. What drew you to this style of coming-of-age story, specifically?
The thing that’s wonderful about the teenage years is it’s so full of firsts.
You are constrained because you’re still a child in many ways — you live with your parents, and you’re subjected to certain rules and expectations. That’s a prime place for rebellion and for discovery. Your first love, the first band you fall in love with, your strong friendships, the way that you’re discovering yourself…
And as I like to say, the truth is we never stop coming of age. We keep hopefully evolving, we still keep discovering things, but that’s when it’s really at its most exciting.
What are you hoping that readers get out of this story?
I hope that they will discover some music they haven’t discovered before because each chapter is a song title or a band. I’d like to have them go, “I don’t know who Klaus Nomi is, but let me find out.”
I actually started writing this book 25 years ago, and I just could not get under the skin of it. And then a few years ago, I had this memory of taking my son to see “Where the Wild Things Are,” and he started to sob. And I turned to him and I said, hey bud, what’s making you so sad? And he said, “it’s just so hard to grow up.” I was like, oh, dagger to the heart.
So it’s a love letter to growing up with all of its aches and pains. And as I said, we never stop growing up. We never stop coming of age. I think it took me 25 years because I needed to age into the grace of it, the grace for each character.
The fact that not everything works out the way we want it to, but we do form these small communities and they shape us and we take those experiences with us… And it’s great if it can have a soundtrack that also makes you want to dance.
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