Sarah Dessen reflects on her ‘Change of Plans’
The writer’s daughter is graduating from high school, just like the main character in her latest novel.
When Sarah Dessen ’93 published “The Rest of the Story” in 2019, her daughter, Sasha, was in fifth grade. Now she is getting ready to graduate from high school, just like Finley, the lead character in Dessen’s new young adult novel, “Change of Plans.”
Dessen calls it a full-circle moment. Her 15th novel is set in North Lake, the same fictional town as “The Rest of the Story,” a town loosely based on White Lake, North Carolina.
“Finley thinks she has her whole life lined up ahead of her. She’s going to her college of choice with her boyfriend, and then, as often happens in life, everything changes,” Dessen said. “She ends up going with her mom to the lake town where her mom grew up, in eastern North Carolina, and learning more about her mom’s past and meeting her extended family.”
Dessen wrote the book right after the pandemic, “when we all had our plans, and then everything changed.”
Dessen has always loved reading, gravitating to authors like Judy Blume and Lois Lowry when she was a teen, and checking out a stack of books weekly from the Chapel Hill Public Library. Her parents were faculty members at the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. Her father, Alan Dessen, who died in January, taught in the English and comparative literature department, and her mom, Cynthia, in the classics department.
They gave Dessen a manual typewriter when she was 8 or 9 to type her own stories. She “grew up” in Greenlaw Hall, skateboarded in The Pit, and attended local readings for authors like Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith and Marianne Gingher — later working for Smith as her assistant.
At Carolina, Dessen initially chose psychology as her major. But after she took a creative writing class with the late Doris Betts, she was hooked.
“I always tell students to follow what interests you, to take all kinds of classes,” Dessen said. “In Doris’ class, I knew this was what I wanted to do. Again, my own change of plans.” (Dessen cherishes a box of every paper of hers that Betts edited, kept on her closet shelf.)
Dessen has never shied away from writing about difficult topics in her books, like divorce and grief and illness, even abusive relationships.
“Because I started so young, I just wrote very honestly,” she said. “I was always attracted to harder stories. Books got me through high school. They were sort of how I knew that there was a bigger world out there where people felt like me.”
“Change of Plans” is the first in a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster.
Dessen offered a teaser that the next book will be set in the fictional town of Lakeview, which longtime readers will recognize as Chapel Hill.
It features a brother and sister who are “thrown together for various reasons in the summer, and she ends up being involved in Bendo, the music club he manages, which is sort of based on Cat’s Cradle,” Dessen said.
Dessen’s previous books have sold millions of copies worldwide, but she said she measures success by the longtime connection she’s had with her fans. This fall will mark 30 years since her first novel, “That Summer,” came out in 1996. Moms who read her books in high school are now reading them with their teenage daughters.
“Readers have said to me, ‘Your books got me through high school.’ And to me, that is the highest compliment,” Dessen said.
Read an expanded interview with Dessen and learn about more new books.
