Minnesota writer channels 'lost years' for novel.

Dale Myers

11 August 2008

The lead of previous schoolteacher Jonathan Friesen's Jerk, California struggles with a condition the author knows well : Tourette syndrome. Without a name for his condition, the now-40-year-old Mora, Minn, writer lived under stress to stop his twitches and jerks, alone, from age six till diagnosis at age twenty.

Regardless of Friesen's family history of physical twitchs, his pediatrician would not diagnose the inherited neuropsychiatric disorder, which shows itself during childhood in the shape of occasional physical or vocal twitchs. Each time I sort of did something, which would be 200 times each day when I'd jerk my arm or a fast eye blink or whatever, there had been a message : 'You can't stop. ' after a bit of that, the agony is pretty excruciating. Diagnosis helped Friesen explain his fact to mates -- and ultimately to the fifth-graders he taught for fifteen years in Robbinsdale and Anoka college

districts. Four debut of his 1st novel, Jerk, California ( Puffin Books, $10 ), whose angst-ridden protagonist struggles against the syndrome Friesen knows so well. The youthful adult novel isn't autobiographical, but Friesen channeled emotions from his lost years to build the personality of Sam, a 17-year-old who boards on a revelatory trip that helps him learn about himself and his deceased pa.

[Friesen has an other half and 3 children.] I did not have an agent, and had no hope of publishing at the point. And they paid me $500 and I assumed, 'This is simply a breeze. ' And then I had 102 denials after that. Eventually , I do not know why, it struck me that I'm in possession of a story, and I was perhaps making this a touch more tough than it should be. Not one of the real events blur into autobiography, but what I'd regularly do is take an emotion that I recollect feeling strongly in that time and see how that would play out in [Sam's] life. Then I can write a paragraph summary : What is this book in 5 sentences? Beyond that, I haven't got a set trail. Q What is your routine these days, and what do you think about Jerk, California when you read it now? Often I am getting a paragraph done, but if it's a paragraph that feels real -- that's my test, does this feel emotionally real -- it would just be a paragraph a day, but I am an enraptured camper at four o'clock. I needed to show a youthful person's heart -- the center of a rather worried youthful person, at the start -- and show that there is hope in the areas of love, self-acceptance, forgiveness.