June Chu has had enough of not being enough—to the boys she hooks up with, to her demanding Taiwanese mother—and starts a self-defining journey in Anna Gracia’s debut, Boys I Know (Peachtree Teen, July 26), which is part comedy, part sexual awakening, and a whole lot of teenage angst. Add to that a complex background that includes an often difficult, many times frustrating relationship with her family and you have the recipe for a rich, intersectional contemporary YA novel that received a Kirkus star. Gracia, who identifies as Taiwanese American herself, spoke to me via Zoom from San Francisco about writing the novel, her protagonist, and everything in between. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

June’s story is a well-balanced blend of romance, comedy, and heartbreak. That’s a hard balancing act to pull off.

I wanted to show the effect that dating has on teenage girls, but the novel is not about the relationships. I wanted it to be about June; I wanted to show how she is affected by the relationships around her. That’s how I got the balance, because she’s the focus but must deal with all the influences from the people around her. They each must have a turn in the story.

Some of those relationships, especially the ups and downs of her meeting boys, are difficult to read about.

My editor described it as sitting in the passenger seat of the car, watching it crash, and not being able to get out of the car. That’s a really good description for it. That’s part of the difficulty in writing for teens: It has to be realistic enough because she is a teen, she is still figuring things out, things are left unresolved. And I also wanted to leave some room for improvement.

In the novel’s introduction you talk about how it was inspired by your own experience as part of the Asian diaspora but also as a response to the need for representation.

I feel a lot of diaspora writers get really nervous because we write things from our point of view and we’re really worried that we are not going to represent everyone. For me, especially, I was very worried because I wanted to tackle not only the White side of things, where June grows up in this predominantly White town, but I also wanted to show a little bit of what it’s like to be part of the diaspora when you meet people from Asia or people that have grown up around other Asian people. It sometimes makes it difficult to gain this overall feeling of solidarity because Asia is so huge, and our experiences range so widely, and we often all get lumped into this “Asian” category.I really wanted to explore just how much—and how little, at the same time—you can relate to each other.

In June’s family experience, she is constantly compared to her older sister and under lots of pressure from her Taiwanese mother to achieve and go to the same college.

I don’t want to generalize, but this seems to happen in a lot in families with high achievers. The reason I wanted June to go to a different school than her sister is in support of removing herself from that competition. I don’t know if you ever grow out of it, and I don’t think the parents are ever going to stop doing it, so you need to find the key to figuring out a way that you can live peacefully with it. I wanted to show that even if your family members around you don’t change, you can change the way that you respond to them, and I think that that leads to a healthier living. At the end of the day June didn’t change her sister; she didn’t change her mom or her friends. She had to decide to change and make her own boundaries.

Speaking of boundaries: One of the story’s main themes is autonomy. June navigates being a girl with wants and needs, wanting to have her own bodily autonomy and have a say in what she does with her life. There is a pregnancy scare, a morning-after-pill incident, and different types of sexual experiences as she carves her own narrative.

With the morning-after pill, I wanted to show that I don’t think it should be a big deal. I wanted to make it seem almost normal, but I didn’t want the whole book to be about that. Quite honestly, that’s what it’s supposed to be for—it’s supposed to be for accidents and then you go on and you live your life. I wanted to show it as this positive thing, that you don’t need to internalize the shame. I wanted to show, Hey, actually, a lot of people take it, and a lot of people have this problem, and it’s really fine, and we all go on to live regular productive lives. If I was going to write a book about teens having a sex life, I wanted to show that things like this happen. Or how you’re going to meet guys that tell you that they love you and that you are wonderful just to get you into bed. Or that you can actually have good sex with a terrible person. I wanted to explore that sort of range of what you get when you [are] sexually active. I always think about that [TikTok] meme, “We support women’s rights but, more importantly, we support women’s wrongs.”

I love that!

I wanted to show that June is strong, but it is equally important to show that she is also sometimes terrible, and she is messy, and she makes these huge mistakes—but she still deserves love, and she deserves care, and she deserves a future. To me, that’s the ultimate feminism: cheering for someone that you think maybe doesn’t deserve it because, ultimately, we all deserve it.

Ana Grilo is co-editor of the Hugo Award–winning blog The Book Smugglers and co-host of the Fangirl Happy Hour podcast.