Eva Darrows’ latest novel, Belly Up, features Serendipity “Sara” Rodriguez, a queer, half-Spanish, half-Swedish protagonist who becomes pregnant after hooking up with a clueless rebound prospect at a party. Like many of the characters in Darrows’ novels, Sara is pretty snarky for a teenager; so are her relatives and friends. This includes her Swedish grandmother, Mormor; her mother, who had Sara when she was just 17; and Leaf, the dreamy, demisexual Romani poster boy for fat positivity who makes Sara delicious meals as her appetite grows along with her belly.

Belly Up, then, possesses an array of diverse characters, including Sara’s best friend, Devi, who identifies as gray ace—or on the asexual spectrum like Leaf—as well as Morgan and Erin, a couple composed of a trans lesbian and a cis lesbian. For plenty of marginalized people, the novel will ring true for one simple reason: All of the identities in the book come out of the lived experience of its writer, who publishes comedic titles like Belly Up as Darrows but YA horror under her actual name, Hillary Monahan.

“Sara is me,” Monahan says, adding that she has “a lot of labels.” Monahan identifies as bisexual, and she’s married to a cisgender heterosexual man; her extended family and friends offer as diverse a group of queer people as Sara’s; her biological father is Spanish, though she doesn’t have a relationship with him, and her mother had Monahan when she was just 17.

“For a book that’s a relatively light and fluffy read, it was difficult to write,” Monahan says. “I’m not reading reviews of this book. I wrote it nervous that people wouldn’t just critique an angle of the book because of poor writing. I was afraid they would go after pieces of identity.”

She wrote through her fear mostly to educate adult readers who often cling to stubborn tropes, but the most significant narrative in Belly Up is about teen pregnancy, which a lot of books treat “almost like an insurmountable odd,” Monahan says. “I’m not saying teen pregnancy is not emotionally fraught—it is. But Belly Up in some ways is a fantasy. It was the most idealized way to show what happens with support. We want that for every kid that has a challenge.”

While some adults have already argued that Monahan makes light of the life-altering realities of teen pregnancy in Belly Up, she notes that teen mothers are already horrified by their circumstances, and they don’t need adults to pile on.

“Young people right now are having discourse so far ahead of where I was at their age,” she says. Monahan didn’t grow up worrying that one of her classmates was going to shoot her, for example. “There’s a gravity to the lives they’re living because of technology and social media, but also living with racism and homophobia and ableism,” she says. “I think they enjoy [my humor] for what it is, but I don’t think they need it; I think my humor helps challenge the privilege of older generations.”

Joshunda Sanders is an educator and author of the children’s book I Can Write the World.