When Isabel Williams moves to Liverpool, she criticises seemingly everything in Eloise Byrne’s life – her city, her accent, her trademark boldness – so if, when she catches Isabel staring, Eloise feels her pulse race, it must be because they hate each other. It surely couldn’t be for any other reason, could it?
Eloise needs to get her ADHD under control in time for A-Levels, but when she meets Isabel, school becomes the least of her concerns. What begins as outright contempt turns into an oddly satisfactory rivalry, but for their rivalry to shift further into romance, their relationship must withstand Isabel’s classism, Eloise’s distrust, and whatever secrets their friends are hiding from them.
Described as a “modern-day Queer re-telling of Pride and Prejudice“, Leanne Egan’s Lover Birds is a beautifully-written young adult novel that tells the story of two schoolgirl enemies who find their rivalry shifting into romance.
We spoke with Leanne about portraying the experiences of young neurodivergent LGBT+ people and how their experiences with classism influenced Lover Birds.
What inspired you to write Lover Birds?
Mostly I was just writing for fun because I had been working on something for about 10 years that wasn’t really going anywhere. I needed a break from that. I wanted to write something that I was going to enjoy writing, and I’d noticed recently that I’d not really been able to find much in the way of YA books that actually represented what my high school experience was like. I think the closest I’d gotten was a book set in Ireland. It’s like how Derry Girls is the closest I’ve seen to the Liverpool high school experience on TV and so I thought, you know, it’s probably because nobody wants to publish a Scouse book.
How did you portray the high school experience of young LGBT+ people today?
I intentionally made their school experience a lot easier than mine was, partly because it’s been well over 10 years at this point and things have changed, even if it’s not as much as we’d like, but also I wanted it to be a story of queer joy more than anything else, which was very much not my high school experience. I went to a Catholic school from 2007, so it wasn’t a fun time for anyone there. I wanted to try and move away from that a little bit because we’ve just got so many books that focus about how difficult it is to be gay, and I think it’s important to have just a bit of joy and a bit of fun to sort of counterbalance that.
As someone who is non-binary, have your own experiences had any influence on the story or characters?
Not a lot in terms of my non-binary identity. There is a non-binary character in there, which I really enjoyed writing. I think this was more a chance to explore my identity when I thought I was a queer woman. I’ve had time to think about and understand my gender, and I know that woman isn’t something that I associate with, but for a large part of my life, I was growing up as someone who was perceived as a woman, and then being queer also tying into that, so this is definitely more focused on queer women and that part of my identity. The sapphic experience is something we don’t really see enough of, especially in books and TV. Growing up as a teenager who reads as a lesbian, especially in a Catholic school, is a very uniquely rough experience. I wanted to focus more on that side.
Lover Birds has been praised for its representation of ADHD. How did you research and write the character of Eloise to accurately represent a young person with ADHD?
Most of my research for that was done while I was researching for myself. At the time when most of this book was written, I was on the waiting list for an ADHD assessment. I’d been second-guessing myself. I’d ticked all the boxes for an ADHD diagnosis, but still in the back of my mind, I was like, oh, what if I’m just faking it, what if, you know, the doctor’s just gonna laugh at me. ADHD doesn’t look like what we’ve always assumed it looks like and I flew under the radar for a really long time because I was so quiet and I was so nervous. My core personality trait was not wanting to cause a scene, so writing Eloise was a chance to have a character who, up until the events of the book, didn’t have that fear of being too loud and too obnoxious, and it’s something that she takes pride in. I wanted to be able to portray that experience of what it looks like when you’ve not been taught from day one to sort of shove that all down, because I think that is how people go undiagnosed.
Classism is a major theme in Lover Birds, something some people in Liverpool will have first-hand experiences with. Have you ever experienced classism?
I’ve lived away from Liverpool for probably about 10 years now. I moved away for uni, I moved back for a little bit in the middle and then had to move to London, because at the time that’s where all of the publishing jobs were. In Newcastle, where I went for uni, people would say, ‘I was a bit nervous to find out that I was going to be living with a scouser, but you’re alright, you’ve barely got an accent.’ I’d spent two years in Southport for college and had learned to hide it because I’d been getting laughed at. Growing up, I didn’t ever really think about how people would perceive me with an accent or anything like that. It was wild to me, that first year moving away, of just how strong opinions everyone has about Liverpool. I wanted to explore that through Eloise as a character who hadn’t moved away from Liverpool, who was in her hometown and was still getting that from someone who had come to her and hadn’t really challenged any of those misconceptions that most of the country seems to have.
Leanne Egan’s Lover Birds is available to purchase at https://harpercollinschildrensbooks.co.uk/products/lover-birds-leanne-egan-9780008626587/
