Restart
Restart
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Gordon Korman on Restart
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A bully gets a blank slateThe seed for the book came not from a news story or a school visit, but from a character Korman had already published. Cap Anderson, the protagonist of his 2007 novel ‘Schooled’, arrives at junior high with no social history there because he has spent his whole life on a commune, and that structural condition, a kid who is genuinely new to the whole social ecosystem of school, lodged in Korman’s mind as a premise worth inverting.
The inspiration for *Restart* actually came from an older book of mine called *Schooled*, which featured a character named Cap Anderson, who was raised by his hippie grandmother on a commune. He comes to junior high school for the very first time, and he’s totally new to the whole experience of junior high. And so it made me think, what if someone went to junior high, but they were not new to junior high, they just forgot everything about it? And that was really the spark for *Restart*. [paraphrased from audio]
Once Korman had the amnesia mechanism, he had to decide what kind of person it would be most interesting to strip of memory. He chose the one that would make the philosophical stakes as sharp as possible, someone whose transformation would actually cost something to resist.
My what if was just, what if the worst kid in the school got a total do-over at his life? I mean, Chase Ambrose is not a nice person. He’s a bully. 90% of the school is terrified of this kid. [paraphrased from audio]
Placing amnesia inside a bully rather than a neutral or sympathetic character meant the nature-versus-nurture question carried real weight. If Chase simply reverted, the book would argue that character is fixed. If he changed, it would have to show that change is work, not luck.
Behind the plot mechanism was a question Korman had been carrying for years, one that amnesia let him dramatize in a way that ordinary circumstances could not. The head injury does not resolve the question; it opens it by removing the usual excuses.
I think my original idea for *Restart*, I was thinking about what makes us the kind of people we are. Is your personality kind of hardwired into you, you’re stuck with it, you can’t change it no matter what — your nature, right? Or is it nurture? Is it sort of shaped by the people you meet, the stuff that happens to you? [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
When the nice little bow wouldn’t holdBefore writing a single chapter, Korman had to understand what amnesia actually erases, because the version most readers assume, a total blank slate, would have made the story impossible to write. His research revealed a distinction between procedural memory and episodic memory that shaped every scene in Chase’s first days back from the hospital.
Chase doesn’t forget everything, right? I mean, he wakes up in the hospital. When he says, ‘Who are you, lady?’ That proves he remembers how to speak, he remembers the language. When he needs to use the bathroom, he remembers, ‘Okay, you get up, you put one foot in front of the other. That’s how you get there.’ So those are the little things about amnesia that I had to sort of get exactly right in order to make *Restart* a believable kind of story. [paraphrased from audio]
Getting the amnesia right was the easier problem. The harder one was structural: Korman’s instinct as a writer pulled him toward a clean arc, but the social world he had built around Chase pushed back. School psychologists who reviewed the book noted that bullies rarely enjoy their behavior; they feel pressure to maintain a status that is itself a trap, which meant Chase’s old friends and old reputation would remain forces he had to actively fight rather than simply leave behind.
My impulse was to tie everything up with a nice little bow. Oh, he used to be so mean. And now he’s nice. But the real world just kind of rebelled against that. It just, that book would not allow itself to be written. [paraphrased from audio]
To give readers access to the gap between how Chase sees himself and how everyone else sees him, Korman needed a form that could hold two truths simultaneously. He had been experimenting with multi-narrator structures in other books, and ‘Restart’ became the clearest test case for what that technique could do when the central conflict is precisely about perception.
It’s something that I’ve been really playing around with a lot in my books lately — telling the story from different perspectives, a different narrator does every chapter. And I think it’s just an awesome way, particularly in a super school-based story. And what I love about the multiple perspectives thing is just that sometimes you could be looking at exactly the same events, but you may as well be talking about completely different things. [paraphrased from audio]
The choice of middle school over high school was not default but deliberate. High school would have introduced cars, part-time jobs, and a social landscape where adult institutions dilute the peer dynamics Korman wanted to keep at the center. Middle school gave him exactly the right ratio of independence to constraint.
Middle school was perfect for *Restart* because it was just a great forum to provide these kids with enough independence to let their true colors show through without too much adult supervision. But at the same time, just keep it focused on what I wanted it to be about. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
Reputation as its own kind of prisonEven after Chase begins to act like a different person, the school around him refuses to update its model of who he is. That gap between a changed person and an unchanged reputation is, Korman has argued, one of the book’s real subjects, separate from the amnesia that triggers it.
One of the things that’s very difficult for Chase is that his reputation precedes him, and people are afraid of him. And so he really has to earn their trust and earn their belief that he is a changed person. So it’s about reputation, and how hard it is to shake a reputation, and how sometimes that reputation can follow you even if you’re a completely different person. [paraphrased from audio]
Korman has described a thread running across many of his books, not bullying specifically, but a preoccupation with what happens when someone who does not fit the existing social order shows up and forces the group to reckon with its own assumptions. In ‘Restart’, that figure is Chase himself, who becomes an outsider to his own former identity.
A lot of my message in my writing is sort of the acceptance of the misfit and the outsider and all of our differences. And that’s where our strength comes from, not our weakness. [paraphrased from audio]
When the first reviews appeared calling the book an anti-bullying novel, Korman was genuinely surprised. His reaction, and the way he talked himself into accepting the label, reveals something about how he thinks the work of fiction differs from the work of argument.
A lot of people say, for example, my book *Restart* is an anti-bullying book. And I remember when I read the first review, I was like, anti-bullying book? And when I thought about it, I was like, yeah, I mean it does have a really strong anti-bullying message. But that wasn’t what I did when I sat down to write the book. I just wanted to write a good story. And I feel like if I had sort of decided, ‘okay, bullying is bad and I will write a great book to prove to everybody that it’s a terrible thing,’ it would have been very much like someone lecturing you, it would have been very preachy. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Reinvention is real, but it costs somethingKorman has stated his hope for readers in direct terms on more than one occasion, and the consistency of the language suggests it is not a rehearsed publicity answer but a conviction that preceded the book. The word he keeps using is ‘work’, not luck, not accident, not grace.
I hope readers take away from *Restart* that it’s possible for people to change. That you’re not stuck with the reputation that precedes you. And that if you work hard, and if you’re honest with yourself, you can be a better human being. [paraphrased from audio]
What makes the final argument of the book unusual is that Korman does not treat Chase’s amnesia as a prerequisite for change. He treats it as an extreme version of something that happens, slowly and without drama, to real people. The head injury just removed the usual friction that keeps most people from doing what Chase did.
That is one of the things that I truly believe, that we do reinvent ourselves the way Chase does. It’s just he was given this incredible opportunity, which he needed, because he wasn’t such a great person when it all started. [paraphrased from audio]