Save Me a Seat
Save Me a Seat
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Sarah Weeks on Save Me a Seat
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A student’s story she couldn’t leave aloneThe book began not with Weeks’s idea but with an assignment she gave. Varadarajan was her student at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and one short story submitted for class set the whole project in motion.
Gita wrote a short story in my class about a boy who moves from India to New Jersey and what his first day in fifth grade was like — that was the jumping off point for our book. I created the character of Joe, and we began talking about how these two characters might see the same situation from different points of view.
Weeks didn’t wait long after reading that story. She picked up the phone and proposed the collaboration directly, with a structural concept already formed.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the story because it was so colorful, and so I called her and I said, ‘I can’t stop thinking about the story, and I’m wondering, would you consider writing a book with me? I’ll create a character who will sit behind your character in class, and we can go back and forth between the two voices.’ [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Two voices, one friendship, five daysWeeks and Varadarajan worked on opposite schedules across a time difference, which turned the writing process into something closer to a relay. Weeks describes the morning routine that became their rhythm.
When we were working on Save Me a Seat, I would get up in the morning and run to my computer to see what she had sent, then I would spend the morning responding to it with ideas and suggestions for what might happen next.
The division of labor might suggest each author owned her own character, but Weeks rejects that reading. Both writers crossed into the other’s voice repeatedly.
It was a true collaboration in that we both learned how to speak and think like both Joe and Ravi.
The structural payoff of that shared investment is what she names as her proudest achievement in the book.
The novel covers exactly five days of fifth grade, and Weeks is precise about what that compressed timeline allowed her and Varadarajan to build without a single scene between the two boys.
One thing that I am especially proud of about our story, and one which I think sets it apart from others, is that over the course of five days, Joe and Ravi become friends without ever having exchanged a word.
Perrima, Ravi’s grandmother, is a character whose lines required a certain willingness to go further than Varadarajan felt comfortable going. Weeks had no such hesitation.
Hands down she was my favorite character to create and write dialogue for in that book. Gita was shy at times about writing some of the horrible things that came out of Ravi’s grandmother’s mouth, but I had a blast thinking of insulting things for her to say, like when she accuses Americans of being beef-eating, divorced cowboys.
That willingness to let a character be genuinely cutting connects to a principle Weeks has held across nearly three decades of writing for children.
I’ve been writing books for young readers for almost 30 years. One of my personal goals has always been to create stories that tackle difficult situations without pounding those messages over the head. Humor is a great way to soften the blow!
The personal thread
Geeky, flat, and hopelessly lost in mathJoe, the American boy whose auditory processing disorder makes school a daily ordeal, needed a creator who remembered what it felt like to be conspicuously out of step. Weeks drew from her own middle school years in concrete terms.
I was not one of the ‘cool’ girls in my school. I entered puberty on the late side. I wore glasses and had braces and I was flat as a board and very tall for my age. In a word — geeky. I took comfort in my writing and my music but often felt that my parents didn’t understand my creative side.
She stops short of claiming Joe’s specific diagnosis, but she traces a clear line between his classroom struggles and her own sense that her brain might be working differently from everyone else’s.
I didn’t have the kind of learning challenges that Joe faces, but I was hopelessly lost in math class and often wondered if there was something wrong with my brain.
What she wants us to sit with
Say the name, ask the questionAt school visits, Weeks runs an exercise that began with a private moment between her and Varadarajan. For years, Weeks had avoided saying Varadarajan’s full last name because she didn’t know how. Once they started working together, she practiced at home until she could say it correctly, then called her co-author. The response stayed with her, and she now replays a version of that moment with every audience she meets.
You cried, because you said no one had really taken the time to learn how to say your name. [paraphrased from audio]
She then asks the room how many students have names that people regularly mispronounce. She has found that the hands go up in nearly every school she visits, which is the point she wants them to sit with before the book discussion even begins.
Teachers have found their own use for the book, one that tracks closely with what Weeks hoped it would do. The pattern she describes has repeated itself enough times to tell her something about why the story works.
The thing that always makes me feel really happy is when a teacher tells me that they used Save Me a Seat as their first read-aloud of the school year... I think the reason they do that is because it’s about inclusion, and it’s about, you know, not making assumptions about people, acceptance, and things like that. [paraphrased from audio]
Stripped of its plot, the book asks a single question about what to do when someone in front of you seems entirely foreign. Weeks has a plainly stated answer.
When you first meet someone, if you feel like they’re really different from you, the thing to do is to ask questions and then really listen to the answers. That’s how you find out that people have, you know, all kinds of things in common with you that you might not think was going to happen. [paraphrased from audio]