The YA author on grief, queer identity and family secrets in her new novel ‘In Between Days’
The books being pulled from school shelves don’t disappear. They find their readers anyway. Camryn Garrett, NAACP Image Award-nominated YA author, is counting on exactly that. Her upcoming novel, In Between Days, releases this May and follows a teenager navigating grief and queerness through a friendship nobody in her family saw coming.
Finding family in unexpected places
Garrett began writing In Between Days during college, away from home and thinking about connection across generations. “I was inspired by the idea of forming different types of family and finding family in places where you didn’t expect to look for them,” she said. “Not just finding friends your own age, but finding community in people who are older than you.”
That idea became the foundation of the novel. The story centers on Mira, a 17-year-old whose father passes away. A stranger appears at the funeral and Mira doesn’t know who he is. “It’s revealed that he was her father’s boyfriend, and she never knew about him,” Garrett said. “She’s spending the summer with this man, learning a lot more about her father and this side of him that she didn’t know.”
Learning how to be queer
One of the novel’s most striking moments comes when Mira asks Richard, her father’s boyfriend, to teach her how to be queer. Garrett said the line came from personal experience. “That’s something I experienced, and a lot of people experience, not just how to be queer, but just how to be,” she said. “As a young person, I’m always looking at older people, like, what am I supposed to do?”
For Mira, the question carries extra weight. “She’s the only queer person in her family, so she’s looking to Richard and saying, how am I supposed to do this?” Garrett said. “The answer is there’s no one path, and that’s sort of what he tells her.”
Why the format matters
In Between Days is an epistolary novel told through diary entries, text messages and book reviews. Garrett said the choice was deliberate. “The story is about death and grieving. I wanted there to be elements that you could engage with that would not make you feel depressed the whole time,” she said.
She drew inspiration from the Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot. “There are heavy things happening in that book and it’s just so funny because it feels like a real teenager wrote it,” she said. “Writing it this way would make Mira feel way more like a real teenager.”
Breaking the silence on grief
Grief and queerness sit at the center of the novel, and Garrett was intentional about exploring both. “In Black communities, a lot of times you don’t talk about these things, or your family says this is our business,” she said. Mira’s mother delivers that exact line in the book. “I think that can be so isolating.”
Garrett said she hopes readers who have carried that kind of silence find something in the story. “I hope anyone who has felt grief, or who has been isolated because of something in their family, is able to feel like a safe space when reading it and able to feel cathartic when they’re reading the story.”
What keeps her writing
With book bans and legislation making it harder to get queer stories into schools, Garrett said the readers themselves are what keep her going. She works with Lambda Literary, a New York-based program that sends authors into schools for GSA meetings.
“A lot of times it’ll be students who are queer, and that gives me energy,” she said. “Even when there are book bannings and legislation that makes it difficult, seeing the actual people who the stories are for engage with it gives me the energy to keep going.”
In Between Days is available this May wherever books are sold. Garrett can be found on Instagram @camryngwrites and on Twitter @dancingofpens.