Like so many other ex-Jerseyans, Beth Ann Bauman remains a Jersey girl at heart. But the Manhattan-based author of the young-adult novel Jersey Angel (Wendy Lamb Books), published in May, does not embrace all things Jersey.
MTV’s Jersey Shore, for example.
“I was a little bit worried that people would think that’s what my book would be like,” she says. That’s because Jersey Angel is set in an unnamed Shore town and aimed at teenagers. “But it’s not like that at all. I know because I watched some early episodes of the show, and it’s really mean-spirited. You can feel the producers snickering behind the scenes.”
Bauman, who grew up in Metuchen in the 1970s—her father was a Metuchen police officer, her mother a secretary—is no snickerer. In Rosie and Skate (Wendy Lamb Books), her first book for young-adult readers, published in 2009 and also set at the Shore, sister protagonists hopefully and inexpertly mine tough emotional territory, like their father’s alcoholism. The eponymous Angel in Jersey Angel is a promiscuous teen trying to avoid committing to a serious relationship the summer before her senior year, but she is also nuanced and invested with the author’s empathy.
Neither book is autobiographical, Bauman says. “I’m always in every character as I’m writing, but the characters are definitely not based on me.”
That may be because her own adolescence—she attended Metuchen High School and spent summers in Seaside Park—was relatively scar-free. “I was quiet, but I was a cheerleader,” she says. “A lot of my friends were the cool kids. But some of them weren’t.”
Bauman’s first book, Beautiful Girls, a collection of short stories about young women finding their way in the world, came out in 2003 and earned high praise. Bauman doesn’t know whether its handful of teen characters stuck with readers most, but they left a lasting impression on her, and Angel is based on a character from one of the stories.
“I just kind of fell into writing young-adult novels after writing from a teen-age perspective in Beautiful Girls,” says Bauman, herself single and childless.
“It’s mostly just my own teen memory I’m putting to use,” she adds. “I’m sort of like a middle-aged teenager.”