"I'm a cool mom" with Melissa de la Cruz

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Adam Sockel:

You are listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast where each week, I'll interview an author about a thing they love, and how it inspires their work.

I'm your host, Adam Sockel, and today's guest is Melissa de la Cruz, the New York Times Bestselling young adult author of multiple series, including the The Au Pairs, the Blue Bloods, and The Beauchamp Family. She also wrote the original novels for Disney's Descendants franchise. She has done just so, so many incredible things.

She has a new book out called The Headmaster’s List, which is described as “One of us is lying meets Riverdale.” It is definitely a very, very thrilling edge of your seat thriller.

There is a fatal car crash that goes on, and then all these teens kind of come together to uncover the truth about what really happened. It's a really, really incredible, delightful book. I think you're going to love it.

Our conversation today is all about something she's super passionate about, and that is being a mom, but not just being a mom, but being a mom to young and now, growing slightly older students. It's really, really interesting. She talks about basically being what you might think of as like a room mom as her kids were growing up and all these different things.

But what's really interesting about this conversation is we get into how her children's friends have sort of become her alpha and beta readers of her books because they are the exact people who she would want to read her books. So, just really, really fascinating.

Melissa has had an incredible career, not just as an author, but she is the founder of several very popular book festivals, which we talk about, and she's also had a long, long career in Hollywood that we get into, just a whole bunch of really interesting things that we jump all around in, and I think you're going to really enjoy it.

Before get to that conversation, I want to give you a quick book recommendation. I finished The Night Ship by Jess Kidd. I really, really enjoyed Jess Kidd's previous book, Things in Jars, which is why I picked up the Night Ship.

And this book is two different timelines, and it's based on a real-life event, this epic historical shipwreck that occurred in the 1600s. I did not know that going in, and I found myself wondering throughout the first part of the book, like, “Wow, how did you come up with this incredible story?”

It's still phenomenal, but it makes sense that she found this very, very fascinating story of the shipwrecked Batavia. It is one of the kind of most famous, I guess, maritime disasters, and there's mutiny and there's all sorts of things that happen.

One of the timelines is basically following that ship on its doomed journey. And the other timeline is in 1989 when a lonely boy named Gil is living off the coast of Western Australia in this like seasonal fishing community with his grandfather. And he feels very, very secluded and he doesn't have any friends.

He struggles to fit in, and the story goes back and forth between these two timelines, and slowly but surely, they're connected and there seems to be some like hints of magic in here, and you wonder what's going on, how they're able to sort of connect.

It really, really grew on me the more and more I kept with it. So, I really think you'll enjoy that, especially if you're a fan of maritime books. So, that is The Night Ship by Jess Kidd.

If you want any book recommendations from me, you can always shoot me an email at [email protected]. Send me any ratings or reviews you've done of this podcast, and I'll give you some customized book recommendations.

Also, if you want to send me any of the things you are passionate about, you can send it to that same email address. I love reading those, and I give away a bookshop.org gift card every single month to one random person who has sent me their passions. So, feel free to do that, and you can always find me on TikTok and Instagram at Passions & Prologues.

Okay, that's enough housekeeping. I am so-so excited for you to listen to this conversation with Melissa de la Cruz, New York Times bestselling author of The Headmaster’s List on Passions & Prologues.

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Okay, Melissa, what is something you are super passionate about that we're going to be discussing today?

Melissa de la Cruz:

It's funny, when I found out I was going to be on Passions, the podcast, I thought, “Oh my God, what am I passionate about?” And when you're describing something that gets authors to light up, one thing that I really am passionate about that I tell writers to do is to really dig into your personal life, not just your professional life.

And for me, my personal life for a long time, was I was a room mom for my daughter's class. So, yeah, I even got an award. The end of elementary school, you get like a little award, and I think that that was part of it.

She's not an elementary school anymore, but for whatever, seven years from kindergarten to sixth grade, I was just really a passionate mom, and I was a full-time mom and a full-time writer in such a way that I was, to me, my identity when I was with my family. And this is still something that nobody in my family is at all impressed by anything that I do outside of it.

I mean, my career is just so outside of who I am when I'm at home, it's almost like, “Oh yeah, mom has to go on tour. That's weird, mom's always just here for us.”

Adam Sockel:

I love this so much. So, I am the youngest of four siblings and one of my two sisters has four kids and my brother has three kids. And my sister, they're both incredible parents, but my sister has four kids. And I feel like you two are kindred spirits because this is very much like she's a full-time mom, but she also is a lawyer, and she does like these incredible TikToks about the law where she's like got this big following.

But she like is such a mom of these kids and she's so involved in everything. So, I want to know, how did you kind of get into this like becoming sort of, like you said, like the classroom mom? How does one get into that?

Melissa de la Cruz:

You know, it's weird because I still remember, and I was a writer for 10 years before I had … we have one daughter, before I had a kid. And so, my entire life before that was just all about my career and all about writing. I worked in magazines, I was journalists, and then I was just writing all the time.

Because we didn't have kids, I would write until like 2 or 5:00 AM, I was a total night owl. I would have my life where I did whatever I wanted. And then at night is when I wrote. So, that was how I worked. And having a kid just threw everything off. I could not write at night, I did not have the time to do that.

And so, I had to completely rewire my brain. And I didn't think that I would like being a mom at all because I was kind of the person who didn't like kids at all. I was a terrible babysitter and I thought kids were mostly really annoying.

And yeah, it surprised me because when my baby was one, one of my best friends who's a TV showrunner and she didn't have kids at the time. She said, “How do you like being a mom?” And I said, “God, I hate it, it's so exhausting and I'm just so not the person for this, all the carrying the baby.”

My husband always carried the baby because I could not carry the baby. I wasn't strong enough, I would be tired. Literally, I was like not physically capable of the baby stuff. And then I just got … oh, I think what happened was, I was always working when she was in preschool and we had a nanny, and I had the nanny give out the birthday invites for her third birthday.

Because I didn't know any of the moms, but every time we got invited to a birthday party, we would show up just because you had to. And I just thought people would do that for me even if they didn't know me, then they got an invite from the nanny that they’d show up. Because I showed up to everybody else's birthday and I didn't know them, but I was a number and here's my three-year-old.

And we had this party, and literally only one mom showed up; one out of like the preschool class of 20, whose other birthday parties we'd been to. And I was just so floored. I told my sister, “Why didn't anybody come to Maddie's birthday?” And she said, “You have to befriend the moms. They're not going to come if they don't know you.”

And I said, “What? Really? Like I went to everybody's party, I didn't know.” So, she said, “No, you got to put in the time. If you want Maddie to have friends, if you want her to have a life, you got to put into time and get to know these people.” And I said, “Oh my God.”

But when she told me that, I said, okay, I'm going all in. So, starting kindergarten, I was like the most social person at the school. I literally just had a whole completely different personality and just decided that my daughter was going to be part of it.

We were never going to have that debacle again of nobody coming to our party because nobody knew me. So, it was six years of being completely into it. I would do all my mom work. So, yeah.

Adam Sockel:

I love the idea of you saying like how exhausting it was like being a mom when your daughter was really young, but then like I have to imagine doing all of the room mom stuff. Like I see my sister again, like how involved she is with their schools, and that must have been like an entire … because there's so much of like a hierarchy in politics when it comes to like school, classes and everything. That had to be exhausting too, I imagine. Right?

Melissa de la Cruz:

It was funny because it is all these like little politics and little dramas, and I did not find it exhausting. I found it kind of invigorating. I was like, “Oh yes, I'll be right in there with the gossip” and with the elbows out and figuring out who we liked and who we didn't.

When I moved to LA 20 years ago, I thought about writing for Hollywood just because I was lonely. Because when you write books, when you're an author, it's a very solitary career, but when you write for TV, it's very collaborative and you get to see a lot of people.

But I didn't really like to have that kind of group work in my work. So, being a room mom and being part of the school, I was able to have that kind of social aspect of life without it affecting my career. So, I think that's why I was really into it.

Adam Sockel:

So, did it feel like … because I mean, anyone who knows your work, like you write for all ages, but like some of your most popular, like most beloved stories are for younger readers.

And so, did you feel like … was there any connection between all of the interaction you were having with these young kids and the parents and everything, and how you're writing about these different relationships and families and things in your stories? Or was it wholly separate for you?

Melissa de la Cruz:

No, not separate at all. And when I started the Descendants books, my daughter was in first grade and when they came out, the first book came out, she was in second grade. And literally, all the class and my kid, they were all in the Disney commercials, all the kids saying we're so excited for the book, my kid and her friends.

And seeing how excited they were for that project, I did think, oh, I think this is going to be okay. I think we have a hit here.

Adam Sockel:

Actually, I want to ask a little bit about that because you were just talking about how like your family like you said, you have this whole separate life where like you’re a mom, but like to everyone who's listening to this or like people who will come to your book tour or anyone that'll go to like YALLFest and YALLWEST, which you've also co-created …

Like these are people who are like, “Oh my gosh, that's Melissa de la Cruz, I want to meet her, I want to interact with her.” But for your family, it's like, “Oh, yeah, mom writes books. That's fun.” But like you said, like when it's the Descendants, I'm just thinking about like if my niece knew this, I'm going to score so many brownie points by telling her that we're talking by the way.

But like how did it feel? Like you said you could tell you had a hit on your hand, but like do you do that with some of your other books? Like do you ask like the kids like, “Hey, what are your thoughts on this? Like do you think this is going to like resonate” or was that sort of just like a moment in time because it was the Descendants, which was such like a phenomenon?

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yeah, no, a couple of Maddie's friends are my beta readers. And they sign NDAs and they give me their notes. So, shout out to Whitney (hey Whitney). I've known Whitney since she was in kindergarten, and she reads my book. She's a big reader.

So, my daughter, I think because I'm her mom. So, I want to explain a little bit about how the work goes in our house.

So, in our house, we completely talk about the work as creative things. So, we break down plots, we talk about character, we talk about plot problems all the time. So, we talk about it as the work, but we never talk about it as like the career.

Like “Oh my God, that I've got to do this. Or, oh, you guys have to be nice to me, I'm filming a commercial.” That whole part of the career is not at all important in our house. But actually, making the books and talking about what makes a good book and what makes a good story is something that we always talk about at dinner table.

So, I always joke that my kid is going to be a studio head because all she does is say “Yes, no, that sucks. That's good. Do that mom.” She gives very good notes.

Adam Sockel:

I imagine for someone who has like had level of success you have and you do so much — like the writing and the film and TV stuff and things for Hallmark and all these different things, like I imagine that is probably really helpful just to have like a clear and concise, I guess, as you said, it's your daughter.

She's like sometimes teenagers don't really care if they hurt your feelings, so it'll just being like, “No, this part's bad. You got to get rid of this. Like I have to … that would be pretty helpful.”

Melissa de la Cruz:

Oh yeah, 100%, and especially with them being in the age group right now — Maddie and her friends being the age group that I write for, it's really interesting to kind of see ideas.

So, there's a bunch of things that are inspired in the books from seeing how the kids relate to. But first and foremost, I write for myself, but definitely and never after, we were going through a period where with bullying and the school told us there's no such thing as bullying.

And I said, okay, you can just take away the word, because they said, “We don't call it bullying.” I'm like, “Alright, but there's still bullying.”

Adam Sockel:

Problem solved, you don't use the word, congratulations. Yeah.

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yeah, exactly.

Adam Sockel:

So, for example, for your newest book, The Headmaster's List, like you mentioned kind of going through plot problems and like story points with your daughter and her friends — because you said you're write for yourself first, which I love.

Do you run by like the story with her before you start? Like when you have an inkling of idea, or I guess like at what point are you like, “Hey, I want some younger eyes on this?”

Melissa de la Cruz:

Very late, not at all in the beginning. I think my beta readers get the book when it's actually I think going into copy edit. When you go into copy edit, it's actually like the book has to be kind of locked. So, I would say maybe the draft before copy edit before production, I send them out.

And sometimes, I forget. I was like, “Oh, I forgot I have beta readers, I got to send them the other books.” So, I only ask for help when I can't solve it myself or I'm kind of choosing between two things.

But I don't really work with people in the idea stage, those are all my ideas. Those are how I think. I always say I'm kind of like a dictator, and I think as an author, you have to be really confident in your story and your work.

Adam Sockel:

Before we dive into your new book, I want to ask really quickly about … because you’re heavily involved in YALLFest and YALLWEST for people that don't know, and the book kind of like conference space. Like those are two of just the biggest, most like wonderful examples of people coming together to celebrate books.

When you got involved with those two incredible organizations, was there any connection between like being like a room mom type of a situation and like being so … because I imagine like that has to be a little bit like hurting cats too, like helping run these massive things.

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yeah, and I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Margaret Stohl and I who run both festivals, we're both room moms, and we both come from backgrounds where we like to organize things and we like to throw … she used to run the Children's Hospital gala. That was her big charity.

And I think we took our talents outside of writing into the festival. I think we're both kind of those joiners, those workers, and we like getting people together. And it was kind of just fortuitous that we met Johnson Sanchez at Blue Bicycle Books who asked Margie once …

So, there used to be in Charleston, a book festival called the Capital Book Fest that was funded by the by the National Endowment of the Arts. And when they cut a lot of the funding, the Capital Book Fest was one of the things that was cut.

And it was so sad that that was cut because it was a beautiful book festival in Charleston. So, Jonathan asked Margie, “Would you help? I want to do another book festival or something to replace the Capital Book Fest.” She said, “Sure, but can it be for YA because that's what I write?”

And so, Margie asked me to get involved with that, and we just complement each other a lot. I think this is our 13th year in Charleston and I think our 10th in Los Angeles. So, yeah, somebody said we have the most functional marriage of anybody they know.

Adam Sockel:

And on top of everything like with directing, you mentioned, and it's something I've heard authors say hundreds of times about how writing is such a solitary thing. It's like I always think of it as like this very lonely process that brings people together eventually.

And like your books have been read by millions of people, but you don't see them reading them. You write the book, you put that out in the world. And like I have to imagine … like you're literally just before we started recording talking about how you're just getting on book tour and you're going to get to meet all these people during that.

But like I have to imagine seeing thousands of people come together to celebrate books, especially young adult books. Like that has to be extremely satisfying for you. You strike me as a person who kind of feeds off that energy, or is it exhausting for you to partake in all this process of the book world?

Melissa de la Cruz:

It's really exciting and it is really satisfying, especially when we open YALLFest or YALLWEST in the big auditorium with a thousand people and everybody's screaming. And just seeing all the readers being so excited, it's such an uplift and all the kids that we bring in, because one of the things that we do is bring in kids from Title I schools and they're able to pick a book and buy a book through our funding.

And most of these kids have never owned a book before, so that's really, really satisfying. But at the end of the day, we are just dead. We are just so … where's that wheelbarrow? We're just going to collapse because yeah, that energy is invigorating and then it just turns into exhaustion.

Adam Sockel:

That's one thing I … like the pandemic, I've deeply missed. I used to go to BookCon every year and get to like see all these authors that I've like interviewed and become friends with, but it's literally like watching rock stars in like the seventies. It's so cool to like trying to go like say hi to Victoria Schwab and like I can't get to her because there's 90 people around her that are like wearing chadors and trying to say hi.

But I have to imagine like you said, by the end of the day, it's just like where is a bed and a pillow for eight hours.

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yeah, no.

Adam Sockel:

So, can you give my listeners a little bit of an introduction to The Headmaster’s List, which is your newest book that you are just getting ready to go share with the world?

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yes. So, The Headmasters List was actually inspired a little bit about my experience as a mom in private school. And the original idea for the book was I was going to write about the parents. And when I was writing the proposal, I kind of realized, “Oh wait, I write for the kids, why is the camera on the moms?”

I think I actually had to shift it and write about the kids. So, it's fiction. But at our school, the honor roll is called The Headmaster's List. And then also at the yearly gala where we fundraise for school, there's a group of donors called the Headmaster’s Circle, which we always joked that, “Oh, the kids from the Headmaster’s Circle are also on the Headmaster’s List.”

That's not the case at our school. But then I thought, what if it was? What if it was the case at a school? What if beyond the headmaster’s list was because your parent was a big donor and all kind of the corruption behind that kind of with the varsity blues idea, and also just seeing just how competitive it is now for college.

It's just kind of whacked out how crazy it's become. People are talking about getting their kids ready for college in sixth grade, and my daughter's in 10th grade and everybody said, “You should start, you should start.” So, we're “starting,” but part of me is also just wants her to have fun and just kind of don't worry about your future so much.

I feel even though I worked really hard in high school, and I always tell her that was the hardest I've ever worked, was to try to get into an Ivy League school. And I still stand by that, that was probably the hardest time of my life, was working that hard and feeling like I had to sacrifice so much because I wanted this kind of academic success.

Not being allowed to go to parties, not being able to be social. And I've been kind of making up for it for the rest of my life. My husband says, “Can we stop partying?” That was a long time ago. You're making up for something that you've made up for a long time ago.

So, The Headmaster’s List is about four kids and three of them are on the headmaster's list. And there's a big party at the end of the year, and then there's a very sad fatal car crash.

So, Spencer, who's kind of this perfect scholarship kid — there's a lot of me in Spencer, a lot of the things that she says about being the brown girl who's … I’ve definitely felt that when I went to my private school because I was on scholarship and because we have this kid and we're so proud of her.

And really, it's kind of this perfect kind of academic kid. And then her boyfriend, Ethan, who's kind of this golden boy, soccer star, rich kid from LA, and he was driving. And then there's Tabby who's non-binary, whose parents were big donors, and she's on the headmaster's list too.

And then the boy who dies is Chris, whom everybody loved, but who had secrets of his own. So, kind of putting these characters out in the world and having them — Spencer thinks that something else happened that night, so she's going to try to figure out what happened because she has a feeling that it wasn't quite what everybody said.

Like Ethan, because Ethan's kind of taken the rap for it. And she was just like why? So, she's trying to figure out whether it was something deliberate or something malicious.

Adam Sockel:

I'm so curious when you … a lot of the stuff you've written, like you said, it can lean into some like fantasy or stuff that maybe not is like directly connected to a like very similar world to the one we actually live in. This is a story that is very much like could happen.

Like you mentioned like you have the headmaster’s list where the school that you're at, like when you write something like this, I'm just imagining like your daughter and your beta readers being like, “This is kind of close to home.”

Like did this feel closer to real life than some other books that you've written? Or are you able to just say like, “This is just a story I'm writing, this has nothing to do with anything else going on in the world?”

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yeah, I mean, it was just the seed of that idea, but then it's really not my daughter's school at all and not at all based on anybody that we know. So, it is very much fiction. In a way, it was probably based on other schools because I was probably feeling a lot more the ability to say fictionalize that part because our school, we are still there and it's a little too close to our real life, and you definitely want to have a little bit of distance with your writing fiction.

So, yeah, no, it's very, very fictional, and one of the things that for me make it definitely … oh, it's definitely not real life at all, is the two kind of teen podcasters. So, they have kind of a serial killer, a murder gossip podcast based in LA.

And at first, I had written them as adults because I know a lot of a lot of my friends have podcasts and I was kind of thinking that's who they were. But then my editor said, “Does it make sense that these adults would be so obsessed with high school life and high school?” Then she was like “Maybe they should be high school kids.”

And I said, “Oh my god, yes, of course, they should be high school kids.” So, we don't have a teen podcast.

Adam Sockel:

At least that you know of.

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Sockel:

Oh man, and I love that you're able to tie that part in and I also love like the description of the book. People say like, for fans of like the Only Murders in the Building type of situation. Because I do think having that connection of like the crime podcast, those have become so prevalent in our life now.

Like it seems like anytime anything happens that … so like having that in there, it also, I imagine for you, is a fun like storytelling mechanism because you can kind of step away from the story as like looking at it from a different angle.

Was that intentional for you to be like, “I want to be able to tell this in multiple avenues?” Or was it just kind of putting that in because it is something that is so prevalent in our society now?

Melissa de la Cruz:

Yeah, both. I mean, definitely being able to tell the story from a fun kind of different way and having people kind of comment. I do think like in our world of social media, there's a story, and then there's the comments, there's the recaps, there's people talking about it, that's kind of how we absorb media now.

Even with TV shows, like I'll watch a TV show and then I'll be like, “Oh, I can't wait to read the recap.” It's kind of a funny way that we all live now where there's the main story but then there's also the stories that people telling it. So, it's kind of fascinating.

Adam Sockel:

I'm even worse than that. I will sometimes not even watch a show or a movie because I’m just like, I'll just never get to it, and I'll just go on like Vice or The Ringer or something and I'll just like read the review and reactions to it and be like … I'll have no concept of what they're talking about. But like, “I want to know what they thought about this particular movie.”

So, I'm even worse than you. I'll just sometimes read the review. I won't even be like I wonder … I'll just read that part. I'm even worse.

Melissa de la Cruz:

Right. I mean, yeah, no, definitely, definitely.

Adam Sockel:

So, I always, I always end every conversation by asking for a recommendation from the author. It could be a book recommendation, it could be a show, it could be anything you want to recommend.

I've had some people recommend just like go for a walk. Like what is something that you want to recommend to people? Again, it could be a book, anything you want it to be, just like one recommendation that you want to leave my listeners with?

Melissa de la Cruz:

Oh, absolutely. So, I think my other passion is to get everybody to read Warren Peace. So, Warren Peace is my favorite, favorite book of all time. I read it when I was 23-years-old and deeply depressed. And I remember reading that book over a course of six months actually lifted me out of my depression.

And it was just such a great … it's a really long book, so I think people are like, “I'm not going to read that door stopper. Oh my God, it's Warren Peace, it's like so old.” And I always say, you can skip all the war parts, all the stuff about the military stuff. I was kinda like, “Eh …” but it's about a family and it's about love.

It's about love between a family, love between siblings. Like I'd never read a novel that was about a brother and a sister and that relationship, and how wonderful that is. I have a little brother … and it’s so wise, about marriage, about love, about family, and then there's all these fabulous kind of Russian balls and parties.

They're like in the slay in Russia on the snow and they’re happy. It's a book about happiness and I think that's what I really love about it. Like it's a book about happiness, and I would say yeah, you have to be a little older to read it because you've got to have the time and also the mentality. So, I think that everybody in their twenties should read Warren Peace.

Adam Sockel:

I will say as a person who has read — I have also read Warren Peace. I'm a big Russian literature fan. And I will say you might be the first person to ever describe any famous Russian literature book as book about happiness. Yeah, exactly.

It's like no one ever said that about Crime and Punishment. Like it’s never going to happen. Oh, that's a wonderful recommendation.

This was so much fun. Melissa, thank you for joining me today.

Melissa de la Cruz:

Thank you so much. Thank you, it was wonderful.

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Adam Sockel:

Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen podcast and was created by Adam Sockel, and was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen podcast, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.