XO, Kitty screenwriter Alanna Bennett draws on her experience as an entertainment journalist in her pop culture–infused debut YA novel, The Education of Kia Greer. As one of four daughters born to a Black actor and his white manager wife, 17-year-old Kia is no stranger to the spotlight. For 11 seasons, Kia’s older sisters have ruled the set of their family’s reality TV show Growin’ Up Greer with their on-camera tantrums and messy breakups. But when a scandal brings the press to the family’s door, wallflower Kia volunteers to distract the paparazzi by fake-dating teen pop star Cass. The plan goes off without a hitch—until Kia and Cass fall in love for real. In a conversation with PW, Bennett spoke about society’s relationship with fame and the differences between writing for print and TV.
How did you ensure that Kia was relatable, and that readers could empathize with her?
I’ve been an entertainment journalist for more than a decade, and I’ve done a lot of reporting on the celebrity world. I noticed that there’s a lot of dehumanization around the very real and human things that some of them go through. That’s not to be like, “Oh, poor celebrities,” because there’s obviously so much privilege that they’re afforded. But, for example, Kim Kardashian shared on a podcast that when she was pregnant with North West, she had to sneak into her doctor’s office on Thanksgiving for what she thought was going to be a D&C miscarriage treatment abortion. What does it look like when you have to worry about the paparazzi photographing one of the most vulnerable moments in your life and exposing it to the world? What does it look like when you’re going through a breakup or you’re going through a medical situation while there’s also a person stalking you with a camera?
With Kia, I made her relatable by amplifying the things that I’m sure are already there for celebrities that we just don’t see on-screen, like her everyday anxiety and depression and her relationship with her sisters. I wanted and needed Kia to feel grounded in humanity even though she’s in this “aspirational” environment.
How did you approach the novel’s focus on fame with issues surrounding colorism and prejudice?
I think that there is such a big difference in how young girls and women are asked to navigate this world, whether you’re white or Black or biracial. There are so many things that you have to deal with and so many unspoken biases that I really wanted to explore through Kia. People are going to take what she says and what she does a certain way, view it through a certain lens, because that’s the extra baggage that any Black girl is already carrying. But then there’s the added layer of it being splashed across headlines all over the world. We see it with Meghan Markle and Simone Biles. We see it with any famous young Black woman.
Being 17 and not having signed up for this, Kia has to navigate the fact that her sister is a lighter shade than her and is being perceived a different way in part because of that. What is it like to have a famous Black dad who can share experiences with you and impart wisdom, but also, he’s a man, so your experience is going to be different? And [what is it like] having a white mother who understands fame, but she doesn’t necessarily get all the nuances of how the world is seeing you, because you’re a Black girl and she’s a white woman? There’s automatically a gap in experience between a white parent and their Black child when it comes to how you’re walking through the world.
How did you tap into the mindset of contemporary teenagers to realistically portray them in The Education of Kia Greer?
Fame is much more accessible to a lot of teenagers now than when I was a teenager in 2006. Becoming famous can be a more active goal because you can decide to be a content creator and put in the work every day to put yourself out there. And even if you’re not famous, you’re seeing comment sections dissecting you and your more famous peers. Since Kia was born into a Hollywood family, it seems like she would be very far away from the average person’s experience of fame. But I think that she’s closer to the experience of a teenager these days than her kind of family ever has been because of the accessibility of fame.
I also think that a lot of people don’t understand what shifts when you become famous. They don’t understand that you’re sometimes going to feel like an animal in a cage at the zoo. People always yell at celebrities for complaining about the paparazzi following them. They’re like, “You signed up for this,” or “You invited us into your world, and now you don’t want us to criticize you?” But people don’t understand how intense it can be to wake up and check your comments and see that everybody has an opinion on your newest relationship, or your newest hairstyle, or if you got filler. People see the shiny parts, but I wanted to explore the human side of it.
What media or research did you draw from to depict this specific experience of fame and celebrity?
There’s this article that I wrote for Bustle that was aggregated from a profile of Taylor Swift, where she talked about how she was scared to change her clothes or get naked in her own home because she knew there were people aiming long-lens cameras through her windows, trying to get pictures of her. Privacy laws are complicated in certain states, so they could easily publish those photos. She also said she travels with army-grade QuikClot bandages, because she has enough stalkers that it’s a very real threat that somebody could shoot her or stab her in public à la John Lennon.
I did a lot of research into child stars, like Jennette McCurdy and the Jenner sisters, and their experiences with this feeling of claustrophobia, and how the power they have with their money and fame also comes with limited options. What might it look like if you decide to walk away from it all?
Has there been anything about the publishing process that’s surprised or challenged you?
I feel like there’s more day-to-day agency in the creative process in publishing than in Hollywood. The fact that I even own certain rights to my work and its adaptations is very different from Hollywood, so that’s been really refreshing.
I also really enjoyed being able to dive deep into a character’s psyche and their inner thoughts, because that’s so different than what I can do on screen. In a screenplay, everything is what you see, what you hear, the movements of a character and what they’re saying out loud, with very limited access to internal monologue or voiceover. But with The Education of Kia Greer, I got to live in Kia’s head and walk through the world with her. That was really rewarding. I’m addicted to that feeling now, and I’m excited to keep going.
The Education of Kia Greer by Alanna Bennett. Knopf, $19.99 May 13 ISBN 978-0-593-80610-4
