So it’s kind of a sacred place to me and I loved giving Liv that same sanctuary. It’s the place where I had my first solo show of paintings, the place I had art flirtations, like Liv does, and the place where I started to find my voice as an artist. I definitely had Choate’s Art Center in mind as I wrote the art scenes. The only similarity between Wickham and Choate is the Art Center. Choate is a diverse, inspiring, and tolerant environment. I went to Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut.

How much of that experience inspired, or at least informed, the book? So all that comes to play in the school’s mythology and conspiracy.Īs a kid, you went to a boarding school. I wanted to tap into that suspicion we all have that the 1% would happily sacrifice us in order to serve themselves. I got excited about the metaphors a ghost story could bring to a teen novel.Īnd, finally, when I was working on the story, the Occupy movement was happening, and I was really struck by the great divide in our country between the 99% and the 1%. So, I started to think about how I might craft a ghost story involving a character like Liv. Secondly, I’ve been interested in ghosts and the supernatural world for a long time. Emotionally, she’s a lot like I was in high school and I wanted to explore that. First, I just had this character I wanted to write: Liv. The idea came from a bunch of things piling up in my brain at once. She has to connect to the one guy who can hear her, work to expose the conspiracy and, hopefully, reconnect in some way with her love. While lingering as a ghost, she learns she’s the victim of a conspiracy that has claimed many other lives. Just when she starts to get in the groove, and falls in love for the first time, she’s murdered. It’s about a young artist who lands at a prestigious boarding school.

Liv, Forever is a young adult novel, my first.

I always like to start at the beginning: What is Liv, Forever about and where did you get the idea for it? Though in talking to her about the book, it seems that some of what happened while she wrote the novel wasn’t so mysterious. But after she wrote it as a book, it got optioned by a film company…who hired Talkington to write the screenplay. Before she penned her first novel - the young adult ghost story Liv, Forever - she was going to tell her tale as a screenplay for a movie.

Liv forever amy talkington