Two of author Scott Brown’s colleagues had an idea for a story, but no time to write it, so they offered him the project. He’s usually a television writer and producer.
The resulting young adult novel “XL” is about a 16-year-old named Will. At the beginning of the story, he’s short for his age at 4 feet, 11 inches tall.
Will laments his height while pining for his high school crush, Monica. From the book:
It was a massive love that was, absurdly, headquartered in my ridiculously tiny body.
Monica was many things. And one of them was tall. Almost a foot taller than I was. Almost a foot taller.
That's practically a species difference.
But there's an early plot twist. Will starts to grow abnormally fast, baffling his doctors. And that creates a whole new identity crisis.
Brown said the story appealed to him as a metaphor for an expectation imposed on teens — that we are all destined to grow into a specific person.
Scott Brown, author: I think we are constantly changing. And being accepting of change is important. And especially for young people. Because I feel like when you tell somebody there's a person you're meant to be — I feel, for a young person, especially an insecure young person, you immediately feel like you're falling short of that, or going wrong from it, or like you've already done something wrong by not more efficiently or immediately becoming that person you're supposed to be.
Karen Brown, NEPR: The core of the book is about teen relationships I can imagine happening in any kind of circumstances — love triangles and broken families. But in this case, you have a medical mystery. You have this kid who grows from under 5 [feet] to 7 feet in a very short period of time, and the doctors are mystified. How much scientific research did you have to do to get that part right? And how important was it for you to include this whole medical subplot accurately?
It was one of those things where you want it to be an element of the story that doesn't overwhelm everything. Certainly, you could make a medical mystery out of this, and it could be the whole story.
I wanted just enough of that to feel like this story could happen in our world, and these questions would be asked.
Because obviously, if somebody grew like this, there would be questions. I looked up typical disorders that involve rapid growth, and the kind of things that doctors would look at. But again, I wanted to keep it sort of contained. I try to keep it contained to the doctor's office scenes. And I tried to make it just, you know, another source of anxiety that pours into Will's larger anxieties about who he is.
This would make a really fun movie or TV series, especially since you're in that business. But how would you cast the main character, unless you used special effects, or found a teen actor who had an amazing growth spurt while you were filming?
We've talked about turning this into a show — and there is a plan to do that, and there's a script that I'm working on right now, actually.
Most of the middle part of the story involves him achieving a relatively average size, going from, you know, only slightly below average to slightly above average.
The hope is that's the kind of thing you can do, what Hollywood has done for years, which basically [is] cheat with camera angles and apple boxes. You can cast someone of average size and make them look smaller or make them look bigger depending on the scene.
But we're living in an age where, terrifyingly enough, you can put another person's face on another person's body. That's not very difficult now.
