Hayley Krischer | Writers' Voices

Award-winning journalist and author, Hayley Krischer, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss her third and newest YA novel, You Belong To Me. Her book takes us into the dark world of the wellness and beauty industry and reveals how their influence can have detrimental effects, specifically on young girls. She explains, “You Belong To Me is about a high school girl named Frances Bean and… she and all of her friends are these goth kids who have their own look… they’re not necessarily trying to make themselves fit into a traditional beauty… and so they see Frances Bean as this outsider and she’s a teacher’s daughter, so she goes to this very elitist school and she feels like an outsider with her friends… and so then when she starts getting a crush on this wellness guru’s daughter… and she sees all of the beautiful images online of the wellness company… [it’s] called DEEP and she sees… all the girls who work there wear white, they all have beautiful skin… she’s like, oh that’s what I want… She starts using all of the DEEP products and her skin starts to change… but then all of a sudden they start using a lot of cult-like tactics… and they love bomb her with tons of compliments. A few weeks later they start to really tear her down… they control her wardrobe, they tell her she’s only allowed to wear white, and soon enough, someone dies and there’s a lot of older men hanging around and there’s a lot of deception and manipulation and Bean starts to realize, ‘Wait a second, am I in a cult?'”

For Krischer, telling other people’s stories has always been a fascination of hers. She explains why writing about the teenage demographic is of particular interest to her. “I sort of like to get into the teenage brain… I mean, I have a 16 year old daughter, but I started writing about teenage girls long before I had her and I think just my intense friendships with women and how important my female friendships have always been to me probably inspired me to start writing about going deeper into these relationships… I’m always looking at, sort of, the psychology of those friendships…”