She Wanted to Tell Native Women’s Stories. Now She Has a Bestseller and a Netflix Deal.

Angeline Boulley explains how she sold her first novel at 54 and was courted for a screen adaptation by the Obamas’ production company.

She Wanted to Tell Native Women’s Stories. Now She Has a Bestseller and a Netflix Deal.

Angeline Boulley’s life is every aspiring novelist’s wildest dream. As a teenager, she started mulling an idea for a story. In her 40s, while working full-time and raising three kids, she started writing. After ten years of drafts, she sold Firekeeper’s Daughter, an exquisitely crafted, compulsively readable almost 500-page young adult novel about a Native girl who helps investigate an undercover drug ring in her community while falling for a mystery guy.

Selling her first novel at 54 was a triumph. But it was only the beginning. The book was optioned for a screen adaptation by Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obamas’ production company with Netflix. Reese Witherspoon picked it for her book club. Firekeeper’s Daughter is now a #1 New York Times bestseller in the young adult category. Boulley worked in education in Native communities for her entire adult life, doing the often thankless labor that keeps communities going. Now, she’s written the Native women she knows and loves onto the main stage of American culture.

Firekeeper’s Daughter, a coming-of-age thriller, features one of the most outstanding girl protagonists I’ve read in decades of loving books about young people—Daunis Lorenza Firekeeper Fontaine is the daughter of a rich, white mother and a charismatic Native father from Boulley’s own Ojibwe tribe. Boulley has said she was inspired by Nancy Drew stories. 

But the book reminded me, in the best way possible, of two other giants of young adult literature—the seventh Harry Potter, and the first Twilight novel. Like them, Firekeeper’s Daughter is a grand epic, with unbearable suspense, huge loss, and forbidden romance. It returned me to my 14-year-old self—reading late into the night, breathing only to turn the page, briefly believing that my life is fiction and the book is real. I inhaled it, but the book is substantial and satisfying, a five-course meal of a young adult novel.

And it’s Angeline Boulley’s labor of love—the story she believed in and carried inside herself for most of her life. Here, she shares how she brought her vision into the world.

https://twitter.com/FineAngeline/status/1366924141002170373

Glamour: This has been a giant year for you. How does it feel to have so many wins?

Angeline Boulley: I always knew that there was something about the story, that it was bigger than me. I always had faith that it would be published, that if I kept at it, it was going to be on a bookshelf some day. But the response when it went out on submission...it’s still surreal that it struck a chord with so many people. So many people are so eager to learn more about tribal communities! I had no idea that it would be this big.

You took a non-traditional road—did you always want to be a writer? 

I always liked writing, but I think I got the message that writing wasn’t something you pursue seriously because you need to pay the bills. I always knew I would be working, I would be supporting a family, I would be making sure I could take care of myself in the world. And then interestingly, I would always write grants for whatever tribe I was working for. And I realized I was writing a story—I was writing a compelling narrative. I had to state the need, I had to do it in a short span of pages, and maybe the person had never ever been on a reservation, and I had to make sure that that grant reviewer would feel invested in this little story that I was telling. I used to feel bad that I didn’t have an MFA. But I realized that grant writing is a very valid form of storytelling—I developed my craft through that.

How did you write a novel as a full-time worker full-time and mom of three? 

It’s so odd, I was never a morning person, but in my mid-40s, I changed. I would get up early so I could write for a few hours before going to work. And then it was like—getting up at six in the morning wasn’t enough! It would be really hard to drag myself away and go to work. I would get up earlier and earlier. If I could be at my writing desk by five in the morning then I knew I could write for three hours. Because when I woke up, that’s when I felt the freshest. My day job was so intensive that when I came home I would be exhausted, and work will always take everything you have to give, it will take everything and more, and I just loved the story and wanted to give it my best part.

And it took ten years! How did you keep going?

When my daughter was a preteen I was thinking, “Okay, I really think I have something here. I think I've worked out all the bits and pieces in my head, I think I could put together a story.” I didn’t realize it would take ten years! She’s a senior in college now. I would know each time I finished a draft that something was missing. My dialogue wasn’t up to par, the tension in a scene could have been better, and life happens—I went through a divorce, I got three kids through high school. I had to set stuff aside for a little while, but then I’d be excited about diving in again and making another go at it, and that this next draft would be better than the other drafts because I would take care of this plot hole. Yes—ten years of that.

You’ve said that you wanted to write this book because there are too few stories in the mainstream about Native women. 

I just think that we have all these dynamic stories to tell, but what you see available in bookstores and in classrooms, the stories are all set in the past. And maybe they focus on one type of Native—like, my tribe didn’t have teepees! I felt it was important to know that we’re still here and to know what our young people are going through, and for them to feel seen, which I didn’t, growing up.

There’s some debate about whether Ojibwe people are matrilineal or patrilineal, but I’ve received some teachings that are very old that suggest that we were originally matrilineal—everything comes from the life-giver. And I think there’s something to that. Anytime I see a male who’s in a power position, it seems like there’s…a lot of cracks in that. Every tribal community that I’ve ever worked in, I see that when native women have their stuff together they’re just unstoppable.

What’s one piece of advice you wish you could have given your younger self?

I think it wasn’t until I was in my late 40s that I really started to see how important it was for me to have boundaries. I remember being so unhappy in certain situations and feeling like I had to go along with it and not make waves. And I remember thinking—if my daughter came to me and was this unhappy, I would tell her, “Love yourself, take care of yourself, if you’re in a situation that’s not good, get yourself out of the situation.” And then I remember thinking, “If I love myself as I love my daughter, and I wouldn’t hesitate to tell her this, why can’t I take my own advice?” And so what I would tell my younger self is to take care of myself and make no apologies for having boundaries.

Who taught you to set boundaries?

I just realized that givers need to set boundaries because takers never will. I was sometimes in situations at work where it felt like no matter what I gave it was never going to be enough, and for reasons that had nothing to do with me. I read this saying somewhere—“You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.”

So, the story you spent ten years on is going to be adapted for a Netflix series by the Obamas’ production company! Do you have any I-will-die-on-this-hill ideas for the adaptation?

What I have said from the very beginning is that there needs to be Native creative talent, not just in front of the camera, but behind the camera, and in the writers’ room, and at every stage, there just has to be. That’s a big reason why I wanted to collaborate with Higher Ground, because they completely got it. They already had names of people, they had done their work to let me know how serious they were about sharing my vision for this series. I’m not going to go into business with someone that would think, “Oh, are there Native screenwriters? I don’t know of any, is that possible?” I didn’t want to be in a position of doing Indians 101.

How do you treat yourself to celebrate success?

 I bought this ring when I bought the book deal, it’s a green tourmaline, it’s gorgeous. [Laughs and holds up a hand full of rings.] All of these different rings that I have, I’m like, “That’s for the book deal! That’s for the Netflix deal! That’s for Reese’s book club!” I like it because every time I wear the jewelry I’m like, “Yep! Yep! Yep!”

“Firekeeper’s Daughter” by Angeline Boulley (March 16)

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter. 

This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Jenny Singer