“Grief flares up when you don’t expect it, and sometimes survivor’s guilt feels more like survivor’s fury, or worse, survivor’s shame. You hope your bomb doesn’t explode in those moments. You just keep breathing. You just keep moving. We must proceed.”
You might know Tucker Shaw as the author of any number of young adult novels like Flavor of the Week, Oh Yeah, Audrey!, or When You Call My Name, but he also has another career writing about something not quite similar to what most young readers might be interested in: food. In addition to writing books, he’s also worked as an editor for an impressive list of magazines, most recently as an editorial director for Cook’s Country and America’s Test Kitchen. “I love food. I love the physical and emotional pleasures it offers,” he told me. “I also love its boundlessness. The universe of food and cooking is endlessly colorful and surprising (and sometimes frustrating) — there is always more to learn. This sense of infinity inspires me.”
Growing up mainly in Maine and Colorado, Shaw sensed an early intuitional pull towards language, words, and writing. “I think my impulse to write came first from the sounds of words and conversation, which I found mesmerizing and mysterious as a very young child,” he said. “Later, in school, I loved the task of creating sentences. It felt like a game to me. Still does.” That game led him into the world of journalism, where he said he found a home for that urge to create for the first time. “It all goes back to my fascination with language,” said Shaw. “Communication — oral, written, visual, whatever — is the most essential mechanism for human connection, and I’ve always had a desire to connect. Working as a journalist and magazine contributor allowed me to explore that idea.” Naturally, dipping his toes into the murky waters of writing books was the next step.
For the most part, Shaw spent the better part of the last two decades authoring books for teens and young adults, with the theme of food continuing to pop up occasionally. Some 20 years ago, in fact, he published a food photography book for adults titled Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth, which was described as a personal homage to food and chronicled everything the author ate for 365 days. Yet Shaw always found himself gravitating back towards writing books for youngsters. “Young adulthood, teenager-hood, adolescence — these are such complicated and interesting times of life, I think,” he told me. “The puzzle of understanding and appreciating who you are, especially in a world that often wants you to be something different, is exciting. Spoiler alert: the puzzle is never completed.”
But so much has changed culturally in the lives of teens and young adults since Shaw first started publishing YA novels in the early 2000s. When I asked Shaw what he makes of the shift between decades as a young adult author with novels published anywhere from 2002 to 2025, he remarked that social media really was the gamechanger in terms of the young adult publishing world, in that it changed everything. “Many of the most successful authors today dedicate a lot of creative energy to building a following. It’s a smart thing to do, because fandom increasingly rules the bestseller lists,” he said. But in an age of books written by robot software, the author holds true to what all authors know. “What hasn’t changed is the most basic thing: good writing is good writing.”
Despite already having been the author of six YA novels, Shaw himself rose to prominence on the app formerly known as Twitter in 2018, when he composed a thread inspired by a conversation he heard on a New York City subway train between two young gay men holding hands. What followed were frank and necessary recollections from what it was like to come of age as a young gay man in the face of the AIDS crisis. The popularity of the thread ultimately led to a new book deal with Henry Holt and Co. for Shaw to write a new young adult novel set in the age of AIDS. The end result, published in 2022, was When You Call My Name, one of the most heartachingly beautiful novels in any genre I’ve ever read.
Seven years since he wrote that Twitter thread, I asked Shaw what he makes now of today’s queer youth who have access to legitimate HIV/AIDS prevention. It’s something that was arguably unimaginable to the gay men of his generation, yet the author maintains that access to proper information and treatment is profoundly uneven. “It favors white, cis-presenting people with money,” he said. “This has always been true, but is even more true today. And whatever access is available can all disappear in a heartbeat. The political climate makes things very, very tenuous right now. We all have to stay engaged, vigilant, and ready to fight, again.”
“Times get better and times get worse, but we are still and always will be here. There are so many meaningful, beautiful, and complex histories to excavate and celebrate. Our shared sense of pride is earned.”
Seeing young queer people thrive in our current age often comes with so much baggage and grief for the surviving Boomer and Gen X queer men, and when I asked the author how he copes with that, he drew upon the words of an unnamed contemporary of his. “They once said that many queer people in our generation walk around with unexploded bombs in our chests, planted in the 1980s and 1990s,” Shaw explained. “Grief flares up when you don’t expect it, and sometimes survivor’s guilt feels more like survivor’s fury, or worse, survivor’s shame. You hope your bomb doesn’t explode in those moments. You just keep breathing. You just keep moving. We must proceed.” In the immortal words of Alanis Morissette, the only way out is through.
This year saw the publication of Shaw’s latest YA title, Right Beside You, which follows recent high school graduate Eddie as he abandons his small Colorado town to become a live-in caretaker for his eccentric and flamboyant elderly great aunt, Cookie, in New York City. The characters feel reminiscent of those in When You Call My Name yet also uniquely themselves, which prompted me to ask the author how the creative process differed between his last two novels. He described Right Beside You as equally personal in many ways, but less based in reality than When You Call My Name.
Indeed, the former title sees its protagonist separate from the isolation of the digital age and seamlessly time travel through different decades of New York, allowing for a deeper exploration of the answers that can be found when we look to the past. “To write Right Beside You, I spent less time in my memory, and more time in my imagination,” Shaw told me. “The main character Eddie is a lot like me temperamentally, but his experiences are more fantastical than my own. It was a fun project.” As for what the author might be cooking up next (no pun intended)? “I’m not sure yet! Lots of ideas, but we will see,” he said. “I just hope I’m lucky enough to get the chance.”
Both Right Beside You and When You Call My Name grapple with a similar central theme, immersing younger queer readers in the queer experiences of decades past. With When You Call My Name, Shaw’s intention was to demonstrate to readers of any sexual identity just how strong the queer community can be when you test us, how easily we can come together and fight. “We have moved mountains, and we can do it again,” he said. The author hopes to illuminate a related idea with Right Beside You. “Times get better and times get worse, but we are still and always will be here. There are so many meaningful, beautiful, and complex histories to excavate and celebrate. Our shared sense of pride is earned.”
This interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity. Follow Tucker Shaw on Instagram and get his latest novel Right Beside You from your local indie bookstore or library.
Jeffrey Reads 