A Goodreads user asked Meredith Russo:

Meredith! I had the honor of reading your debut novel "If I was your Girl", and I want to praise you for your bravery in shining a light on the ones who are scared to come forth. Being transgender, it was so heart-warming reading your book and feeling safe and at home in every single word. My question to you: How did it feel being so emotionally invested in this book? What have you gained from this experience?

Meredith Russo Thank you so much for your praise, and to everyone whose questions I haven't answered, I apologize! I have a short attention span and executive function problems, I promise I haven't been ignoring you, there was just a period where I wasn't getting questions so I stopped paying attention. But, yes, so:

It was an intense feeling, definitely, and I think in a strange way it was part of my journey coping with the reality that I'm bipolar (I was diagnosed while the book was in production). One of the symptoms of mania is frequent oversharing, and my whole life I've had a bad habit of immediately sharing my most intimate life details with everyone I meet. It should go without saying that not everyone can be trusted with your traumas and secrets, and this frequently got me into trouble! But writing about things that were so intimate to me in a fictional context taught me a new coping mechanism for channeling that idea to share everything about myself.

(This doesn't mean that any specific thing in my work is autobiographical though!)

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