Mike Jung: Hello. My name is Mike Jung. The Boys in the Back Row is very autobiographical. I was best friends with a guy named Chris Heliopolis back in high school and a lot of the things that happened between my main character, Matt, and his best friend, Eric, are drawn directly from my friendship with Chris. So we were both big concert fans and we were both in the marching band. I actually was the first male flute player in the history of my high school. And I did leave the flute, and for marching band, the piccolo section one year, so that I could hang out more with Chris in the drum section, so I played bass drum. So Matt and Eric's adventures, they're obviously aged-down because they're not in high school. It's a middle-grade novel, but they aren't the thinly veiled versions of me and Chris. They are their own people, their own characters, but this is probably the most directly autobiographically inspired book that I've written yet.

The main character, Matt, who's the closest analog to me is a better person, I think, than I was back then, or maybe he struggles with less in the ways that I struggled during that time of my life because even in sixth and seventh and eighth grade, because these boys are middle school age, I was having a very, very hard time in school and in life and that continued on through high school.

One of the differences in terms of the friendship that I had with Chris and the friendship that Matt and Eric have is that they are actually much more communicative and expressive and vulnerable than I was able to be at the time. Because Chris was a friend that I valued enormously, and I knew that he felt the same, but I was also not someone who felt very safe saying things that were emotional and vulnerable to people at that time. So I was dealing with a lot of bullying and things, and I wish I could say that I was one of those kids who really just stood up to it every time and fought back as much as I could, but I spent most of that time just feeling afraid.

I really wanted the parents to not be these typical children's literature parents that are either absent or neglectful or there's some way in which they are uninvolved. I wanted them to be involved because that was an important part of what kind of person Matt would be. In fact, that kind of ability to engage emotionally, that ability to express truth, that ability to really be openly and visibly and obviously connected to his best friend, that would have to come from someone and part of that would be his family life. He was raised by his parents to be that way.

I would really like readers to question the standards of masculinity that we have in this country right now, to look at this idea that men are supposed to be unyieldingly strong and unemotional because emotion is equated with weakness somehow. At its core, the book is about love, loving your family, loving yourself, and loving friends. I want kids to instead embrace that idea, that being loving is strength, being loving is an essential part of what it means to be human.

Now, I would like to share a short reading from the Boys in the Back Row and I'm going to just share the first page:

Page one. Chapter One.

At the start of every school year, Mom and Dad try to get me all pumped up by saying things like "it's a whole new year" or "this is the year when everything changes," which always makes me think, uh, no, that was two years ago, but then sixth grade came lurching in like a one-legged zombie, and what do you know, everything actually did change.

Sixth grade would be the year I stopped being "the boy flute player" and became ... okay, I didn't stop being the boy flute player in air quotes, at least inside the band, but I did switch to playing bass drum for marching band season. Yes, that's me, Matthew Park, the first boy flute player in the history of Hilltop Summit K-8 School and the newest bass drum player in the Hilltop Summit K-8 School Marching Band. Matt, to my friends. Friend, I should say, since I only have one for real.