The Canadian pop music duo reflects on the unique experience of growing up and navigating queerness through writing in the graphic novel Tegan and Sara: Junior High.

Growing up as identical twins, Tegan and Sara learn more about their own identities while also trying to fit in at a new school. Inspired by their own adolescence but in a modern setting, Junior High is a middle-grade graphic novel illustrated by cartoonist Tillie Walden. Tegan and Sara discover their shared love of music and sisterhood through awkward moments and colourful illustrations.

Tegan Quin and Sara Quin are twin sisters, musicians and writers from Calgary. Their previously published memoir, High School, was adapted into a television series with Amazon. As musicians they have sold more than one million albums and also co-founded The Tegan and Sara Foundation which raises awareness and funds for LGBTQ+ women and girls.

Junior High is on the CBC Books summer reading list.

Tegan and Sara spoke with Shelagh Rogers about how their journeys inspired Junior High on The Next Chapter.

Tegan Quin: Sara and I decided that fictionalizing the story, modernizing it and moving our experience to the current times would be an interesting exploration of our creativity. It felt like the perfect place to start was the night before Grade 7 begins. The book starts with Tegan and Sara turning 13 and their mom talking about what they're going to wear to school on the first day of Grade 7. Our mom was very cool. She had us when she was 21, so she worked very hard to make us as cool as she possibly could for our arrival to junior high and we resisted her at absolutely every corner. We showed up on the first day of Grade 7, I wore a Mickey Mouse sweater and Sara wore an Epcot t-shirt and everyone else was wearing Club Monaco, Gap and had ponytails and makeup. We were complete losers, we got dumped by our boyfriends over the phone that afternoon and we went home and begged my mom to let us wear her Doc Martens, her Converse and her Gap sweaters.

The book opens with this sweet first step into middle school, which is figuring out who we are and how to hold on to as much of ourselves while also adapting to this sort of primal world of pre-teens.

Sara Quin: When we were writing the scripts, we were doing our best to write authentically and not do it in a way that would be embarrassing. We're obviously 42, not 13. In talking about Junior High, what I've come to realize is that in some ways part of our job is using social media and the Internet and reintroducing ourselves over and over again to the general public. That's not unlike what it probably feels like to be a teenager and deciding, "This is what I like, this is how I like to dress and these are the types of people I'm attracted to or drawn to in friendship."

When we were growing up we didn't have cell phones or social media. But I think because Tegan and I have to adapt to these new changes in communication because of our job, I know exactly what it feels like to awkwardly join TikTok and navigate the peer pressure around becoming somebody who thrives with these technologies, or somebody who resists them and feels like an outsider. I think it came very naturally for us to write about that awkward navigation because we're actually doing it in our adult lives.

I remember that as it was just so difficult. I love the chapter on bras, it really brought it home. Everything's a first — first party, first love, first crush.

SQ: Not that we've broken crazy new ground here with our storytelling, but I think a lot of girls have the experience of wanting to get their period or wanting to get their first bras. Those are pretty normalized milestones in being a certain type of girl. Tegan and I didn't want any of those things to happen. Our adolescence was pretty much spent wishing that we would be exempt. I remember thinking maybe I won't get my period, that there'll be something biologically askew and I'll be one of the lucky ones. I remember processing that with myself. I didn't know why I didn't want that but I knew that that wasn't what I wanted. So we wanted to try to capture a slightly different version of these milestones that happen in kids' lives. Even the party is based on a real-life experience of hosting our first co-ed boys and girls Halloween party and the awkwardness of wanting it to be a success and then being overwhelmed by the social realities of having a successful party.

TQ: Sara inserted a story that is loosely based on her experience coming to terms with her sexuality, where we had a gym class where you have to change in the locker room. That was traumatizing when we started Grade 7. You're having to figure out how to change without taking your clothes off, so we tried to insert some of that humour like those cringey first moments. The shyness and awkwardness of seeing girls half undressed, coming to terms with their sexuality and being fearful that maybe someone would mistake you casually looking over at them as prying or checking them out. We inserted some of those kinds of stories into the book and adapted them to be a little softer.

SQ: That moment where we went from being listeners to performers happened truly overnight and it was like magic, it was joyful. It was like discovering that you had this superpower that you could do the thing that you loved that other people could do and now you were part of that. The way that Tillie Walden, the cartoonist who drew the book, captured it using this infusion of colour into the story. It really did feel like our life just suddenly got bigger and made more sense. I felt like I had purpose.

I think you arrive into adolescence and you realize, "Oh, everything isn't going to just be about me," and I think there's this almost lashing out that happens to sort of find your voice or to feel heard. In some ways, music was the anecdote to all of those feelings of voicelessness and invisibility. It was a way of us making ourselves realized in a way that felt comfortable. It wasn't me having to stand up and say, this is how I feel everyone. It was me saying, "I have a new song!", and then here's all my feelings and if you're listening really hard you'll probably know what I'm trying to say. It just felt like a superpower.