The Netflix film, To All The Boys: I Still Love You, the second in the To All The Boys trilogy, dropped yesterday. I have a sick kid at home and intend to force her to watch it with me, but I doubt I’ll be successful. The author of the books on which the movies are based, Jenny Han, appeared on Today. She talked about her inspiration for her characters, which was a combination of herself as a teen and the students she worked with as a school librarian.

Craig Melvin asks Jenny about being a librarian at the 1:22 mark and whether it shaped her writing. Her response was:

I did not know you were actually a librarian. How did that job inform the perspective that you have now?
I was a school librarian so I was around kids all day. I think I was the mean librarian, like ‘ssh! Ssh! Like guys, guys – be chill.’ They’d always be sneaking food. I kind of write stories about teens in the suburbs and, like, smaller towns. These city kids have a different way of life, they have every museum and show.

In the book, a girl is writing pretend love letters to her crushes, so to speak. And then someone sends them out, her little sister.
They weren’t really pretend. I did it. It’s like she put out all her true, deepest feelings at that age. I used to do it, that’s where I got the idea for it. I wrote love letters when I was trying to find closure and put it all on a page, like a diary. I put them in a hat box, I did not send them.

My gawd, this makes so much sense. The school librarian plays counselor to all the kids finding themselves, even if they are the ‘mean’ librarian and Jenny claims she was. There’s a feeling of safety with the librarian because, if you were like me, the library was where we escaped the realities of high school. And you knew Ms. or Mr. So-and-So was not going to let anyone mess with you in their principality, so there was an overall feeling of trust. Plus, nobody has to be cool or popular, the library welcomes everyone (if you follow the rules). I’ll bet every school librarian has four or five books worth of stories they could tell. I think I feel even closer to Lara Jean than before. Plus, when I couldn’t seem to get over a guy, I wrote stories about us. I never put the guy’s name in them, but I’d write their initials in the corner of the page. They make me laugh now. Like, some of the initials I can’t place, and a few faces are lost to me, and yet there is so much gut-wrenching want jumping off the page. Ah, unrequited love, you son of a bitch.

In the segment above, Jenny also told a story I’d read about the other day. They filmed the third TATB movie in Korea last summer. While they were there, Jenny had a PA driving her around whose name was Bong. It reminded her of Parasite, which was huge in Korea but hadn’t hit the states yet, and she started going on and on about how huge the movie would be. It wasn’t until the end of the day, when Jenny asked the PA about what his parents did, that she found out her PA was Bong Hyo-min, who is Bong Joon-ho’s son.

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Photo credit: WENN/Avalon, Getty Images and Today/YouTube