Her tales of female knights have made her a favourite for girl readers since the 80s. She talks about bringing ‘the rawness of reality’ to her fiction

Tamora Pierce faced a conundrum when she began writing her latest young adult novel, Tempests and Slaughter. Ever since she published the groundbreaking quartet of novels The Song of the Lioness in the 1980s, she has been renowned for making her characters seem real. Yes, her girls might be able to talk to animals, fight gods and lead armies, but they also get their periods, raise children, worry about their bodies and have their hearts broken.

Tempests and Slaughter, though, focuses on a young boy. For years, Pierce has been asked to write a male hero and here he is: Arram Draper, the child who will grow up into Numair, the powerful mage from her previous Immortals series, and a fan favourite. But first, he has to survive puberty.

“I’m rather notorious for talking about that,” Pierce says, down the line from her New York home. “I had two choices: I could just ignore it as so many writers do or I could do for Arram what I do for my girls. I thought: ‘It’s cheating if I ignore it.’”

Pierce approached her husband and male friends for insight. What is it like having a wet dream? she asked. Did you ever get an erection in class? Surprisingly, for an author who could be described as fantasy’s Judy Blume, she describes herself as rather reticent.

“But I had to do it,” she says. “I’ve spent years with girls and their mothers coming up to me and saying ‘thank you so much for including this material’, and it mattered a great deal. It would be cowardly for me to skip it.”

I am one of those girls for whom it mattered a great deal. Pierce is probably the author I have most looked forward to interviewing. Whether it was the Lioness novels about Alanna, a girl who trains to be a knight while disguised as a boy, or the Immortals books, which followed the animal-literate girl Daine and her teacher Numair, all her books were hugely important to me growing up. Back in the pre-internet era, I’d check my university bookshop to see if she had anything new out, and hide it behind the Serious Literature I was meant to be studying. Reading up on her before we speak, I find that most other interviewers also cite her importance in their own lives: I’m not surprised. In the 80s and 90s, there wasn’t much fantasy out there that dealt with girls who seemed real, who struggled with the same issues we did.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The original 1980s covers of The Song of the Lioness series. Photograph: PR

This, says Pierce, has always been a key impetus behind her writing. Growing up in Pennsylvania and California, she fell for fantasy after a teacher introduced her to Tolkien. “But as I grew older, I began to realise that nobody ever goes to the bathroom, nobody ever takes a bath,” she says. “In fantasy they’re always having stew. Stew takes forever to cook. And you also never see game animals, or farm animals, unless it’s in the Shire. Where do they get the animals? Where do they get the time to cook?”

It’s particularly true when it comes to women, she says. Just look at Red Sonja in the comics, “sleeping in the winter out in the wilderness in a chain mail bikini”.

“I just decided, very early on, I was going to be as real as possible … so the only thing I would need my suspension of disbelief for was the magic,” she says. “I wanted characters people would feel they could meet. I was always searching for female heroes. The very few I found were highly dissatisfactory, so when I started writing, I wrote what I wanted to read – girls like me.”

Pierce credits her father with setting her on the road to writing. He gave her Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Boy’s King Arthur, Robin Hood. When she was 11, he overheard her telling herself stories while doing the washing up, and suggested she should try writing a book on his typewriter.

“Up until then it was death to touch his typewriter, he wrote the union newsletter on it. I knew it was really important to him that I tried this book thing,” she says. He suggested she write about a time machine, so she sat down to “peck away” on a story about going back in time to the Trojan war. “About a year later I stopped – not because I had finished the book, but because I had run out of ideas.”

I thought my mother would be proud I’d had the courage to submit a short story. She flew into a rage.

Her parents split up and her father took the typewriter with him, but she continued writing until her second year in high school, when she sent a short story to Seventeen magazine. It didn’t get published, but the editor wrote back and said her talent was obvious. She showed the reply, proudly, to her mother – whose reaction sparked a period of writer’s block that lasted five years.

“My mother also shaped a great many of my intellectual interests and the way I looked at the world and made a feminist of me. But she didn’t like my writing,” says Pierce. “Maybe because it was my father’s thing. And she hated speculative fiction – she was an English major and had a very snobby view of what a person was supposed to write. I thought she would be proud I’d had the courage to submit a short story. She flew into a rage and wanted to know who did I think I was, to think I was good enough to be published, I hadn’t studied near enough, I hadn’t written enough. She just went on and on. I tried to run away, but ran out of nerve and went home.”

Pierce gave up on becoming a writer and went to college to study psychology. But being exposed to new books, people and thoughts at university – Penn in Philadelphia, where she was on a full scholarship – lifted her block. She wrote her first book-length manuscript, about a girl who disguises herself as a boy to enter a tournament. (It was “beyond bad”, according to Pierce, and will never be seen.)

Six months later, a scrap of a half-forgotten dream sparked a new idea: a girl who disguises herself as her twin brother so she can become a knight. Alanna, Pierce’s red-haired heroine in The Song of the Lioness books, drew from Pierce’s younger sister Kim, a “very strong-minded, very determined” woman who went on to be a captain in the military, an ambulance worker, an air rescuer and a nurse. “She is a real hero, she’s saved literally hundreds of lives,” says Pierce. “I have to have something from the real world to base it on.”

Today, The Song of the Lioness is a bestselling and critically acclaimed young adult series, but when Pierce first wrote it, it was a single book for adults. Working in a home for girls at the time, she would read edited versions to the teenagers she was caring for in the evenings. It was turned down by three publishing houses, but she had set herself rules: she allowed herself one week to be upset each time the book came back, before sending it out again.

By then, Pierce was working for a literacy agency in New York, while writing stories, articles and radio plays. Her agent advised her to rewrite The Song of the Lioness as four books for teenagers; she realised it wouldn’t be hard, as she had already told the story to the girls in the group home. Finally, the first Alanna book arrived in 1983.

She remembers being questioned about how she’d managed to get her frank depictions of sexuality, violence and harsh language published for children. “I just looked at them and said, ‘How do you think these kids are living?’ I worked with Philadelphia and Idaho gang youth, I worked with violent and criminal youth. This ‘Barbie goes to Paris and becomes a model’ thing, this isn’t the kids of today. You’re not paying attention,” she says. “This is a medieval setting – teenagers were not children. It’s not believable if I don’t tell it the way it was. Readers wanted the rawness of reality.”

In 2013, Pierce won the Margaret A Edwards award for her “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature”, and for “helping adolescents become aware of themselves”. It took a while, though, for her books to find their audience: she spent the 80s working for banks and law firms as a secretary, and continued holding a day job through the 90s, all the while publishing books including The Protector of the Small quartet, a series following Alanna’s first openly female successor, a knight called Kel, and her Circle of Magic series, about four mages in training.

“By the end of the 90s I was starting to do rather better and by the time the 2000s rolled around, I was starting to do fairly well. Things just really took off,” she says. (When it came out in the US earlier this year, Tempests and Slaughter debuted on the New York Times young adult bestseller list at no 1.)

With two more novels still to come telling Numair’s coming-of-age story – the tall, bookish magician is based on Jeff Goldblum, she says – she is looking forward to writing about girls again. But she has no intention of straying from her fantasy universe.

“I’m very happy with fantasy. I can say almost everything I need to say. I’ve sneaked in a lot of what I think about the modern world, about modern politics,” she says. “Most of us fantasy writers do. JK Rowling is absolutely brilliant on the failures of justice in human society. Everybody thinks fantasy is so safe, because we don’t deal with heavy modern issues. Are you kidding? We do this stuff all over the place.”

• Tempests and Slaughter is published by HarperCollins. The Immortals quartet will be reissued by Harper Collins on 18 October.