Camryn Garrett Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Camryn Garrett is an American novelist from New York City. She was born and raised in the city and distinguished herself when she was a TIME for Kids correspondent by the time she was thirteen years old. Working for TIME, She got to interview some of the most famous people such as Kristen Bell and Warren Buffett. She has written for the likes of “Rookie Magazine,” “MTV,” and “The Huffington Post.” In 2015, MTV named Garrett one of the networks most inspirational teen-agers using social media to bring change to the world. She added another feather to her cap when in 2019 she was named Glamour College Woman of the Year and Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21. By the time of publishing her first novel “Full Disclosure,” she was a second-year student at the New Your University Tisch School of the Arts. She advocates diverse writers and stories and is also interested in film.

Like many intelligent people, Camryn Garrett has a weird obsession with a lot of topics such as the history of orphanages or the science of in vitro fertilization (IVF). She got the idea for “Full Disclosure” when she was interested in international adoption and read a lot about Angelina Jolie’s adopted children. Apparently, one of her children was adopted from an orphanage where everyone except for her was HIV positive. She began wondering about the adoption process for HIV positive children and read a lot about such children who were adopted. She also watched documentaries on Netflix, read blogs by the parents and read articles on the Internet. Camryn also did get some help from her mom who is a nurse. After a while, she started thinking about what horny HIV positive teenagers did when they needed to let off some steam and decided to create just such a character in Simone, the lead of Full Disclosure. Asked what she hoped people would take from the story, she asserted that she hoped people got to learn about HIV and what life is like for people with the virus. Garrett did a lot of research about the topic and the book does provide a lot of information on the life adjustments that people with HIV need to make. She also hopes that through the novel she can help reduce the stigma against HIV positive teens, which due to recent medical breakthroughs is no different than diabetes or asthma.

Camryn’s debut novel “Full Disclosure” is about a fictitious character who has to confront real-life struggles. The lead in the novel is Simone Garcia-Hampton, a black HIV positive teen that happened to have been born and raised by queer parents. Garrett goes on to explore the life of a teenager who ultimately has to find love, discover sexuality, fear, and self-acceptance. In a world that is not always so accepting or understanding, a teen with HIV will find it rough dealing with disclosure, fear, and radical self-acceptance when she falls in lust and love for the first time. She says it was critical that she write a fun story about a marginalized teen who was just out to have a good time rather than one that suffered all the time because of her status. For Garrett, it was critical to avoid the negative components such as ableism, homophobia, and racism that many such stories typically emphasize. While these things are important, they are just but one aspect of the lives of marginalized people. According to Garrett, even as people such as Simone experience marginalization the same as that of queers, that is just one part of their story that encompasses a whole lot more.

The author wrote the first draft of “Full Disclosure” in 2016 when she decided to participate in the National Writing Month. Camryn took a break from her writing gigs to write the novel, making the edits on her own before reworking it with her agent. She was done with the editing by 2017 but the novel was finally released on October 2019. Camryn does assert that she was driven to write the novel from a hope and a personal desire to get the answers that some people her age could be looking for. She read a ton of blogs and articles but there were questions that she felt either were not covered or were not covered fully. For instance, there isn’t much on how to disclose or who to disclose your status to as you grow up, what it is like to be a teen growing up with HIV, and what happens when you start getting attracted to the opposite sex. Most of the books that she came across never talked about the experience of say somebody being the only person with HIV in a family or being sexually active and living with HIV as a teenager. While she does assert that “Full Disclosure” is not a full representation of the experience of all teens living with HIV, she hopes that most readers will relate to the story of her lead character. Moreover, Camryn says that she felt that since most books written by people living with HIV are at least two decades old, there is a need for a modern take which is what the novel provides.

Camryn Garrett’s “Full Disclosure” is an upbeat novel about Simone Garcia-Hampton. She thinks that getting a crush on someone could be more dangerous than her HIV positive status. Moreover, she already had her viral load under control but she does not know so much about crushes. As long as she takes her medication and visits her doctor regularly, she can have a long life. The only problem is that she is a teen that wants to have sex. Simone has been told since she was a little girl that abstinence is the best policy but now that Miles has come into her life, the well-meaning advice from her dad is no longer so effective. He is a hunk, plays lacrosse and always knows how to make her smile, which makes her want him so much. She has been agonizing about whether to tell her crush about her status or not, having been burned before by telling the wrong people. She had even had to switch schools once since some uneducated parents had raised a huge furor when they learned of her status. Simone had also gotten scarred by the people she loved most and hence she has a reason to be apprehensive. She likes Miles but getting close to him would be a huge risk given that disclosure is the cardinal rule of dating for HIV positive people. But before she can make a decision on whether to keep her secret or not, she gets a chilling letter in her locker.