Labor Day is the new romantic-convict (rom-con!) from writer-director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult), based on the 2009 novel by Joyce Maynard (To Die For, At Home In the World).

Seen through the eyes of 13-year-old Henry (Gattlin Griffith), the film and novel tell the story of a Labor Day weekend in the late ’80s when Henry and his single mother Adele (Kate Winslet) play host to an escaped convict named Frank (Josh Brolin). As Henry struggles with his own pubescent emotions, Adele and Frank quickly fall in love.

I and another writer sat down with Maynard in Chicago earlier this month to talk about Labor Day–the second of her novels to be made into a film (after Gus Van Sant’s 1995 To Die For), about her affinity for writing about teenage male protagonists, and of course her attitudes about homemade peach pie.

Labor Day opens today at theaters everywhere.

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What do you find interesting about writing adolescent male characters?

Joyce Maynard: I’ve got a secret inner adolescent boy, I guess. I’ve raised two of them who are grown now. I think it actually goes to a deeper place. I feel very tenderly towards that age and that struggle. Everybody thinks about girls being so vulnerable, and they are, but look at the girl in Labor Day, she’s the tough one, she’s the killer. Not literally, obviously.

But it’s the boys who tend to pull at my heart strings because they have to seem like they are these big, strong, tough guys, and they’re really not. One of my all-time favorite movies is Stand By Me. I think about that movie often, actually.

When you wrote this in 2008, your sons were already in their 20s. Were you emailing to ask them about adolescence?

Maynard: No, if you’d talked to me 12 hours before I started writing this book and asked me what I was gonna write next, I would have said, “I don’t have a clue.” I was actually planning to write a completely different thing. But then I woke up in the morning, and that boy was there. It sounds like California “wooo-oooo” silliness, but he was talking, and I could barely type fast enough to take down all that he said. He was just in me, and I was along for the ride.

I always say that when I write, the first reader I’m thinking about is me. It was like seeing the movie already, so it’s kind of come full circle to now be a movie. I was watching the movie in my head, and I was just typing it.

I wrote the book in record time, about 10 days, because I had to find out what was gonna happen; I was worried. You might think that I would be in control, but I actually I felt like they had taken on lives of their own, and i had to see what was going to happen.

And when the book was finished, it was a very low point in my own career and life. I had published my much-condemned memoir about my time with Salinger, and I was not the hot girl on the block, that’s for sure. [Maynard was widely criticized by the literary community for writing about her teenage affair with J.D. Salinger in At Home in the World]. I was 55 years old at that point, and nobody would buy my books, and I didn’t have an agent or a publisher.

I brought my book to New York, and a number of agents turned me down, but one read it overnight and loved the book and said, “Yes, we can sell it, but we need to take your name off of it.” It was submitted to ten big editors in New York on the basis of my agent’s reputation, without my name. And it created a bidding war. There was a gossip column item in the New York Observer that some hot young male first novelist had this novel going around. They thought it was James Franco—that was the buzz. And when it was discovered it was me, a bunch of the editors bailed. So this is my “ha-ha” moment!

How is it different writing young male characters compared to young female characters?

Maynard: To Die For also had a very important 15-year-old boy. I don’t really think about male or female, I just think about that character. Who is he? Who is she? My novel The Usual Rules has a 13-year-old girl, and my new novel After Her, the main character is a 13-year-old girl.

I think a lot about age 13. That was just a big age for me, and I think it is for a lot of people. I’m really interested in sexuality and the shaping of it, and the idea of a young person simultaneously discovering his own sexuality while his mother is discovering hers—it’s pretty uncomfortable for him.

I was myself a single parent for most of the years of the raising of my children. And though I am not that woman in the novel, I did raise my kids in a small New Hampshire town, and I know plenty about the loneliness of giving out without someone taking care of you. Henry in the novel and film does the best he can with his “Husband for a Day” coupon book,. My older son Charlie did give me one of those when he was nine. That part I get, but this is not my story.

Do you think 13 is the most vulnerable of ages?

Maynard: Take your pick. [Laughs] Sixty is vulnerable, too.  But thirteen is on the cusp. It’s just leaving childhood, and it’s entering adulthood. It’s both, and it’s neither. It’s trying to make sense of the world.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the great coming-of-age books are about that age. The formative book in my own growing up was Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. My new novel, After Her, is about being 13—I have a whole passage about what it means to be a young girl at that age.

On a very different note, one of the central scenes in the book and film Labor Day is the pie-making. You are a baker yourself, right?

Maynard: I am a very good baker—that pie in the film is basically my pie. I only teach pie for love, but when there’s a political candidate I want to elect or relief effort I want to support, I hold fundraising pie-baking courses. Hundred bucks a pop, I teach them how to make a pie. When Jason acquired this film, one of the first things he asked me was to come over to my house and make pie. For this film, I taught Josh, Kate, and Tom Lipinski who played the younger version of Josh’s character. Some people were there that didn’t need to be, they just wanted the pie lesson.

For the purpose of the movie, the one who really had learn was Josh, because he didn’t have to just make it by hand, he had to have this command, this confidence. It’s not about being all worried about how much of this or that, you have to just feel it. It’s like dancing.

And it’s all about the dough—it can’t be perfect, it has to be so flaky that it looks like it’s about to fall apart. Mine barely holds together—it looks like a pie made by a convict on the run! There’s some things you can’t plug in or buy—you have to make them. This is my little contribution to continuing on to a few people in the next generation who still know what a homemade pie tastes like, who can sing a song.

I made a video of my pie lesson, it’s on Curious.com, and it’s the lesson I gave Josh.

In the book, Adele seems to take Frank in as an act of kindness. But in the film there’s more of a physical threat from him—Frank often comes off more menacing on screen than he does on the page.

Maynard: She is a kind person, but she’s a person for whom the usual rules did not serve very well. She’s not going to act the way people are supposed act—life didn’t go the way life was supposed to go for her. I’m that type of person. She’s not looking at the written-down recipe—she’s feeling it. She and Frank are both people of instinct, and instinct has been bred out of our lives anymore. She’s somebody who sees somebody wandering along and would take them home, which would be me, too.

But that would have been harder to sell in a two-hour movie, to show that side of her, so I think Jason made the right decision in having Frank being more forceful. This is not a story about some vulnerable woman being taken in by a con artist—that’s a different story. This is a woman for all that she doesn’t function very well in the world, she’s right about Frank.

With such a personal story, when you see these actors on screen, what do you see of your characters in them?

Maynard: Well, now it’s hard for me to imagine them any other way. I had been picturing in my head as I was writing, to get going on Frank I pictured Tommy Lee Jones, which as we know Josh Brolin later played [in Men in Black III]. I love that Kate Winslet is not the ethereal dancer that you may have thought—she’s like a real woman. I like the realness of these people.

Was there a lot of discussion with Jason Reitman about fatherhood?

Maynard: Not so much fatherhood, more son-hood. His parents were married, but his father was often gone. We talked about him being the boy home alone with his mother. I think he really related to that.

The book and film are set in New England. When you were writing, were you conscious of certain cultural aspects, maybe backing off them so it played more universally?

Maynard: I wanted it to be as New England as it possibly could be. But I certainly didn’t want them to have New Hampshire accents. That’s a terrible mistake, to have people put on those accents, it just does not work. But I would have loved for it to have been filmed in the state of New Hampshire. I started out this tour in Keene, New Hampshire, where I used to live. When I went to Keene, everybody that walked into that theater, I knew their names.

I like the idea of people all over the United States seeing a town like that. Fewer and fewer kids ever get to ride their bicycle around the way as seen in the film. In the same way that I’d like people to know what a real pie tastes like, I’d like them to know what a real small town is like. I feel so grateful to have been able to raise my children in one.