All of us took children’s literature seriously. And we had fun. Unlike a lot of grown-up novels, children’s books never lose sight of the primacy of storytelling. Children like to be swept up right away in plot, and frankly, most adults appreciate this too; it’s why so many readers gravitate toward spy novels and science fiction and thrillers, books in which things happen and people get caught up in those events. It is, after all, children’s books that turn us into readers in the first place.
But the best children’s books also encourage young people to ask big questions about who they are and what their place is in the world. When you read children’s literature as an adult, you get to revisit the same sense of newness and discovery that you did as a child. You can delve into big emotions, without cynicism or jadedness. You let all that go. In my Book of Books, the entries for children’s literature don’t stop after adolescence; they continue throughout, whether read for myself or with my children.
Bonding over children’s books feels like an especially emotional experience; it’s one of the many things that makes parent-child reading so delicious. Nothing really compares with mutual appreciation with a child who is just embarking on a lifetime of reading. Happily, despite differences in opinion, Beatrice and I share certain literary tastes. Beatrice is also drawn to dark tales—the grimmer the Grimms, the better. She and I read endless incarnations of fairy tales, taking apart the different renditions—was the witch banished or did she meet a gruesome end?—and mulling the implications together.
Beatrice and I also like stories with morals. We don’t look much alike physically, but seeing that same yearning for dark reading while wanting clear rules was like finding myself reflected back in the glint of my daughter’s eyes. She and I share a nostalgic streak, something I, too, had from a young age when I yearned for the days of Abigail Adams. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, which I read to Beatrice when she was in third grade (after tours through Narnia and Betsy-Tacy’s Minnesota), offered an organic lesson in the virtues of the simple life.
“Mommy, do you think that in certain ways, life was better back then?” Beatrice asked one night.
“I often do,” I replied, and she nestled in close on the sofa, bound by a common sympathy. One night, as we read Farmer Boy, Beatrice grew anxious as the three children in the story played with forbidden molasses while their parents were away.
“Which character do you most identify with?” she asked me, all atremble. “Susan,” I answered. Susan was the sage one, the one who tries to tamp down the wild rumpus and avert trouble. “Me, too!” Beatrice agreed breathlessly. “What’s going to happen when their parents get home?” At times, Little House felt like an especially effective parenting manual with its frequent homilies on frugality, respect, resourcefulness, honesty, and gratitude.
Of course, there are limits to those lessons. My friend Alysia found the Little House books similarly instructive—for a time. “What do you think Laura would do in a situation like this?” she’d ask her nine-year-old daughter, as I occasionally did with Beatrice. This kind of moralizing was pleasingly successful until one day, at age ten, her daughter rolled her eyes and replied, “Mommy, those were olden times.”
When Teddy was one and a half years old, and my other two were four and five, I got an e-mail from my friend Sam Tanenhaus, whom I’d met shortly after 9/11 at a luncheon for V. S. Naipaul and who was now the editor of the New York Times Book Review. Sam asked whether I knew anyone who’d like to be the children’s books editor at the New York Times. The most recent editor had left after seven years and Sam was looking for suggestions to replace her. He knew about my penchant for Kidlit because I’d written an essay about it for the paper.
But I wasn’t much use in the way he expected. My experience with children’s literature had been as an enthusiast, not a professional. I didn’t know many writers or editors in that world. None of my referrals worked out.
And then I had a kind of epiphany. While on a family vacation in Los Angeles, I was driving with my husband, our children in the backseat, trying to figure out how to get to Every Picture Tells a Story, an especially good children’s bookstore and illustration gallery (sadly now gone), without having to bring the kids. They would only distract me from my mission. Michael and I were comparing our schedules when I realized what I was trying to do: go to a children’s bookstore by myself. For myself. Without my children. That way I could look at the children’s books I wanted to look at and not be distracted by their needs. Was this normal? If I cared so much about children’s books, perhaps I should be the children’s books editor.
The problem was I never wanted to work in an office again. The last time I’d worked in an office, I had a boss who docked my pay when I got invited to go on Oprah in Chicago to promote my first book. At the office I worked in before that, my boss required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here.
When I’d left my last office job in 2002, I thought I’d left it for good. I’d finally managed to put together the professional life I’d always wanted. I was being paid to write. And I didn’t have to wait to write in the evening after an exhausting workday, but could do it instead during regular business hours. The pragmatics of the freelance life were enormously appealing. You could spend the entire day in pajamas. You could fit in household chores between assignments. You could set your own hours. I figured as long as I could earn enough to offset the cost of childcare, I was in the black. Given how little writing pays, I worked like a maniac but I loved it.