Most of all, I loved being present at home with my children, fostering the kind of domestic sphere I’d longed for when I was a child. I could dip in and out to nurse them when they were babies and prepare their lunches when they moved on to solid food; cuddle them or peer in at the doorway, and then retreat to my home office, to report a story or bang away at whatever book I was working on. When they went to school, they never came home to an empty house. I knew this was a privileged lifestyle, and after years of wiping counters and folding Laura Ashley sweaters and apologizing on behalf of diners who lingered too long over their check and memorizing vegetable codes at the supermarket checkout, I appreciated it. Why would I ever leave a job like this?
But that day in LA, while plotting my visit to Every Picture Tells a Story, I sent an impulsive e-mail to Sam. “Maybe if the job could be part-time, I’d consider it myself,” I wrote, accidentally Dick Cheneying my way into the position. Four weeks and several interviews later, to my surprise more than anyone else’s, I was sitting at a desk overlooking West Fortieth Street. Though it took a while to realize it was not okay to wear maternity clothes to work when you were no longer pregnant, I’d found an office even better than the one I had at home. I was surrounded by other book-and-word people and they were all Thinkers. I felt like a kid given full run of the candy store. There were books everywhere, and they were mine. And I was working at the New York Times, a paper I’d read religiously ever since I was a child and my father had told me, “If you want to be an engaged citizen of the world, you have to read the Times.”
Time with my children became, alas, yet more compressed. As for most parents who work outside the home, moments on either end of the workday grow precious. How to spend time together became a Math Olympiad–level calculation among competing options: homework, cello practice, conversation, dinner, family reading. Luckily, my kids took my employment in stride; they, too, wanted those books.
Not that they had ever suffered from literary want. From the beginning, I’d modeled my policy on book purchases after my father’s, but with even less discipline. Essentially, I bought my kids all the books they wanted, plus books they didn’t want but I did. Now they had yet more, including bound galleys of novels before they were published, which my kids soon recognized as priceless when it came to work by their favorite authors. I wasn’t at home as often, but I was helping nurture a family of readers.
A year after she so coldly set aside A Wrinkle in Time, Beatrice picked it back up. This time, after rereading the first book, she continued straight through. When she put down the fifth and final volume, she turned to me with a mix of pity and disdain, disappointed in the children’s books editor of the New York Times. “I can’t believe you only read the first three books,” she said. I also now understood why Beatrice hadn’t needed A Wrinkle in Time as much as I did at her age. Since the 1970s, children’s literature has expanded enormously for girls, and worthy female protagonists were everywhere. Beatrice met them all the time.
Every day, when I came home from work, carting my tote bags, my children greeted me by asking, “What books did you bring?” occasionally fighting over the latest installment of The Land of Stories or Rick Riordan. My older son, Tobias, a voracious and widely curious reader, was open to almost every story except sad ones; discovering new books for him was a source of constant joy. Teddy laughed over any funny books with an unrestrained glee; ferreting out these books became an ongoing and thoroughly rewarded quest. My family of readers told me which books worked and which ones didn’t. They each contributed in their way to the Book Review, growing up knowing that their opinions mattered.
When, after two years, Sam left and I was asked to take his place as editor of the Book Review, abandoning my post as children’s books editor, my kids looked stricken. There was no avoiding the facts: I’d been demoted.
CHAPTER 20
Bad News
Tearjerkers
Books make me cry all the time. I cry when I’m alone, I cry reading in the office. I cry when I read with my children, big sappy tears blotching up the pages. I cry in public, once snuffling loud and sloppily on the subway over Sonali Deraniyagala’s wrenching and perfect memoir, Wave, in which her entire family succumbs to the 2004 tsunami, nearly unable to get off the train at my stop.
My Book of Books is full of such obvious weepies, but these aren’t the only culprits. I also cry when a book makes me a little too happy. When it becomes dangerously heartwarming and tips into an unendurable joy, I start to lose it. It can even be a picture book: the end of Patrick McDonnell’s Me … Jane where Jane Goodall wakes from her girlhood dream of one day working with animals and we turn the page to find the famous photograph of a baby chimpanzee reaching out to touch young Jane’s hand. To want something so much, and then get it, to experience, even secondhand, that almost unimaginable reward. Without fail, I sob over Goodall’s exquisite achievement, baffling my children. There goes Mommy crying over a book again, and it’s not even sad!
I don’t always wait for the ending. With Tomi Ungerer’s Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear I started tearing up the moment I realized a stuffed animal was in peril. I’d profiled Ungerer for the Times in 2011, after which he signed three picture books for my children. For Teddy, he naturally chose Otto. Since Teddy was only two at the time, I stowed the book on a high shelf in his older brother’s room. One night Tobias took it down. I hadn’t preread the book, eager to first experience its pleasures in the company of my children. I was completely unprepared.
Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear is a story told, per its title, from the perspective of an aged stuffed animal, sitting in the window of an antiques shop. His ear is stained purple from juice spilled by his first owner, David, and we flash back to that little boy, growing up in Germany during World War II. When David, bearing a yellow star, is suddenly taken away (alarm bells!), he entrusts his beloved bear Otto to his best friend. In the tumult of war, Otto loses this owner as well. By now, I am dabbing my eyes, avoiding those of my children.
An American GI finds the abandoned Otto and holds him aloft as he is hit by gunfire; the bear’s plush belly blocks the bullet, saving the soldier’s life. Years pass and through this and that Otto winds up in an American antiques shop where David’s best friend, now an old man, recognizes the stain. A newspaper hails the reunion. David, we discover, has survived the war, too, and reads the paper. We end with Otto bringing the two friends back together, by which point I am a blubbering mess.