by Pamela Paul
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.
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.
According to Bob, the first book that made me completely lose it was Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which I read shortly after my divorce, taking every plot point personally, weeping over Isabel Archer’s torments and tragedy. Rather than focus on the beauty of James’s prose, I let myself get entirely caught up and then fall apart over the plot, continuing to cry even after I’d closed the book and put it away. But Portrait of a Lady is no exception. Novel after novel, things get soggy.
Perhaps this sentimentality could be fought off. “I will not cry over The Fault in Our Stars,” I told myself before picking up John Green’s tearjerker YA novel about two cancer patients, knowing exactly what I was in for. “It’s too much of a cliché.” Surely I could rise above the adolescent drama because I was approaching it from a professional angle as children’s books editor. I would not be manipulated.
I cried like a brokenhearted fifteen-year-old.
In 2013, on the way back from visiting my cousin Kirsten, now living in London with her husband, I cried while reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Alone on the plane to New York, my bathos took up several seats, covered with damp tissues. Two passengers and a flight attendant came over to ask if I was okay.
The following year, I took Beatrice and my mother along on my next trip to London. Beatrice was eight at the time, and had read enough about England to make a visit abroad meaningful, her very first bout of literary tourism. We had many lit-tour plans: the Harry Potter walking tour, the Harry Potter studio, the British Museum, the bookstores. Marchpane, a tiny store dedicated to used and rare children’s books, many of them out of print. Daunt, a pair of stores that organize books according to geography, allowing browsers to tour a world of literature within its walls. Beatrice and I annoyed my mom by antisocially reading on the Tube exactly the way we read on the subway back home. We’d stake out seats as soon as we boarded and whip out our books, eschewing conversation.
One afternoon, after my mother ditched us for the Victoria and Albert Museum, Beatrice and I were on the Tube en route to meet friends at the Globe Theater. I was reading Never Mind, the first volume of the Patrick Melrose series, Edward St. Aubyn’s autobiographical novels tracing his trajectory through boyhood, heroin addiction, and recovery. I’d wanted to read St. Aubyn’s books after so many authors I admired had gushed about them in the Book Review’s “By the Book” column. “Have you read the Patrick Melrose books?” was the question everyone was asking that publishing season, and I was tired of saying, “Not yet.”
Meanwhile, Beatrice was on an Enid Blyton tear. She’d read the few volumes of Blyton that had made their way stateside, English editions stickered over with American prices, but the supply had dried up. Blyton, who died in 1968, was wildly popular in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth for much of the twentieth century, but had taken a critical battering in later enlightened years on charges of sexism, racism, elitism, poor writing, and an absence of imagination. Some of the most egregious material has been sloughed off recent editions, which bear remarketed illustrations even as the content—boarding school shenanigans, old-fashioned capers, and fantasies—remains largely the same.
Our very first day in London, we went directly to my favorite bookstore in the city. If we hadn’t, I’d just be counting the minutes until I did. Beatrice understood completely. Hatchards, founded in 1797, is the oldest bookshop in London, just off Piccadilly Circus. It’s the official bookstore to the royal family; it actually feels like a bit of a privilege to shop there. A wooden staircase, buffed by age, winds up multiple floors, past displays featuring an idiosyncratic selection of literary fiction and stubbornly British subjects of concern. There is no café.
Beatrice, her undereyes mauve with fatigue, was nonetheless stirred awake by the store’s bounty of Blyton. She pored over her options, plucking titles from the shelves into hopeful towers on the floor. The Hatchards salesperson kept giving us additional shopping bags and gold paper bookmarks as if we would somehow dematerialize if not adequately rewarded for our patronage. While there, I picked up the Patrick Melrose series, published here individually with muted pastel covers that telegraphed the melancholy contents within.
Beatr
ice had her books and I had mine. The first Patrick Melrose book, Never Mind, takes place over the course of a day in the life of a five-year-old boy from an aristocratic family: his mother, a drug-addled narcissist; his father, a sadist. The boy Patrick meanders about the family house in Provence, neglected by the adults who are supposed to care for him. When he is summoned by his father and sexually abused—a heartbreaker of a scene told entirely from the child’s bewildered perspective—it’s the most parental attention he ever gets.
Reading this on the train, I immediately choked up, and as our train pulled into our station I found it hard to make any sound, never mind the customary maternal chatter or parental exhortation. Beatrice was across from me, though far off in a very different corner of English literature with Blyton’s St. Clare’s series.
“Ack, our stop!” she cried in mild panic, looking up from her book as if at any moment the world outside could slip from her grasp. “I was at the best part!” She didn’t have time to see my tears before they were wiped away. Certain stories children are not prepared to hear. Sometimes adults aren’t either.
You would think that as we age, tales of other people’s suffering wouldn’t tug at us so insistently. In fact, the opposite can be true. The triggers are more numerous and more readily accessed, the losses felt more acutely. When you read about an injured child or an ignored brother or an estranged parent, you can more easily intuit their pain. Nostalgia goes from being a light feeling of déjà vu to something more primal and raw. The span of history constricts as decades-old horrors no longer seem quite so distant.When I was growing up, the Holocaust felt like ancient history; now it seems to have taken place yesterday.
