Stories of My Life

by Katherine Paterson

  “It’s your girlfriend, David,” his older brother would say.

  But David would take the phone unperturbed. Girlfriends are people who chase you down on the playground to grab you and kiss you. Lisa was no more a “girlfriend” than Margaret Thatcher was a Playboy Bunny.

  Then on an August morning, the phone rang. It was a call from the Hills’ next-door neighbor. “I thought you ought to know,” Mrs. Robinson said, “that Lisa was killed this morning.” While the family was on vacation at Bethany Beach, on a day when the lifeguards sensed no danger from thunder far off in the distance, a joyful little girl, dancing on a rock above the crowded beach, was felled by a bolt of lightning from the sky.

  How was I to make sense of this tragedy for my child? I couldn’t make sense of it for myself. So, eventually, I began to write a story, because I knew that a story has to make sense. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and when you get to the end, even if you cannot articulate intellectually what has happened, you know emotionally that you have come from chaos to order. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzche says: “One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star.” And somehow, as dark as life itself sometimes seems, at the end of a well-told story, the dancing star will shed light on the chaos.

  So I began to write what I could not understand or explain, but when I came to the place in my story when I knew that if I went to work the next day I would write the chapter in which Leslie Burke would die, I did the only thing I could do to keep her alive, I didn’t go to work. I caught up on my mail, I rearranged my bookshelves, I think I was even reduced to scrubbing the kitchen floor—anything to keep from writing the fatal chapter.

  It was just then that I happened to have lunch with a former Richmond classmate. “How’s your new book coming?” she asked. Now, no one, as the long-suffering members of my immediate family know all too well, no one is ever supposed to ask me how my work is coming, but Estelle had known me longer than any of them, and she had no respect. So I blurted out an answer. “I’m trying to write a book about a friendship between a boy and a girl in which the girl dies,” I said. “But I can’t let her die. I guess,” I added, thinking I was very wise, “I guess I can’t face going through Lisa’s death again.”

  Estelle looked me straight in the eye. “I don’t think it’s Lisa’s death you can’t face,” she said. “I think it’s yours.”

  I knew she was right. If it were Lisa’s death I couldn’t face, it was one thing, but if it were my death I couldn’t face, then I would have to finish the book. I went home that afternoon, and with sweat pouring down my arms, wrote the chapter and in a few days finished the draft. It was the most painful writing I had ever done—so painful I simply couldn’t stand having it in the house, so I did what no real writer would ever do, I mailed the draft to Virginia Buckley before the sweat had evaporated.

  As soon as I mailed the manuscript, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. Every day I expected the letter that would tell me politely, maybe even a little sorrowfully, that I had obviously lost whatever talent I had shown up until then—that my career as a writer was over. Instead I got a phone call. It was Virginia, saying that she wanted to talk to me about my new manuscript. I stopped breathing.

  “I laughed through the first two-thirds,” she said, “and cried through the last.” I began to breathe again. “Now,” she continued, “let’s turn it into a book.”

  And then she did what I believe the great editors do; she asked me the question that would do just that. “Is this,” she asked, “a story about friendship or is it a story about death?”

  Until that moment, I had thought I was writing a story about death. Hadn’t it been a year of death in our lives? But as soon as she asked the question, I knew I was wrong. “Oh,” I said, “it’s a story about friendship.” “Then you need to go back and write it that way.” She went on to remind me that in any true friendship both friends change and grow because they know each other. “I see how Jesse has changed because he has known Leslie, but I don’t see how knowing Jesse has changed Leslie. How has Jesse made a difference in her life?”

  That was the problem that had to be solved to turn my pitiful little cry of anguish into a real story. And as I pondered it, up from the dust of the playground at Calvin H. Wiley School arose Pansy and her two gigantic cohorts who had bullied me when I was a fourth grader. It would be Pansy alias Janice Avery who would show how Jesse’s friendship enriched Leslie’s life.

  I revised Bridge to Terabithia extensively and it was published. It was and is a simple story, told in only 128 pages, and the first edition, as I recall, was a modest seven thousand copies. At the time, I wondered if anyone who was not named Paterson would understand it at all. I am still astounded by the response to the book, more than thirty-five years later. But here I want to tell you what it taught me as a writer who was so afraid of mediocrity that she almost didn’t dare to become a writer at all.

  As children, as adolescents, and even, I fear, as adults, most of us are afraid that if we reveal ourselves as we really are to one another, we will be despised. In writing Bridge to Terabithia, I went into the deepest, darkest regions of myself and offered it to my readers, and my readers, through the years, have given the deepest parts of their own souls to my book and together we have created, across barriers of age and race and religion and nationality—even across language barriers—a deep human connection, which in a world torn apart by divisions seems miraculous to me.

  At a conference once, a woman said, “I think it’s wonderful how open you are.” I was quite startled. “You don’t understand,” I said, “writers are very private people . . . who run around naked in public.” So when I think of writing, I really think first of the trip inward. What is it that I care so deeply and passionately about that I want to share it with that wonderful person, my reader? Am I willing to run around naked in public—to lay bare my own mind and heart and spirit to share this passion? Can I forget who might not approve or who might want me to go in a different direction? Am I determined to be as plainly honest as I can be in telling this story?

  But of course there is another step—my early drafts of Bridge to Terabithia were simply a cry of pain from the depths. They were not yet a story—the chaos within must be brought into the light of day and be shaped by all the art at our disposal before it will speak a coherent word to another person, much less become a dancing star.

  Perhaps the story I’m going to tell next belongs in the chapter I have called “Motherhood (Less than Ideal),” because the seed of The Great Gilly Hopkins certainly grew out of that thorny ground.

  It began in the spring of 1975. I was recovering physically and writing Bridge to Terabithia, while on the other side of the world all hell had broken loose. South Vietnam fell and then Cambodia. My children were watching the dreadful news on television and were upset by scenes of the children who were victims of the disasters. They had been nagging me for another brother or sister since Mary got out of diapers, so now they were begging me to adopt some of these homeless children. And I was saying, “I can’t take care of more than four children. We can’t afford any more children.” We compromised. We wouldn’t adopt any more, but we would provide temporary foster care for any child that came to the Washington area if asked. Since Lutheran Social Service had certified John and me as genuine okay parents when we adopted Mary, I offered them our services. We were asked to take in two Cambodian boys for two weeks while the immigration authorities figured out what to do with a planeload of Cambodian children that had arrived at Dulles Airport with no identification other than name tags hanging around their necks.

  That seemed manageable to me. We bought bunk beds for the boys’ room, and I started cooking rice three times a day, thinking how lucky these boys were to land in the home of a woman who knew how to cook rice properly. Needless to say, it wasn’t as easy as cooking rice as the two weeks stretched into two more weeks an
d two more and yet more. The honeymoon period when all six children were behaving was quickly over. I learned a lot about children, about being a foster parent, and especially about myself that, given the choice, I’d just as soon not have learned. Up until then I had thought of myself as a B– or at least C+ mother, and now as a foster mother I was flunking.

  I had to ask myself why, and I found my answer in my own mind. When I met each of our four children, either in the delivery room or at the airport, I knew this child was mine—that there was no backing out for either of us. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, we would belong to each other as parent and child as long as we both lived.

  This sort of conviction does something to a relationship, and both you and the child know it. When problems arise, there is no escape, so you try to work them out. But with these boys, I would find myself thinking, I can’t really deal with that. They’ll be here such a short time. Or, Thank heavens they’ll soon be gone. What I was doing was treating two human beings as though they were disposable. That’s why crimes are committed. That’s why wars are fought. Because someone thinks someone else is disposable.

  Writers tend to write a book to answer their own questions. My question was: How would I feel if the world regarded me as disposable? And I decided I would be very angry. After the book was published, I realized, belatedly, that I had put two foster children in the story. I might not have been Gilly. I might well have been William Ernest. Although I love to perform, I am shy in social situations like publishers’ cocktail parties and church coffee hours. When I feel that people are treating me as though I’m disposable, I want to disappear, and I would, if Maime Trotter’s broad back were available for me to hide behind.

  I’m better now that I’m old, but I’ve had to work to become less shy. I’ve had to think of all the other people in the room who are probably just as shy as I am.

  Jean Little, Claire Mackay, and me.

  Dedications and Other Miscellanea

  If you’ve read this far, you will know that my first five books were dedicated to my husband and four children. As in-laws came into the family, they got books, as have the grandchildren, including our “adopted” grandchild, Kate Greene. My terrific sisters were cited in The Same Stuff as Stars, as was my brother’s widow. My first collection of Christmas stories, Angels and Other Strangers, remembers my parents. My mother died before it was published, but I was able to tell her about the inscription, which also includes Takoma Park Presbyterian Church, where the stories were first read aloud. The second volume, A Midnight Clear, was for the two congregations that heard those stories. Husband John is also honored in The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, which started out as an exercise for How to Use a Computer and then became an anniversary present.

  Teachers and librarians have enriched my life, and my books of essays were for four of my great teachers, and Bread and Roses, Too was for Karen Lane, who is the kind of librarian every town should have. I wrote of Barbara Thompson in an earlier chapter, and if you see her name linked with Hazel Horton’s in Marvin One Too Many, it is because both of them have spent their lives as exemplary teachers of the very young. Hazel was my college roommate and also remains a dear friend. She is from the Appalachian hills and used to sing the old songs that are echoed in Come Sing, Jimmy Jo.

  I dedicated Jacob Have I Loved to Gene Namovicz. I was trying to be a bit clever with it, saying I wish it were Emma (a Jane Austen we both loved). People of my generation know the famous quotation from Helen Hayes’s autobiography about the peanuts that Charles McArthur put in her hand, saying, “I wish they were emeralds.” Gene would have rather had a good book any day than emeralds.

  Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom is my thanks to Virginia Buckley. No one ever had a better editor, and since the book was set in China, I thought a Chinese saying was appropriate: “A thousand thoughts; ten thousand thanks,” though ten thousand would still be far too few. Lauren Wohl, one of the great library promotion people I have worked with, has the distinction of being the dedicatee of both the authors and the illustrator for Consider the Lilies.

  With the dedicatee of Come Sing, Jimmy Jo I have the longest history. Mary Watt Sorum’s mother and my mother were friends at the General Assembly’s Training School before her mother went to the Belgian Congo and my mother went to China. We can’t remember a time when we didn’t know about each other. If, as children, we whined, Mother would remind us that Georgia Watt’s children in Africa all had polio and she had TB. Whereas when the Watt children whined, their mother would tell them how Mary Goetchius’s children were running away from war and occupation. You’d think that would make Mary and me never want to meet, but meet we did when we were both teen-agers. We knew that first day that we would be friends for life and we are.

  Jean Little and her dear friend and mine Claire Mackay got a book. Jean, who is often referred to as “Canada’s most beloved writer for children,” recently recalled an interviewer who asked what she wanted to be called. “Why, Jean Little,” she said, a bit surprised by the question. “No,” he said, “I mean, do you want to be called ‘visually challenged’ or—” “How about blind?” she said. “Oh, no,” said the shocked interviewer, “they don’t like to be called that.” I once went to England as Jean’s seeing-eye dog. I am proud to say that I was quite a good one and laughed louder at her stories than the actual dog or dogs ever did.

  Virginia Buckley, my editor for forty years.

  Ted and Alice Vial were our dearest friends from Princeton Seminary days. At nine and a half months, John Jr. took his first steps on their living room floor. Grace Greene and Nancy Graff of Jip, His Story are chief among the many friends who have made Vermont feel like my real home. In her introduction, Nancy has already told you about our weekly lunches at Wayside that continue to be more important to me than she will ever know, and Grace, the mother of our adopted grandchild, starred in chapter one.

  Stephanie Tolan and I have waged peace together as well as co-written four plays, three of which we collaborated on with Steve Liebman. With few of my long-time friends have I shared more joys and grief than with Kathryn Morton, to whom I dedicated Park’s Quest. The Day of the Pelican is dedicated to the Kosovar family that inspired it and to Mark Ofila, whose knowledge and love of Kosova made it possible for me to write the story. Margaret Mahy was a writer both John and I admired extravagantly, as well a cherished friend. Steven and Helen Kellogg have brightened our lives for more than a quarter of a century. The three of them share the page in The Flint Heart, a book wonderfully illustrated by John Rocco. Mary Brigid Barrett is the incomparable President of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, and she and her whole family are an inspiration as well as just plain fun to be with. I felt this family of artists needed a truly beautiful book, and when I saw Pamela Dalton’s exquisite paper-cut illustrations for Brother Sun, Sister Moon I knew it must be inscribed for them. Christopher Franceschelli was the publisher of that book and also much earlier at Dutton, the publisher of Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight, my re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem, which I dedicated to him.

  Any of these wonderful friends is worthy of a book, but it’s like that T-shirt. She wrote a whole book and all I got was this lousy line. And some people, who have been really important to me, didn’t even get a line. I beg forgiveness of them all.

  Accepting the Wilder from Martha Parravano, chair of the committee.

  Awards, Etc.

  People often ask about awards, and there are always stories surrounding such events. When The Master Puppeteer was nominated for the National Book Award, Sophie Silberberg called from Thomas Y. Crowell to tell me. She told me not to worry about winning, as just to be nominated was honor enough, but that since the award would be given in three days, it would be a good idea to prepare a five-hundred-word acceptance speech just in case one would be needed. There was no way I was going to write
a speech for a prize I wasn’t going to win, so when Sophie called with the unbelievable news that I had actually won, I was, of course, unprepared.

  John Sr. was out of town. (It is a rule of nature that spouses are always out of town when they are most needed.) It was a school holiday, and Lin and John had taken off on their bikes with several friends for a ride to a park in Silver Spring where they planned to have a picnic lunch. While I was still trying to recover from Sophie’s call, the telephone rang. This time it was a woman telling me that there had been a bike accident involving my daughter. One of the children in the outing had gone to her house and asked her to call me.

  There was no more thought of the award or of any speech. I hopped in the car and raced to the address the woman had given me. After I made sure Lin was fine, though her bicycle wasn’t rideable, I told her and John the news and that I had to write five hundred deathless words by evening, so that Sophie and Virginia Buckley could vet them and turn them over to the press the next morning. I drove Lin and her broken bike home and set to work. I promised the children that if they would leave me alone for the entire afternoon I would take them to supper at any restaurant they chose and they could order anything they wanted.

  With such an offer, they happily complied. I mean, at that point in our lives, going to a fast-food place and splitting the hamburgers in half was “going out for dinner.” I think it was well after six before Sophie and Virginia agreed that the speech was okay, and the children and I could go out and celebrate. They chose a new place that served the usual hamburger fare, but was noted for monster ice cream dishes. It was very loud and ordinary, but I didn’t care. We were a happy bunch. Suddenly, I was aware that our booth was surrounded by the entire waitstaff singing: “For she’s a jolly good fellow,” at the end of which they shouted in unison: “Congratulations to Katherine Paterson, the greatest children’s writer in the world!”