Stories of My Life

by Katherine Paterson

  Virginia Buckley and me at the National Book Awards for The Master Puppeteer 1977.

  Even in that noisy restaurant, heads were turning. My face was red, but my smug children were beaming.

  The prize for winning the National Book Award in 1977 was one thousand dollars—more undesignated cash than my family had ever seen, so it seemed to me that it shouldn’t go for beans or bills. I asked the children what they would like to do with the prize money. With one voice they voted to go to Busch Gardens, an amusement park that had just opened near Williamsburg, Virginia. Now, I do not like crowds or rides; therefore, an amusement park would be my last choice on where to spend prize money, but I’d asked, and this was their choice.

  The motel had a swimming pool. At this point in our lives, we hadn’t frequented motels. It never occurred to me that I should have packed swim gear. The sign at the pool strictly forbade swimming in unsuitable gear, but it was hot, and I had four children panting to leap into the water. Heck, I’d just won the National Book Award. What could they do if my kids swam in shorts and T-shirts, sue me? “Go ahead,” I said. “Jump in!” I felt reckless and gleeful, flaunting the rules.

  The next day was one of the hardest days of motherhood. I had to avert my eyes as my precious children rode and re-rode the most terrifying thrill rides I had ever imagined. Their father even took a ride or two. I sat huddled over a table in the shade trying not to look. Near the end of the day, Mary was delegated to make sure I had some fun. She decided to take me on the baby roller coaster—the one they let wee children ride. I hated every stomach-churning minute of it.

  When we were at last safely in the car, I was breathing normally but the children were still giddy from their great day. “When can we do this again?” they demanded. I wanted to say “Never,” but I said what I thought was the same thing: “The next time I win the National Book Award.” Two years later when Gilly won, they reminded me of my promise. I made their father take them. I stayed at home, where there was no chance that I might inadvertently see what they were daring to ride or how often.

  Years ago, my friend Phyllis Naylor made a speech in which she said: “Katherine Paterson and I discovered that we share a certain neurosis, which is this: As long as we are being rejected, ignored, and unreviewed, we prove ourselves strong and tenacious and resilient. The harder the wind blows, the taller we stand. We’re sad, of course, but strong. Let some success blow our way, however, and while we are, of course, happy, we’re terrified, dyspeptic, and sleepless.”

  So what happens to a writer who has lived out a comfortable fourteen-odd years of genteel failure and modest attention, only to be suddenly pronounced an overnight success? Or, how does it feel, Mrs. Paterson, to win the National Book Award in 1977, the Newbery Medal in 1978, the National Book Award and Newbery Honor in 1979, and the Newbery Medal in 1981? Well, as I said earlier, I felt like Job backwards. “Why me, Lord? Why me?” These days I’m grateful, not worthy, but very grateful. At the beginning, it cost me more stomach churning than catching a glimpse of my children screaming with glee atop Die Wildkatze roller coaster in Busch Gardens.

  On the morning of Wednesday, January 25 at 5:49 a.m., the phone rang. My husband gave a sleepy grunt and handed it to me. On the other end an incredibly wide-awake voice gave me the news that Bridge to Terabithia had won the Newbery Medal. Peter Spier, the Caldecott winner, said his wife went down and got the leftover New Year’s champagne. John went down to the kitchen and brought me up a cup of warm milk.

  I had been directed not to tell anyone, but to take a plane on Thursday and come to Chicago for the official announcement. I had promised to speak in a Baltimore school on Thursday morning. Would I need to lie to the librarian friend who had invited me? I called and as soon as I said I would need to postpone my visit, she cried: “That’s wonderful!” Apparently, she knew without being told the reason.

  When I got up the next morning, John was already up with the radio on. “Chicago doesn’t look too good,” he said. It was something of an understatement. I had made a twelve noon reservation in order to get there by the 4:30 press conference. I rushed to the airport to get the ten o’clock flight. No one told me that the twelve had already been canceled and the eight a.m. was still in a holding pattern over the Midwest. I settled myself in the seat for the trip, my usual jitters quiet. I felt bathed in a warm orange glow—the kind you feel when you know that you love and are loved in return. Ah, I thought, this is how it feels to win the Newbery.

  My warm glow sputtered out sometime during the endless circles over O’Hare. It began to dawn on me that I might not get there for the 4:30 press conference and subsequent celebration. What will they do? Surely they couldn’t go on without me. I was dead wrong. They not only could go on without me, they did. More than one person assured me it was the best party they remembered. Peter Spier, the only winner and honor recipient to get there, single-handedly charmed the press and the American Library Association, melting the heart of blizzard-bound Chicago, while I sat in Kansas City frantic because a phone call to HarperCollins let me know that my editor Virginia had left New York at the same time I had left Washington, and she hadn’t been heard from since. I knew I could go on writing books without a medal, but I darkly suspected that without Virginia, I was finished. On Friday afternoon I stumbled into National Airport, ready to kiss the carpet. Virginia was okay and I was home. It didn’t matter if I got a prize or not.

  As the days went by, it all seemed less and less real. I fully expected another phone call with the voice at the other end saying; “Now that you’ve had your fun, the real Newbery Medal goes to . . .” Then one day a long envelope arrived in the mail. Inside were ten gold seals. Engraved on the seals were the familiar words that had blinked at me seductively since those days I was a library helper at Calvin H. Wiley Elementary School. It was there that I discovered Kate Seredy, Robert Lawson, and Rachel Field. And here were those same gold stickers, ready for me to peel off and stick to the jacket of a book with my name on it.

  It is amazing how quickly one becomes accustomed to glory. I began to admire my own copy of Bridge to Terabithia with its new seal. I held it up so the light from the dining room window could bounce off of it. There was no one home to share it with except our dog Blossom and she was not interested. I needed to show it off. It was my proof that I had actually won the same medal Kate and Robert and Rachel had won so many years before. I mean, they wouldn’t have sent me the seals if they were really going to give the medal to someone else, now would they?

  At last the children came trooping home from school. “Look!” I cried. “Look what came in the mail!” They had all been so thrilled when the news first came, but now they looked dutifully at the seal and headed for the kitchen. “What’s for snack?” “Isn’t it beautiful?” I said. “This gold seal is going to be on every copy of Bridge to Terabithia that’s ever printed!” “Brag. Brag. Brag,” said my ten-year-old Mary. Back in the real world, I helped them assemble their snacks.

  I gave myself a gift when Bridge won. I decided that we were now rich enough to buy fresh milk. “I will never mix another gallon of dried skim milk as long as I live,” I promised myself, and I haven’t. When Jacob Have I Loved won in 1981 we had just moved to Norfolk and I was homesick for my Washington- area friends. My gift to myself that time was that I could call my friends long-distance whenever I wanted to. I still do that.

  At the Newbery banquet in 1978, John was sitting on the platform with me, but the four children were seated at the table squarely in front of the podium with the Harper crowd. I asked Lauren Wohl to sit by David because I was afraid my relating the story of Lisa’s death might be very hard for him. Lauren tells the story that as the speech went on, she was the one sobbing, and David was handing her a Kleenex and saying, “Are you all right? Are you all right?”

  People often ask me which is my favorite book, and, I, like many other writers, feel as though I’
m being asked to choose a favorite child. I don’t think any of them (books or children) are perfect and I love them all. I have a different relationship with each one, so it would be impossible to compare them on the basis of who or which is the favorite. But when I’m asked which book I’m proudest of, I say, “Jacob Have I Loved.” There are several reasons I’m proud of Jacob. When The Master Puppeteer won the NBA, I had already finished writing Bridge. When Bridge won the Newbery, Gilly was about to be published. But when Gilly received both the NBA and Newbery Honor, I was in the early struggling stages with Jacob. How could this pitiful little non-book compete? I was terrified that it would die before it had a chance to be born. Or if I finished it, it would be published no matter how awful it was (in those days that fragment was truly awful) and my career and reputation would collapse into ruins.

  I thought about trying to finish it and then sending it to Virginia anonymously in a plain brown wrapper—no email submissions in those days. If she read it and liked it without any medal-heavy author’s name on it, then I would go ahead and let it be published. If she rejected it, I would know the truth. In a telephone call that spring she asked me if I was working. I said that I was trying to, but I wasn’t sure if it was any good or not, so she might not ever see it. “Well, just promise me you won’t send it to me anonymously,” she said. I never told her that I had thought of doing just that.

  My mother died in February just after Gilly was announced as the Newbery Honor book and before it won the NBA. We moved from Takoma Park, where we had spent thirteen wonderful years, to Norfolk just before she died. So I lost my mother and all my Washington-area friends at the same time. The only thing that kept me from drowning with grief that year was my struggle with Jacob. I had decided on the Jacob and Esau theme when I’d heard several of my delightful, intelligent friends talk about the way they still carried the psychic wounds of childhood. “Mother always loved him best,” said one. “If my sister hadn’t stolen my doll when I was seven years old . . .” began another. Do you really want to live your life crippled by your envy of your brother? I wondered. Isn’t there some statute of limitations on what your sister did when you were seven?

  Since I have grown up with Biblical stories, I began to look at the sibling relationships in those stories. Cain commits murder because he is jealous of his brother Abel. Jacob steals his brother’s birthright and his brother Esau wants to kill him. Jacob’s two wives are sisters, and the older one is envious of her younger sister because she knows that Jacob loves Rachel best. And on it goes. I will write about this, I thought, it’s a universal theme. I didn’t think it was my own problem until I sat down to write, but every time I sat down at my desk I was so filled with fury that I could hardly type. Hmmm. Someone else’s problem? Maybe not. As I’ve often said, writing is a lot cheaper than psychotherapy.

  When I was trying to figure the story out, when I was expending all kinds of fierce anger (as I first thought) at Louise for not realizing how much her parents and sister loved her, I was in the world of my book—not the world of sorrow and loneliness that I woke up to every morning. It seemed an impossible task, this book of blind jealousy that was making me furious. I tried desperately to write it, as I had all the previous novels, in the third person, but Louise’s voice kept intruding. She demanded the story be told her way. “All right,” I told her, “you can have the first draft. Next time I’ll fix it.” But the voice persisted into every attempt I made at third person. I finally realized that Louise is so consumed with envy she cannot see anyone else’s viewpoint. “But you are writing for young people,” some have said, “how can you trust them to realize that Louise is an unreliable narrator?” Well, I do trust my young readers. They have proven themselves to be quite sophisticated. I’ve had more trouble with adult readers not understanding the book than with young ones.

  I was walking past the phone that winter morning at about nine when it began to ring. “Katherine,” a familiar voice said, “this is Ginny Kruse.” “Oh, Ginny,” I said, “I’m so glad you called. I’ve never heard from that person in Wisconsin who asked me to speak and I need to get the details . . .” She broke in abruptly. “Katherine, I’m not calling about that. I’m calling to tell you that Jacob Have I Loved has won the 1981 Newbery Medal.” “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. After all, I already had my medal. “I wouldn’t kid about something like this,” she said a bit sternly.

  The original six at the Ambassador for Young People’s Literature ceremony at the Library of Congress, January 2010.

  This time it went much more smoothly. Winners were being called during normal waking hours and no one was expected to fly in for a press conference—just show up in June for the big celebration. Bill Morris, the legendary library promotion director at Harper, called to congratulate me and fill me in on the details. “We want the whole family to come again,” he said. “Bill, you know how big my family is. One husband, four children.” Yes, of course, he knew, and they were all to come to San Francisco.

  But my children were three years older and less naive than they had been when Bridge won the Newbery. On the night before the Newbery/Caldecott, we had been invited to a lovely dinner in a San Francisco home. The children opted out. They had discovered room service and thought they’d eat in and maybe watch TV or something. It seemed quite reasonable. By now Lin was eighteen and John seventeen and both quite responsible young adults.

  We got back to the hotel soon after ten o’clock to find thirteen-year-old Mary alone in the room, weeping heartbrokenly. She finally got out the fact that after dinner the older three had decided to go out and see a movie. She didn’t want to leave the hotel—after all, they had said they’d stay in and watch TV—but the older three had promised they’d be home right after the movie. And they’d never come back. She was quite sure all her siblings had been killed or left for dead on the streets of the city.

  We tried to reassure her, but it was hard to reassure ourselves. If they’d gone right after supper to a movie, they should have been back long ago. Eleven o’clock went by, and then twelve with no return. The way I’ve gotten through motherhood is to recite the motto: Panic at the last possible moment. As the clock crept toward one, the last possible moment seemed nearly upon me. Should I call the desk? The police? Area hospitals? What could anyone do? If three of my children were dead or injured, would they insist that I go ahead with my speech that night?

  It was almost one o’clock when they came in laughing. The first show had been full, they said, so they bought tickets for the next. Then when they came out, they couldn’t find a taxi, so they walked back. They couldn’t believe anyone would worry. They were fine. Well, their parents and their little sister were wrecks, but we recovered. Recovered, that is, until I checked out and saw the room service bill. I was totally appalled and humiliated. I apologized profusely to Bill Morris, who, ever the gentleman, said it was fine—not to worry. A few years later he told me that the MacLachlan kids had beat out the Paterson kids for most room service orders. Patty and I are both able to laugh about it now.

  It was the spring of 1998 and I was aware that sometime soon, the Hans Christian Andersen winners would be announced. I was at Calvin College for their biennial festival of Faith and Writing, where I was to be one of the three keynote speakers. I remember standing at a window in Gary Schmidt’s guest house realizing that although I had been nominated for a third time, there was little likelihood that I would ever win the award, and suddenly, it was all right. It didn’t matter, but late that very afternoon a call came telling me that I had indeed won. The Andersen is an international prize that gives its winners a sort of ambassadorial status to the children’s literature community in more than seventy member countries. I would be relating with persons from diverse cultures and religions, speaking many languages. There would be Israelis and Palestinians. There would be Russians and Chinese and Iranians. There would be citizens of African nations and islands of th
e Pacific. I was at that moment overwhelmed with gratitude. I felt somehow that God trusted me with this mission. It was an amazing feeling.

  We went to dinner but I could hardly eat, and after dinner we went to the jam-packed gymnasium to hear the first keynote speaker, Elie Wiesel.

  I was seated just below the dais and I watched and listened to what I will always believe was the greatest talk on the relation of faith to writing that I had ever heard. He strode back and forth on the platform, with no notes whatsoever, telling of his life from the concentration camp whose horrors robbed him of words to his finally being able to find words for the unspeakable.

  I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. Of course, I was still feeling the thrill of the Andersen announcement, but I could hardly enjoy it for wondering how I could possibly get up before that same audience the next night. How could anyone? The speech that I had worked on so long seemed childish and inadequate at best. How could I dare deliver it after Elie Wiesel’s earth-shattering presentation? But there was no escape. My name was on the posters all over town. And then I had an inspiration, and if you’re me, you’d call it divine.

  This is what I said when I got up before that crowd the next night. “The name of my talk is ‘Image and Imagination,’ and I want to begin with an imaginative exercise. Take out a piece of paper [and here I made a rectangle with my hands roughly 18 x 24] about this size—” I could see some of the women scrabbling about in their large purses, so I said: “No, no, this is an imaginative exercise. Okay. Now on that paper, down here in the right-hand corner I want you to print in bold block letters: ‘Elie Wiesel.’ And here a bit lower, print ‘John Updike,’ and right between them, put your own name.” There was a moment of puzzled silence and then a roar of laughter at which point I said: “Now that I have your complete sympathy, I’ll begin my talk.”