by M. E. Kerr
“Because,” Shoebag silently finished the sentence for her, “she is a Doll Smasher.”
“Because,” Miss Rattray finished her own sentence, finally, “she is a very special little girl.”
“So am I a very special little boy,” said Stanley Sweetsong, “according to my mother.”
“Then you two should get along very well, Stanley,” said Miss Rattray. “You will share the bathroom across the hall.”
Miss Rattray was a very tall, sturdy woman, who looked as though a string suspended from the ceiling was attached to her head. She had a very erect posture, large black spectacles, and short black hair. She wore a blue-and-white striped seersucker suit, for the school colors were royal blue and white.
“I hope you will be happy here, Stanley.”
“The bed isn’t made,” said Stanley Sweetsong.
“Here we make our own beds, dear.”
“I have never made my own bed in my entire life.”
“No time like the present to start,” said Miss Rattray.
Then with a smile and a wave she left the boy by himself in the room, except for Shoebag, now clinging to the twenty-second slat in the Venetian blind.
When the boy sat down on the unmade bed, he put his hands up to his face and sobbed.
“Cheer up,” Shoebag said. “It’s not that bad here.”
But, of course, humans rarely hear anything roaches have to say, and Stanley Sweetsong was crying too loud, anyway.
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A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
My real name is Marijane Meaker.
When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.
My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.
I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.
I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)
Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York, Dinky was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.
Gentlehands, a novel as successful as Dinky but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the New York Times called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”
One of the hardest books for me to write was Little Little, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.
I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called Deliver Us from Evie. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.
When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called Your Eyes in Stars.
Growing up, I was friends with a boy whose family was in the funeral business. As the only male, he was expected to take over the business when he grew up. Can you imagine looking forward to that in your future? Neither could Jack, who inspired I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me.
My book Night Kites is about AIDS. To my knowledge, it was the first print book that featured two gay men who have contracted AIDS, rather than having the illness come about because of a blood transfusion. When we first learned of AIDS in 1981, everyone grew afraid of old friends who were gay males. There was a cruel joke that “gay” stood for “got AIDS yet?” But soon we realized AIDS was not just a gay problem. The book is set in the Hamptons, though much of the action takes place on a Missouri farm.
I have also written a teenage autobiography, called Me Me Me Me Me, which deals with my years growing up in upstate New York during the thirties and forties. My older brother, Ellis, was a fighter pilot in the naval air force, seeing action over Japan. After World War II, he fought in Vietnam for our secret airline Air America, and later in Korea. He was my favorite relative until Vietnam. We had a major falling-out over the war when he called me a “peacenik.” We never felt the same about each other after that, up until his death in the nineties. My much younger brother has lived with his family most of his life in Arizona. We don’t see as much of each other as we’d like because of the distance between our homes.
I have always given my parents credit for my becoming a writer. My father was a great reader. Our living room was filled with walls of books. I grew up with him reading to me, and ultimately began reading any novel he did. But I am a writer largely due to my mom’s love of gossip. Our venetian blinds were always at a tilt in our house because Mother watched the neighbors day and night. Many of her telephone conversations began, “Wait till you hear this!” On execution nights in our prison, my mother and her girlfriends huddled outside in a car, waiting for the executioner to go inside. He was one of ten men who entered the prison together on execution night, so no one snooping could know who had really pulled the switch.
I have taught writing for thirty-four year
s at nearby Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. We benefit, in part, the Springs Scholarship Fund. My teaching inspired me to write Blood on the Forehead: What I Know about Writing. A dozen members who had never finished a book became published writers after joining the class, and we also have members who are already professional writers. Currently, I am in the middle of a memoir called Remind Me. The title comes from an old Mabel Mercer song:
Remind me not to find you so attractive
Remind me that the world is full of men
Portrait of Meaker, drawn by Louise Fitzhugh from a baby picture.
Seven-year-old Meaker, her mother, and her brother Ellis in Auburn, New York.
Meaker (front left) with her mother, her brother Ellis, her father, and several other Meakers at the home of British relatives in Brighton in 1938.
Meaker as a girl scout in Auburn in 1939.
Meaker, age seventeen, with her first car, a 1937 LaSalle convertible with a rumble seat, and a sailor from Sampson Naval Base. The bane of her parents’ existences—both the base and the sailors.
Meaker and Jim Sears at a fraternity dance in Missouri in 1948.
Meaker with Irving the dog in East Hampton, New York, in 1976.
Meaker (front), with close friend and author Tom Baird and Barbara Dicks of Harper & Row in 1980.
Portrait of Meaker at age sixty-two.
Meaker with Tom Baird in 1989.
Meaker holding Gerbils the dog, next to ER the Siamese cat, in East Hampton in 1989.
Meaker and neighbor John “Trip” Timmerman in East Hampton in December 1991.
Meaker, her brother Charles, and her grandniece Tracy Hovelin in August 1999.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Mary James
Cover design by Barbara Brown
978-1-4804-5589-4
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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Shoebag Returns,
the sequel to Shoebag
More ebooks by M. E. Kerr
also known as Mary James
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