On the day S realized she would outlive me, she had a decent-sized meltdown. We were at a barbecue and I carried her to an ice chest to fetch an ice cream while she wailed, promising that I'd live to 100 so we could have a long time together. I told her about how we'd be old grannies who shared a bed, tucked in with our walking sticks, cackling late at night. That cheered her up. She took a selfie of us on her Fire tablet, then added stickers. In it, her eyes are blurry stars splotched with red but she’s smiling, and there is a kiss-face emoji overlaid along with text bubbles that say, “Old ladys” and “We’re both so fuck old!!”
Obviously, I can't guarantee that's how it will go. It got her out of the time vertigo, though. When she was five days old, she was fixated on the handle of her baby carrier, turning her head so her dark little eyes could follow it like a rainbow from one side of the world to the other. Now she has zoomed all the way out.
The story of a life is, to me, one of the most terrifying things to behold, like seeing the planet with the atmosphere peeled off. But it populates a whole genre of children's books. Princess Diana, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., Frida Kahlo, David Bowie, Rosa Parks—they all have their own books. And almost by definition, they’re stories that don’t end in a bouncy old bed as a grannie. We’re talking assassinations, polio, accidents, prison, which is what makes these books so funny—why do we think this should be cute?
We own the Amelia Earhart Little People, Big Dreams book by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, which begins with little Amelia wanting to know why women can’t be pilots and ends with her flying over some Pacific Islands, concluding, "and so she flew on, never to return." Hang on, did she crush the patriarchy or crash into an atoll? Can you have it both ways?
A life is always a heavy edit.
Civil disobedience and organizing is left out of the Rosa Parks book: one day she is asked to get up out of her bus seat and spur-of-the-moment decides, “No!” At that point, she is trundled off to jail.
The Princess Diana book was on display at the library when we last went, and I thought, I'll bite: How do they wrap this up? Two things were interesting about this hagiography: It introduced the concept of her gorging on sweets then purging after she realized her husband loved another woman; kind of a lot for 5-year-olds. “The sadness grew into an eating disorder called bulimia,” says the text. The gouache illustrations show Prince Charles in a kilt, and Diana in the iconic sheep sweater you can buy from Rowing Blazers for USD248.
Several pages on, there is no mention at all of her grisly death in the Paris tunnel. We simply end on an illustration of the palace gate festooned with bouquets, and the resolution that she had “become the Princess of People’s Hearts.”
I also read Who Is Bono? He was born a baby, we are told, and didn't much like school, so instead would roam around Dublin and listen to records by the Beatles. That gets us a sidebar on John Lennon. There is nothing on U2’s residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, since Bono’s story is still being written.
Could you explain Björk to your kids? Noel Gallagher? What are these books but the t-shirt quilts of Boomer and Gen X memories? The shelves are squeezed tight with biographies tending to the political and social agendas of parents and educators, even though the most important people in the world right now are Trisha Paytas and Paul Mescal. Why are we doing this? Do we see what a contortion it is?
“Kids really should have a child as the protagonist,” says Phaea Crede, picture book author (Super Pizza & Kid Kale and the forthcoming Princess Battle Royale) and person with the best author headshot I’ve seen. “It's one of the major rules that’s very hard to break, so a lot of biographies you'll see people spending maybe more time than necessary on when the person was a kid and really focusing on what happened when they were a kid that might inspire them when they're in the future.”
This is true of the Harriet Tubman Little People, Big Dreamers book, which begins with Minty looking out the window at night, wishing to be freed from slavery.
Over the ocean in an ordinary house in London, Little Person With Big Dreams David Bowie had dance moves that would “take him out of this planet.” (I’m reminded of Bruce Springsteen talking about shaking his 7-year-old ass.) Later, Bowie got into a fight and a friend punched him in his eye. This “changed David’s look forever, and made him strangely magnetic.” Cool.
Whatever the traumas, they can be worked into an origin story, while everything else can be excised (“David Bowie no hero for sleeping with kids, but he was no Gary Glitter either,” Belfast Telegraph). Above all, the story must end happily.
“Endings have to be hopeful,” says Crede. “[The book] has to inspire kids. You can't have a sad picture book. Book picture books that are about death—it has to be hopeful at the end. There's no way anyone would publish a book with like a sad ending.”
And so we fly on, never to return.
The entire picture-book biographies undertaking is a monument to our own petty concerns and need for meaning-making. It’s perhaps the most we lie to children, since it’s the one thing that is supposed to be nonfiction.
Chrissie Wright is a librarian and writes the
about kidlit. She says that “the deluge of moralistic picture book biographies we’re seeing is more for the intellectual and emotional satisfaction of grown-ups than for their kids. Grownups want to feel that they’ve Taught Something Important.” (Who Is Ralph Lauren?)And the kids in her library? “They want to have a good time.”
There’s a bit in the 10th anniversary introduction of Liar’s Club where Mary Karr is talking about the response other people have had to her book, how they will share with her their own insane stories. One woman told her about lying awake at night as a child feeling “the metaphorical foundations of her family shake as her parents roared around in the masks of monsters.” What a line. I think it’s an argument for fantasy, for invention, for getting the adults out of the way, not for some Jack Ezra Keats collage applied to hardship narratives.
How about we never grow up? Let us slip into the strange little details of a world not yet fully editorialized! Leave us in a place where we don’t know how it ends.
Or we’re fuck old, but make it funny.
Related reads:
’ Sophie Haigney in The DriftLet the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s Books by me, heh, in Lit Hub
The Biggest Trend In Parenting Is ~Supreme~ — Courtney Gorter on RBG in Romper
A few good new children’s books while we’re talking
Madame Badobedah and the Old Bones, by Sophie Dahl, illustrated by Lauren O’Hara
Speaking of acknowledging the end of life, Madame Badobedah is BACK in a new picture-book-with-chapters from Sophie Dahl. Mabel lives in the Mermaid Hotel, a seaside inn, with her parents, and becomes friends with an elderly guest, a story that grew out of Dahl’s thinking about the relationship between grandchildren and their grandparents. Imagination provides an escape for Mabel as an only child, and Madame B as a solitary elder. During the pandemic Dahl told me, “We underestimate what [children are] capable of just taking in their stride.”
S stole this one as soon as it arrived to enjoy in her bedroom with the door shut.
Gray, by Laura Dockrill, illustrated by Lauren Child
I can be tetchy about mindfulness books but Gray, from Angry Cookie’s Laura Dockrill is a GREAT one for offering up a visualization of how kids sometimes feel on blah, scrunchy, meh kinds of days. S and J both said they knew EXACTLY what the book was about.
The Truth About the Couch, by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Liniers
We are a big Dragons Love Tacos family (apparently now a musical?), and Adam Rubin is good at writing funny, playful books that don’t worry terribly about the story making narrative sense. In The Truth About The Couch, the center of the household is the site of mythology—of sailing away, of eating coins and remotes. Fun to read and not too long.
Other goodies
🐛
in The Paris Review: “No one cared about me, because they had decided that whatever I would need in life I would figure out how to get it, and they were right. I have to tell you how much I love my parents for forgetting most of the time to tell me how to live.” (Don’t worry, I’m solidly in the overthinking-my-parenting camp.)🐛 Can’t overstate how good this Daisy Alioto/Dirt piece on the eclipse was: “My mother knows the parts of my personality that weren’t borrowed from anyone else, which is, I suspect, a large part of what it means to be truly seen. I couldn’t see her face when I was born, I couldn’t see her face the first time she realized I was an adult. But I’m watching now. And someday we will look into each other’s faces for the last time.”
🐛 A bureaucrat with an arts portfolio explaining how he thinks arts funding should work: “Our position is that the government shouldn’t be supporting the arts in the way it does today. And we would give back more money to people so they can actually value things that they find creative and invest in and purchase them and attend them.” GOOD FUCKING LORD.
🐛 Don’t ask how, but I wound up on this
essay from 2017 and I can’t believe it exists in some distant bit of the internet I had never heard of! I can’t believe we’re not rereading it! (I know we all loved We All Want Impossible Things and Sandwich is out in June!!!)🐛 Really loving Jess Allen’s paintings, which remind me of this snap from a few months ago at bedtime when I looked up and saw the shadows of my clingy child and myself knitted together on the curtains
My son read "Who is Walt Disney?" I asked him what he learned. He said, "After he got married, he took a two week honeymoon with his wife."
This is so brilliant, what a genre to behold. Also speaking of, this!: "The story of a life is, to me, one of the most terrifying things to behold, like seeing the planet with the atmosphere peeled off."