Almost everything in A Day With Wilbur Robinson has some basis in truth. And yes, my sister did pay me to feed her grapes while she talked to her boyfriend on the phone. In the book, it is a frog with a turban that’s feeding the sister grapes while she talks to her boyfriend on the phone. My grandfather had false teeth and a glass eye as well as a missing thumb. So I left the thumb part out, but the grandfather in A Day With Wilbur Robinson is missing his false teeth and that’s what they’re looking for the whole time.
I raised frogs every spring in our house from tadpoles and by end of summer our house was overrun with frogs. So, in A Day With Wilbur Robinson there are frogs all over the place and they can sing and dance like Louis Armstrong — that didn’t actually happen at our house, though our house was full of frogs. But we were often listening to Louis Armstrong records, being in Louisiana as we were. So I just combined the two. Yes, I had an uncle who swore he was from outer space. And he was so convincing. I was like, “Why would a grownup lie about that?”
He didn’t like overdo it. It was very matter of fact. It was like, “Well, you know, when I was traveling intergalactically last week and met some of my friends on Mars
They may come visit this weekend.” It was very matter of fact — like he was taking a trip to the country. It just sounded very believable. And I’m like, “Why would he make that up?” It seemed perfectly plausible. So I celebrated him in that book by making the uncle genuinely being from outer space and re-arriving in his spaceship. It’s all that stuff that happened. I just sort of exaggerated a little bit and in some cases didn’t have to exaggerate it very much at all.
