You know, writing was something that I never even ever imagined that I’d do. And I mean I had a friend who worked in the book business actually who said to me, “You know what you should do? You should write a children’s book about your own childhood, something that happened to you. Your kids would love that.” And at the time he didn’t have children and I laughed at him and I said, “Children don’t care about anything that happened to you!” You know, they care about what’s happening with them. And so I kind of dismissed the idea.
But my son was seven at the time. He’s now 13. That’s sort of the moment when children first start noticing their physicality and that they’re different from people around them. And he was very worried about his teeth. His teeth were coming in and he thought they were too big for his face. And he didn’t like his haircut. And he didn’t like his school picture. And it just — it broke my heart. You know, I just couldn’t believe it because he was the most beautiful boy. But then I
And I remembered when I was seven, the same age. That was really when I first noticed my freckles and started hating them. Before they just didn’t matter to me. And then there were kids in the neighborhood who called me Freckleface Strawberry because that was the name of a powdered drink mix like Kool-Aid. So there was like Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry and Blueberry Blast and Freckleface Strawberry. So I sort of started with that idea just about not liking something about yourself. And I think that in a lot of children’s literature, especially the classics, there’s something that a child doesn’t like but then they grow up and they’re transformed and they’re beautiful and they no longer resemble the lump that they were.
But, of course, that’s not how it goes in real life. Really what happens is that, you know, you have these freckles and stuff and you grow up and you still have the freckles and you still don’t like them, but it doesn’t matter so much. So I wanted to write a story about how the things that loom large in childhood are less important when you grow up.
There were a lot of places that I lived where there were no redheads and there were no freckled people and people were like, “What are you? And why do you look that way?”
So and it wasn’t really until I spent time in areas where there were lots of Scottish and Irish people and to be able to see like, oh, there are lots of people who look like me. But it was very
all the kids would be tan. They had dark hair or blonde hair. And to look like I did was to look super-different in some areas of the country.
