Friendship. Yeah. Just about every book that I’ve done except for I Yam a Donkey I think is about friendship. And friendship is a funny thing for me. I don’t — probably like a lot of people I have a few very close friends that I keep close. And for me some of — one of the things that I look for in a friend is can I understand him or her.
I mean that sounds awful, but, you know, I tend to just oh, here comes Buddy. Buddy’s got a beard. Gotta go, Buddy. So, you know, we cannot be friends. That’s not true. But friendships are just fraught with complexities, and I think I’ve spent a lot of my time just thinking about, you know, what — I feel like — let me think about this. I feel like I’m often a bad friend, and I think about that a lot.
And that kind of makes it into my work. The Sock Monkey books, for example, Sock Monkey is kind of vain and he kind of puts himself first and often will — but then in the end he just needs all this help. That’s me again. You know, I think — I hope I’m not too vain, but sometimes I do think without meaning to I’ll put myself and my own needs first and then I’ll go home and I’ll think oh, why did I say that to Mary? I should have been a good friend.
You know, it’s just agonizing over these things. And that definitely makes it in. So that’s some ways that I’m not the greatest friend in the world, but I try very hard to be a generous person. I think maybe one of the ways that I’m a good friend is I like to make things for people, and it’s very important for me to make things for people. And in fact, I get more pleasure out of giving one individual person a gift than sometimes I do with having books out there.
