Gooney Bird Greene is in second grade, and she’s very outgoing and very self-confident. My mother would have called her a “little mouthy.” She’s exactly the kind of child I was not. I was always the one who sat silently with my head down looking at the floor. And I was terribly shy. So she falls into the category of the kind of child I yearned to be, because certainly I knew children like that — they’ve always been around, those self-confident children. So I think, as often writers do, we try to recreate our own childhood in terms of what we wished it could have been like.
So here is a child who in the first book, enters a classroom a month after school has begun, which I remember doing many times, but in 7th grade. Not only has school begun and 7th grade is a tough age anyway, but I’m also in a new location, in anther country even. We have moved now to Tokyo and suddenly I’m thrust into a classroom. And I’m now 70 years old so I was 11 in 7th grade and that makes it 59 years ago. And yet to me it’s like yesterday that I entered the classroom having just had my hair cut and the first words I heard were from a boy sitting in the classroom, calling out, “Is it a boy or a girl?” So embarrassing and humiliating when you’re 11 years old.
So she is a character I made up, but I thrust into a classroom on her own, but she doesn’t wait around to see how anybody is going to comment. She saunters into the classroom and says, “Hello I’m your new student and I want a desk right in the middle of everything.” I want to be right smack in the middle of everything.
