When I was writing my third picture book, Love, I set out to write a totally reinforcing story that was full of joy and full of love to the point that it was called Love. Why? Well, because I had a new daughter and I wanted to write a story that I could read to her at the end of the night, and feel good about myself and hopefully have her feel good about the world as much as she could. But the symbol was that I just wanted to share love with kids all over the country. Right?
But after I wrote the book, and revised it several times, it just felt like there was something missing. And I had an epiphany. Because, and this all comes down to the way I see the world. I think there’s great love in the world, but I also see a lot of sadness and I see melancholy. And I don’t think it’s something that we should try to eliminate; I think it’s part of our journey.
So, if I was going to write a book called Love, I felt like I had to at least acknowledge adversity. And in one of the scenes in the book, it’s a big cast of characters, right? The way I describe it is, the main character in the book Love is a contemporary American childhood and so there are kids of all different races and abilities. So we’re trying to bring as many people into this concept of love as possible. No one person owns the concept of love.
Well one kid, he’s kind of hovering underneath a piano with his dog and he’s hiding because his two parents are in an argument. And it seems like it might have been a big argument, a scary argument, because there’s a lamp that’s toppled over, and even a little loveseat that’s on its side. So it’s a scary moment.
And I felt like it’s important for kids to know at a young age that adversity exists and it’s part of our journey. And in some ways it’s beautiful. It’s just as beautiful as the parts where we’re happy and joyful and full of love. It’s just part of our experience as humans.
Well, we had this book in, I guess it’s called F&G form, folded and gathered. So, it goes out to bookstores and it goes out to reviewers. And there was a little bit of controversy about this particular moment and there was some pushback from a certain outlet.
They said basically, “We can’t have a book called Love have this moment of violence, of insinuated violence, so, can you take it out?” And the illustrator and I, Loren Long, we really had to sit with this feedback and decide what were we going to do. This is where art and commerce collide. So, if we took this scene out, maybe it would really help with book sales. And if we kept this scene in because we thought it was the right artistic choice, maybe it would harm the book’s ability to get out into the world when, let’s be honest, that’s what we want our books to do. We want them to have a wide reach. We want every community to read the book to their young family members.
Well, we’re lucky because we had experienced a little success in previous books, both of us. So we just took the risk and we said, “We’re going to keep it in,” because we felt like that beat needed to be in the story. And I’d have to tell you, like, I’m so thankful we did because one of my proudest feelings about the book Love now is that it has generated lots of conversations, not only about the concept of love but the concept of adversity.
And I think at the end of the day, all books are – they’re just a vehicle to conversations. And I think this added to the conversations that were possible around the book Love and that’s why it needed to be kept in.
I remember posing through an essay conversation with Kate DiCamillo, like, “What is the job of the author for the very young? Is it to preserve innocence or tell the truth?” That’s a big question for a writer of books for young people. And you know, she said, “I think our job is to love the world.” And I thought that that was such a beautiful answer to the point that every time I sign the book Love, you know, I write the person’s name, “To Todd, Love the World,” and then I write, sign my name.
So I kind of am plagiarizing Kate DiCamillo every time I sign that name or sign that book. But I just think that’s such a great way to sort of think about that particular scene in Love that is kind of scary. Well, I hope that in presenting that I’m also loving the world.
