I loved my teaching at the university. I absolutely adored it. And when I was watching my own students teach young children, I saw kids who had never seen a book in their lives. And my students were trying to teach these children how to read in a class of thirty kids.
They were trying to teach children sounds. They were trying to say to children, “What’s coming out of my mouth is actually on the page. This is what it says.” And kids who had been read to picked it up. Children who had not been read to didn’t pick it up So I thought, okay, I have to leave the university because I haven’t got time to teach properly and I’m not going to teach improperly. So let me leave.
And then I got just so frustrated because I could see that people weren’t reading aloud to their children. I was listening to pediatricians talk. I was listening to speech pathologists. I was I was listening to sociologists, psychologists about the importance of reading aloud.
And I thought I have to write the book. I’ve got to write a book for parents cause it has to happen. We could change the world if people did this. So
I sat down and wrote an academic book of 66,000 words because I had not long been an academic. You know, I had been an academic.
And my editor who had a three-year-old child at the time said, “Mem, I’m actually a very bright person, you know. I went to a good school in America” — as you call them schools; we never called them schools. But she said, “I went to a good school and I did well. And I do not understand half the jargon in this book. And I’m a parent of a three-year-old.”
And she said, “I want you to lie in a couch on lie on one of your couches and I want your reader to lie on the other couch and I want you to gossip to them about how important it is to read aloud to children.”
And thank God she said that because really it’s just full of gossip. It’s full of little stories about what happened to this person, what happened to that, built around a theme of what reading is.
It’s about bonding, attachment, fun, laughter, having a great time, smelling the back of a little neck after a bath at night, mmmm, and then reading a book and talking about a book and the kids driving you crazy on a particular page which they will not turn over cause they’ve got to talk about this bit and this bit and this bit. And you think I’m so tired.
But it’s just a wonderful, wonderful thing to do. But out of that wonder is so much benefit in so many ways. So I wrote Reading Magic and that became a best seller as well. I’m so excited about it. Now, you know, books like that sort of come and go, but this is still with us. It’s still here.
