I asked myself as I was working on “Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from a Children’s Book,” would there be a book that I would say had had the most profound effect and I honestly have to say, it depends on what age of my life we’re talking about. There was a book at five, and at six, and at seven. But next to my desk as a writer, I keep a first edition of “The Secret Garden” and it was purchased by my mother’s great aunt, and she was born in 1985, so right at the end of the Civil War.
She read it as an adult, she passed it on to my mother, who my mother was born a few years after that. It’s inscribed to my mother and then my mother gave it to me and she read it to me. And when I literally, physically touch that book, I’m connected to everybody in my family back to the time of the Civil War.
And I read that book every five years and I’m sure the words change on the page because I see something different in them every time I read that book. It’s one of those books that holds up for multiple readings and wherever you stand in life. So I would have say if I had to take one book from my childhood to that desert island, you know, I mean just a single book, it would be “The Secret Garden.”
When I was at the, the book festival in Austin, Texas, the Texas Book Festival, there was a mixed audience of adults and children. And at one point a little boy raised his hand and he said, “that’s very interesting what all you adults are saying about your favorite book, but I want to share with you what the most important book in my life was.” And he said— and everybody laughed, you know.
And he said, “I’m six years old, and when I was five and a half, I read “Where the Wild Things Are”. And that has had the most profound effect on my life.” And after he spoke, this little girl came up and, and she looked at me and she said, “I’m ten, and like you my favorite book is “The Secret Garden.” And she said, “you know what I love about it is what I learned is that no matter how you’re broken, or how your family’s broken, you can be made whole again, you can be made well again.”
And that is such a profound reading of that book and that is the power of that book, that these children have gone through terrible things and yet, you know, nature, air, the garden, their interaction with each other, they make them whole human beings again. So I, I’m amazed at you know even in childhood, I think children have that ability to go underneath a book and really find what’s there.