I have a good friend or a fellow children’s writer who lives in Greenwich named Anne Rockwell. She’s published many, many books and she’s also an illustrator. And at one point, we met each other and we both were expressing our dissatisfaction with writers’ groups that we had belonged to and never seemed to work out right. So I said, “Why couldn’t we be a writers’ group with two?” Because I really respect her work and she picked the idea up. So we met for a year every Friday and we were very faithful about this. I don’t think we missed more than one or two meetings. And we had decided for the ground rules we were each going to try something new
something we had not done before.
And I was very certain what I wanted to try, but what I thought it was a memoir, and probably an adult memoir. And Ann was going to do a historical novel. She got waylaid into barriers, she had deadlines, etc. So she started many things, which I think some of them she’s completed, but I just worked on this one thing. And it started out as, “Now that I’m an old woman and I look back
” That was the first sentence, something like, “Now that I’m an old woman
”
And I wrote a page. And it had no life. It just didn’t work at all. And I decided no, that’s not the way it’s going to go and then I just plunged right into, “I’m an old woman remembering. Here I am the child, write in
” And so that’s how it happened and this little character Allie who talks in the first person, and she certainly started out, she has a lot of Mary Ann characteristics, but she very soon escaped Mary Ann. She’s not me and she does a lot of things that I didn’t do. She does some things that I did do.
And each time I get in the story of the dolls that she puts to bed each night and some have to sleep on the floor because there is no room for them in her bed, that’s certainly Mary Ann. But the other characters are all fictional. Allie has a little brother named Danny. I have a little brother named Joel, now 76. And the book is dedicated to Joel. Danny is not Joel. The book takes over. The book decides what these characters have to do.
And Joel, in real life, as I remember him at that age was a terrible cry baby. But I did need Danny to be a cry baby. I needed Danny to be kind of a wise child. And Allie
I did have a friend named Rita Greenburg. Because it started off very realistically. We were at the Greenburg’s house. We did live there. We didn’t move. We were going to move to Strawberry Hill.
But as soon as we got to Strawberry Hill, the novel started taking over and once Mimi, this little chubby girl from across the street steps into the story, the story takes off, because there was a Mimi. There was a Mimi who lived across the street and she was probably five or so, as I was five when we moved there. And she was chubby and she had a chubby mother. And what I remember only, the only thing I remember about Mrs. Minnick
And her name, I slightly changed. First, I was keeping everybody’s names exactly and then I kind of changed them. But her mother, I remember saying, and she was very large and so when she sneezed it was a huge sneeze, and afterwards she said, “Oh! It feels so good to sneeze.” And I’ve never forgotten that.
And I put it into the book and always when I sneeze, almost invariably I think to myself, “Oh, it feels so good to sneeze,” and there is Mrs. Minnick, looming in front of me. But the Mr. Minnick is a complete figment of my imagination, Cynthia, the friend, the mean spoiled kind of friend, another figment of my imagination. Most of it is, but the playing hopscotch, the playing dolls
those are all out of my childhood.