My first book for kids was called A Summer to Die. I was just today signing a new edition of it, a new cover. And that was published in 1977 and I signed those books today in 2007, so that’s 30 years ago and that book is still in print. I had been writing for adults, but an editor came to me and asked me to write a book for kids and did not suggest any topic, just expressed an interest in whatever I might write. And I think perhaps not surprisingly, I turned my thoughts and my attention to something from my own history, something from my own life and it had to do with the death of my older sister when we were both young. I had just one sister, three years older. We had been very close and she died young. And so that was a story probably that I had been telling to myself, to a lesser degree to friends, I suppose, for many years.
And then when they said write us a book, that’s what came to my mind. So although I fictionalized it, I did recreate the two sisters, the older one pretty, popular, cheerleader, and homecoming queen at Penn State — all the things that I envied. And the younger one, kind of a nerd and a bookish child but she later told me that she envied my good grades. She majored in home economics in college. When I’m about to say simple person, I don’t mean simple-minded. She just had no aspirations beyond being a happy person with a family and a home — that’s all she wanted. And of course that was cut off for her when she died young of cancer.
But I recreated those sisters and their personalities and that part of the book is realistic. There are other things that I changed. One thing my brother has never forgiven me for was that I took out the cute little brother that those two sisters had. But that was my first book and it was the reaction to that book — not so much from critics, although the book got wonderful reviews and won awards — but the reaction from kids that made me turn my attention to writing for kids instead of the adults for whom I’d been writing. I began to feel, and I think this is true, that that audience that you’re writing for, when you write for kids, you are writing for people who can still be affected by what you write in ways that might change them.
When you write for adults, they can be affected by what you’ve written but they’re already well molded and shaped. It’s kids who are still in the process of growth and change and it’s why I think I take very seriously what I do because it does affect kids that way.
