One of the most rewarding parts of being a writer is hearing directly from readers, and over the years I’ve gotten the most extraordinary letters from readers. I get two kinds of letters. One is the type from a very young reader who will say to me in a letter, “I didn’t like to read until I read this book,” and that is a huge thrill to know that a student was really motivated to do something that must have been hard.
And so it’s a great chance for a new reader to be able to share that joy by writing a letter to an author, so I very much encourage parents and teachers to have kids write letters to the authors that have helped them to become readers. It’s a joy to receive a letter like that, and it’s a joy to write a letter back. You know that that child is really excited to get a letter back.
The other kind of letter I receive is from an older child who has read one of my more serious books and who has said that the book helped him or her to understand something that was previously very confusing or very difficult to understand. So I had a letter from a girl who said that after reading my book The Naked Mole Rat Letters realized, for the first time, that she wasn’t really talking honestly with her father.
That’s a big part of the book, and the book inspired her to try to have the courage to have an honest conversation with her father, and she said that it changed their entire family. And the reason that I think that happens is because books often will tell a truth that students don’t have a chance to hear.
So giving a child a book that really speaks to that child is not just a way of building up their reading skills. It can be a way of opening up a window on some area of that child’s life that really needed some light, and if the child is able to internalize that, to really understand her or his problem from that character’s point of view, that’s a huge leap.
And it enables that child to then take action in a positive way in life because they’ve seen the character do that. So that really is why we read and why we write. It’s to try to understand our own lives better, and to try to find a way forward in a more positive and really alive way.
