The Joy of Children’s Books—For Adults
· The Atlantic
Please don’t judge me, but in March 2020, when I moved across the country, I got rid of six boxes of books, including many classic works of literature and nonfiction. Gone were titles by Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey—I’d rather reread Pride and Prejudice) and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities—plain old disinterest). Moby-Dick went (I’d tried for years, and failed). So did Joan Didion’s Political Fictions and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (just never got around to them).
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What I did not—and never would—get rid of: The Snowy Day, Miss Rumphius, The Little House, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, Blueberries for Sal, and about 50 other children’s books. My copies have been with me since the 1970s and ’80s. They sit, always, in a place of honor, alongside artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. In 1991, when I left home for college, they moved with me from Davis, California, to New York City. From the East Village they traveled to Brooklyn, then Queens, then Brooklyn again, following me on a professional trajectory (half a dozen jobs) and a personal one (one marriage, one divorce). During my most recent move, purging my adult library created more physical space for my kid one—Caro’s books are roughly 20 times the width of an average Dr. Seuss title—but more important, the sifting represented a setting of priorities. The picture books took precedence.
Again, I’m inclined to ask readers not to judge me. It’s a defensive crouch that comes from experience: I have heard numerous people suggest that in no way is “kid lit” on par with words written for grown-ups. (At least one of Margaret Wise Brown’s contemporaries dismissively referred to her genius works—Goodnight Moon, Little Fur Family—as “baby books.”)
This kind of snobbery is what Mac Barnett, the author of many dozens of children’s books—including The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza, the Jack Book series, and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole—calls a “literary misdemeanor.” In his new book, Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (this one’s for the adults), Barnett writes, “When we dismiss children’s books, what we’re really doing is failing to recognize the potential of children.” To this, I would add that in dismissing children’s books, adults fail to recognize the potential of people.
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Reading children’s literature in adulthood isn’t just a nostalgia impulse or an exercise to undertake in the context of sharing stories with kids. Incorporating these books into a literary diet—whether or not a person has children—can help anyone to see and hear with fresh eyes and ears, to find or rediscover wonder in the large (mountain ranges, the moon) and the small (a hummingbird, a smile, a square). In my home office, surrounding myself with kids’ books puts me in a state of mind that complicates and enriches my thinking. The books have also nudged me toward some of my more original ideas. (I recently took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Los Angeles airport because I was interested in writing about how certain aspects of large airports work—here’s looking at you, Richard Scarry.)
A useful concept, “childness,” may sum up this way of experiencing the world, Alison Waller, the author of the 2019 book Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics, told me. The term comes from the literary critic Peter Hollindale, who identified “a common ground where remembering adult and remembered child might come into contact,” Waller writes, “and where they may, indeed, find something to share through childhood experiences more generally.” When we chatted, she was quick to stress that childness does not mean childlike. The latter, she said, contains an element of judgment; the former acknowledges that for many people, aspects of childhood stay with them—sometimes vividly—into adulthood. (As the renowned children’s-literature editor Ursula Nordstrom put it, “I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”) Rereading childhood books, Waller suggested, might be a way to acknowledge that our younger selves are “part of a continuum of identity.”
In Make Believe, Barnett writes movingly about the “perceptive, flexible, and open-minded” nature of a child’s mind. Kids, he argues, are better at make-believe than adults, and may be better equipped than adults to engage deeply with stories, because they have to be. So much in the world around them is new; so much is possible; so much of childhood is “a long series of experiments—testing out hypotheses and making adjustments.”
During a recent conversation with Barnett, I began to wonder if rereading picture books could encourage creative plasticity in adults, a return to a seemingly simpler, but perhaps more sophisticated, way of encountering literature (and, by extension, life). Many children’s books, after all, engage in leaps of logic. They can be strange, spooky, sometimes existentially unsettling. It takes an attentive, receptive intellect to process that type of weirdness, to follow along with a writer’s or illustrator’s nonsense and suspend judgment or disbelief.
Barnett writes that one way adults “define ourselves as older is by rejecting the things we very recently loved.” But older is not always wiser. When we spoke, he pointed out that encountering words and pictures together invites people to enter a liminal zone. “The words are doing some of the work,” he said, “and the pictures are doing some of the work, and they create this space in between that really asks the reader to come in and interpret and to make sense of it. They demand a reader’s active engagement.” That is, children’s books activate a part of the brain that some adults—caught up in the day-to-day business of work or child-rearing or simply survival—may have unwittingly allowed to go dormant.
This past week, I popped into Wolfcat Books, a new children’s store in Los Angeles that, when I visited, was preparing for its soft launch—though its proprietor, Andrea Meller, told me that she hesitates to call it a “children’s” shop, because to her mind, children’s books are for everyone. (She has a quote from C. S. Lewis affixed to her door: “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”) We chatted about how reading kids’ books, especially picture books, can induce an experience not unlike visiting an art museum—or, as Meller pointed out, working in theater (as she once did). “You can kind of do these wild things in theater because it’s in the moment,” Meller said. “When I found picture books again, as an adult, I felt that same sense of freedom, where there are these rules that we think of with literature, but in picture books they’re all broken. The main character can be eaten in the middle.”
Barnett writes about that sort of openness to quirk, too. “Kids read without tightly held notions of what a story can or should be,” he observes in Make Believe. “An unconventional structure or new approach bothers them not a whit.” I see the same spirit in the stories of some of my favorite writers and journalists, people who, with contagious curiosity, attack their work with a formal innovation and exuberance that one might call evidence of childness: Think John McPhee on oranges; Maggie Nelson on the color blue; The Atlantic’s Caity Weaver on bread.
Many picture books remind readers to be brave. And the best (here I think of The Giving Tree and Where the Wild Things Are) refuse to shy away from some of life’s heaviest topics: love, death, loss, fear. They also push readers and writers to savor the music of words, use language with economy, and pay attention to the tiniest details. I’ll never forget reading a letter, from Wise Brown’s archive at Hollins College, that she wrote to a fellow alumnus. “Did you know that if you listened during the day on Fifth Avenue when the light changes and the traffic stops,” Brown observed, “you can hear a loud sound of feet?”
Who says that? Who notices that? An adult who can summon a child’s delight at the absurdity and surprise in the everyday.
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