Shaved Meats, Piled High: September 2018
There Be Dragons
Summer is over unless you're a pedant and/or a resident of the Southern Hemisphere. In my hometown, children have gone back to school, the weather is a notch cooler and a whole lot rainier, with a pretty scary hurricane forecast for North Carolina and Virginia. My next novel is headed into copy-editing and I'm allowing my brain juices to simmer, confident that an idea will show up and I'll soon be at work on another novel.
The novel will be -- I really do have to stop and count, not because there are so many, but because I have a terrible memory. It will be my 24th book -- and now I get to add two words I've never had to add before -- for adults. On October 2, Akashic will publish my first children's book, Liza Jane and the Dragon.
I didn't set out to write a children's book. But in January 2017, my then 6-year-old daughter asked a provocative question: "Why is Donald Trump president?" I took her question very seriously. I told her that there were people who were angry and frustrated and thought no one ever listened to them. "They sound just like me!" my daughter said. We both laughed and I began to tell her the story of a little girl who fires her parents and hires a dragon to take care of her, but his only response to every problem is to belch fire.
Given this context, I understand if people think it's an anti-Trump book and a casual skim through my Twitter feed would establish that my politics are pretty lefty. But the book is actually about a kind of professionalism that I admire. My dad wrote about politics. I wrote about politics. The good politicians were very good indeed. It's a complicated job and not necessarily one that enriches people. In fact, I think writers and politicians have something interesting in common: Everyone thinks they could do what we do and get rich while doing it.
That said, the dragon does appear to be wearing an orange toupee.
Because I'm a writer, I've long been asked: How does one publish a children's book. And until 18 months ago I could shrug and say, "I dunno, it's very different from adult publishing." I still don't know much about children's publishing. Two days after friends encouraged me to write down the story I had told my daughter, I sent it to my agent. She showed it to the children's division at Harpercollins, but they didn't make an offer. I suggested we take it to Akashic because I'm a long-time admirer of Johnny Temple and he had published Go the Fuck to Sleep. (Not exactly a children's book, by the way.) He made an offer, then found the amazing illustrator, Kate Samworth, who did the heavy lifting and taught me quite a few things along the way. The girl is named "Liza Jane" because that was our second choice for a girl's name when our daughter was born, taken from a song one hears often in New Orleans.
I will be making appearances for the books in Baltimore, Washington D.C., New York and New Orleans. As noted above, the book makes absolutely no direct references to any political figures and is mainly an argument for hiring the most qualified person for a job. Which, I hope, is not a controversial ideas, but who knows these days?
READ/READING: Bad Twins, Rebecca Chance; Poor Cow, Nell Dunn; By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, Elizabeth Smart; Nothing Good Can Come From This, Kristi Coulter; What to Read and Why, Francine Prose; Middlemarch, George Eliot; Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata; Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart; A Book So Horrible I Don't Want To Type Its Title.
REREADING: The works of Maud Hart Lovelace; The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman; All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown, Sydney Taylor.
ME, ME, ME: Sunburn was the Waterstone's Thriller of the Month for August and as a result, spent most of the month in the Top 4. The Mystery Box was featured in the September issue of Real Simple.
Laura Lippman
September 2018