From: Megan Schliesman <Schliesman>
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 14:21:57 -0500

We've spent the first part of April talking about three specific autobiographical works by authors or artists for children and young adults. Thank you to everyone who has shared insights on Anita Lobel's No Pretty Pictures, Lois Lowry's Looking Back, and Jerry Spinelli's Knots in My Yo-yo String.

We invite anyone with additional comments about one or more of these three to please feel free to make them. But we also invite your thoughts on and suggestions of other author or illustrator biographies published for young readers that you have found stimulating, entertaining, thought-provoking, insightful or otherwise worthy of mention.

Cathy Blaski gave us a good headstart earlier in the month when she brough up several: "For a fun, autobiographical look into an author's childhood, adolescence
& unorthodox/wacky family: Oddballs by William Sleator (sci-fi YA novelist), 1993. Also, Jean Fritz' Homesick, the story of her childhood in China (1982 Amer. Book Award winner and Newbery Honor Book)... Roald Dahl had two autobiographies: Boy, and another, I can't recall the title, about his creepy English boarding school years."
[Note: this second book is titled Going Solo.]

Earlier this month Katy Horning noted that, "After reading over the messages posted over the past week or so on the topic of author/artist autobiographies, it seems that one could draw a distinction between the sort of book written by Anita Lobel, which is more of a straightforward autobiographical account, and the ones written by Lowry and Spinelli which shed light on occurrences in their lives that have a direct correlation to the books they write today for children."

I find Cathy's mention of Sleator's Oddballs, which I also found delightful, intriguing as it is a fictionalized memoir--that is, the events in it may be very real and are based on Sleator's childhood and family, but it is written as novel. This is another dimension of author memoir that we haven't yet considered--novels that are based on an author's life. Rarely can the provenance of a fictional work be as literally traced to an author's own life as Sleator's Oddballs, however (as Lois Lowry makes so eloquently clear in Looking Back). Paul Fleischman spoke at a children's literature conference sponsored by the School of Library and Information Studies here at UW-Madison last weekend, and he made a comment to the effect of
"every character is autobiographical for an author," or at least for him, but Sleator's Oddballs is a bit different, since, if I recall, he is up front about saying this is my life and my family, even though the names have been changed....(unfortunately I cannot put my hands on a copy of Oddballs at the moment to quote exactly what he reveals.)

So let's continue our discussion of author and illustrator memoir for the second half of the month by drawing in other works, focusing especially on books that are written and published as autobiography, whether they are written in a way that primarily illuminates the author or illustrator's life or written to also cast light on her or his work, but allowing some latitude for books like Oddballs that are fiction but contain an admission of self-revelation by their creators.

Megan

  



Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education UW-Madison 608&2?03 schliesman at mail.soemadison.wisc.edu
Received on Fri 16 Apr 1999 02:21:57 PM CDT