From: Virginia Walter <vwalter>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 14:26:46 -0700 (PDT)

I am the author of Making Up Megaboy, which has generated so much thoughtful discussion, on this list and elsewhere. I have talked and written about how the book came to be written in a number of forums and don't want to repeat myself for all of you who have heard this spiel before. Thank you for giving me this forum. Perhaps I should try to respond to what seems to be the most common reaction to the book, which is my apparent failure to more clearly assign a motive for Robbie's crime.


I really wrote this book in an effort to try to answer that question for myself. Why does any child kill? I came up with a number of partial answers to explain Robbie's act, and I have sprinkled them through the book. Most readers have found those clues. None of them are satisfactory responses in themselves, however; perhaps they are not even satisfactory when taken as a whole. Part of the sorrow is that nobody -- not his parents, not his best friend, not his teacher, nobody
-- knows Robbie well enough to answer that question. And maybe that's why he did it.


I think there are a lot of children like Robbie out there. They may not act out in flamboyant or obvious ways. They aren't the victims of poverty or racism. Their families are not obviously abusive or neglectful. Yet they live in quiet despair, with the certain sense that nobody knows who they are deep inside. With no one to listen to them, they slip through the cracks, often escaping to fantasy worlds that are more satisfying than the reality around them. We all bear some responsibility for these children, I think, and we all share the tragic consequences when they crack.


Dick Jackson (my editor at DK Ink) and I decided to leave both the motivation and the ending of the book ambiguous, knowing that this would frustrate and provoke some readers. We didn't do this with the hope of generating discussion, however; I certainly didn't intend this book to be a didactic anchor for classroom discussions on youth violence or gun control. I left the book open-ended because it seemed more true that way. This has the effect, I think, of leaving a lot of gaps and holes for readers to fill in themselves. I loved Nina's comments about the book and wish I could claim that I had intended it to be the kind of sophisticated commentary on the media that she describes. This is just how the story revealed itself to me, and it seemed like the best way to reveal it to other readers as well.



BTW, Pat Scales has produced an excellent Teacher's Guide to accompany the paperback, due out officially in September. I think you can get a copy from Random House Children's Books, School and Library Marketing, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.


I would be happy to answer any specific questions or to comment on anything else you are curious about.

Virginia A. Walter Associate Professor UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies 220 GSE & IS Building, Mailbox 951520 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles Ca 9009520 Telephone: 310 6?63 Fax: 310 6D60 vwalter at ucla.edu
Received on Fri 09 Jul 1999 04:26:46 PM CDT