Seems Like Old Times

"Do you have any pet allergies?” inquires Jeanne Birdsall, welcoming a visitor into the 1860 house she shares with her husband, Bill Diehl, their four cats (Lucy, Jake, Kirby, and Beverly), two occasionally quarrelsome rabbits (Peta and Tisha), and a Boston terrier (Cagney). The considerate question is just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from the writer of The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy, the G-rated charmer that recently won this 54-year-old, first-time author the National Book Award for young people’s literature.

As its subtitle suggests, The Penderwicks (Knopf) follows the adventures of four spunky siblings—12-year-old Rosalind, 11-year-old Skye, 10-year-old Jane, and four-year-old Batty—as they encounter the snooty Mrs. Tifton, her surprisingly sensitive son, Jeffrey, and a handsome teenage gardener named… Cagney. Although The Penderwicks is a contemporary tale with pitch-perfect writing and irresistible characters, it exudes a wholesome 1950s innocence. In fact, compared to today’s increasingly edgy children’s books, The Penderwicks is so retro, it’s almost radical.

As a young girl growing up in Strafford, PA, to a family troubled by alcoholism, Birdsall adored the works of E. Nesbit and Edward Eager—and their books ultimately inspired her to write The Penderwicks. Although Birdsall says she knew at nine or 10 that she would one day write a book that might please Eager, she didn’t start writing until she was 42. That’s when her husband-to-be, Diehl, a teacher, whom she met when they were both junior high students, slyly coaxed Birdsall into helping him write a novel about their high school days. Although the project eventually fizzled, by then Birdsall says she was “hooked on the process” of writing.

We visited Birdsall at her home in Northampton, MA, where she was at work on a sequel, and talked about her struggle to publish The Penderwicks.

Even though you worked a series of unsatisfying jobs for years, in the back of your mind, did you always know you would write children’s books?

I didn’t for a long time know I was going to be a writer. I was passionately involved in my career as an art photographer. I sometimes think, looking back, I didn’t have the self-confidence to write. I got my first camera at 21 and went to art school [at the California College of Arts and Crafts] for a while. I was single for all those years and had to work full-time jobs to support myself. I spent all my time—vacations, weekends, holidays, everything—doing photography. But in retrospect, the interesting thing is, I was always, always, always reading. I’d read several books a week. That was my passion. I feel now, I was training myself [to become a writer], because I was very sure about what I wanted to read. I wasn’t the kind of reader who would just read anything.

What did you read?

I always kept reading children’s books. I kept reading my old ones that I’d loved as a child over and over and then people that came after my childhood. I’d read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series. I just adored it. I read it over and over. And Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three, the Prydain Chronicles. Then in my 20s, I dropped out of college. I couldn’t stand to be told what to think or take pictures of or read. While I was doing photography and working, I decided to train myself on the classics I was interested in. I read Tolstoy, all of Nabokov, the British classics—from Austen, whom I still read every couple of years, to the Brontës and Trollope, whom I adore, and Dickens. Dorothy Sayers is one of my very favorites and P. D. James.

What I was doing over those 20-some years before my husband decided to prod me—he wasn’t my husband yet, but still prodded me to start to write—was winnowing down my [writing] voice by reading. I literally can’t tolerate bad writing. I read the things I loved over and over and over.

What else helped you become a writer?

As a pretty young child, I was aware of the author as the person I was communicating with. I remember, in my 20s, writing in my journal that I was so lonely intellectually, I felt like my best friends were writers. I think most children communicate with the characters. But I somehow made that leap, and I was communicating directly with Edward Eager. I never really thought about that before, but I think that’s how I started to write.

Do you see traces of the books you loved in The Penderwicks?

I wrote the kind of book I read and that I’ve always read. One thing I did realize while I was writing is how much my old books that I’d read were in it: Emily of New Moon, The Secret Garden, Ferdinand the Bull. I’d referenced C. S. Lewis. Even Pencey, the military school [Jeffrey’s] going to is stolen from Catcher in the Rye. There’s a lot of E. Nesbit in there; the whole MOOPS [short for “Meeting of Older Penderwick Sisters”], too. Noel Streatfield is another huge [influence]. It felt right, and I just kept going with my gut, but I kept being terrified that people would say [my story] is totally referential. You’ve just stolen a bunch of books and put them together.

What I finally figured out when people responded well to it, is what I’d done was what my husband and I did with the first book [we tried working on together]. That book wasn’t a memoir of my life. It was a memoir of the books I’d lived in. Books were such a huge part of my childhood. So I was gathering up all these wonderful memories. I was really remembering older books—the hundreds and hundreds of hours spent with those families instead of with my own, which wasn’t so hot.

Since so many of today’s kids’ books are dark and edgy, did you ever think, “There’s no way any publisher is ever going to buy The Penderwicks”?

Oh yeah! I sent [my first agent] a couple of chapters of an early version [of The Penderwicks], and she said, you’re writing the kind of book that you read as a child. You better find out what kids are reading now because this won’t fly. So I went, “Oh, OK.” I panicked a little bit. “You’re right.”

The funny story about it is that a friend of a friend is a librarian, and I asked her if she would graciously give me an hour, show me around the children’s library, and show me the books that kids were reading now. Out of that whole hour, I got a little bit interested in Betsy Byars, but the only books I really connected to were the Swallows and Amazons series, which was written in the ’40s, but I missed it as a kid. I was trying really hard to become hip and cool, but…. [Laughs.] I just kept going because it was the only way I knew how to write.

How long did you work on The Penderwicks?

I worked on it for about three years. Then what happened is there’s this big, mysterious two-year gap. And that big, mysterious two-year gap came because HarperCollins said, “We want your book, but we’re not going to give you a contract, and you need to do a lot of work on it.” So, I received an 11-page editor’s letter. I spent a year and a half making it edgier—and between the two of us, we totally ruined the book.

So you both hated the revision?

I don’t like it now. It’s just a completely different book. One of the things [the editor] said was to make Rosalind 13. For me, 13 is so much older than 12. So I rewrote Rosalind. I haven’t been able to bear to look at it. They brushed me off. They said, “Oh, wow, you messed up the book!” I was in a panic, and thought my career was over. My fabulous, wonderful [second] agent, Barbara Kouts, talked me down from the ledge. She said, “I hate this rewrite, too. It’s terrible. I’m going to go back to the original manuscript.” I fought her for about two hours, because the idea of this wasted year and a half was a nightmare. Of course, now, I realize it wasn’t at all wasted, because I’ve learned my lesson: you don’t do that. If they loved the book, why was I rewriting it? There was something wrong, but I was too inexperienced to understand it.

How long did it take your agent to place the manuscript with another publisher?

Within a couple of months, we had [signed with] Knopf, and my new editor [was Michelle Frey]. Her editorial letter came in, and I did the major changes in six weeks.

How did it feel to win the National Book Award?

It was absolutely wonderful! It was wonderful for two reasons. This was something I said I was going to do when I was 10—and not just that I was going to write a book, but it was going to be like Edward Eager’s. When these reviews started coming out that compared me to Edward Eager, it was a dream come true. The book was so retro, but I also really believed there was a need for that, too.

How so?

This has all taken me a long time to figure out. But I realized that for me, in my difficult childhood—there was too much booze and not enough love, basically—books about families were an escape. They gave me a sense that there was a world where families were close, and sisters took care of each other, and you could get in trouble and it wouldn’t be a disaster.

People are saying children who lead traumatic lives need books that validate the trauma, and I’m not saying they’re wrong. But I also think because it worked so well for me, that there are children who lead difficult lives who need to understand that it doesn’t have to be so bad. I also think that there are a lot of children out there who are still leading wonderful lives, and I think they need to have something to read, too.