A World in Your Backyard: Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me
RSSJennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 11/03/2009
TeachingBooks.net resources on this interview »»»
Listen to Rebecca Stead introduce and read an excerpt from When You Reach Me »»»
For 12-year-old Miranda it appears that everything in her life is changing and the biggest shift involves her friend Sal. Sal lives in her building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the two have been buddies since their stroller days. But ever since the afternoon he was punched by a stranger as they walked home from school, Sal treats Miranda differently. Things feel even more uncertain when she starts getting mysterious messages from someone who knows about events in her life before they happen. Sometimes it seems as if the only thing the girl can count on is the well-worn copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time that she carries around (she “had probably read it a hundred times, which was why it looked so beat-up”). Here Stead talks about how a stranger, time travel, and coming-of-age themes all came together in her second novel, When You Reach Me (Random, 2009; Gr 5-8).
Are you a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time?
I’m still a huge fan, but I was an even bigger fan when I was a kid. When I went back to the book more recently, I was struck by how brave it is in terms of asking huge questions about the universe and good and evil, and then also spending a lot of time on self-doubt. Children spend many hours wondering if they’re like other people in fundamental ways.
Did you reread the book many times as a child?
As a child, I would reread anything with a story. I was a little bit more open-minded than my character Miranda. I read A Wrinkle in Time and Harriet the Spy a bunch of times, and the books of Norma Klein and Anne McCaffrey. McCaffrey’s books take place on a planet called Pern, and there’s a little romance and a time-travel story across her series.
So you’re comfortable with time travel.
Inherent in every time-travel book is the puzzle aspect and the romance of it—the drama and the adventure. I find it incredibly satisfying in terms of story, and think it’s dramatic in a way that’s all-consuming. I was very excited when I had the idea for this book.
And what was that idea?
The idea came to me after reading a newspaper article about a guy who was wandering around the streets in Washington State; he had no memory of who he was, whether he had any family, whether he had a job, why he was in the place where he was. He started asking people on the street for help; they avoided him. He found a police officer, and he said, “You have to help me. I have no idea why I’m here or where I’m supposed to be.” The officer took him to the station, where he was hypnotized. “I know I’m married to a woman named Penny,” he said, “and we had two daughters and they were in a terrible car accident.” They couldn’t find a woman named Penny or a record of the car accident. They [published] his picture. A woman came forward, and she said, “I’m Penny, and that’s my fiancé; we’re not married and we have no children."
Maybe because I’ve read so many time-travel stories, I immediately thought, "This is heartrending. Maybe he’s come back to change the future." The whole story made me think of a man on the corner near my home when I was growing up, who I was frightened of, “the laughing man.” I had this idea of a time loop, someone coming back to prevent a tragedy.
How did A Wrinkle in Time enter into the story?
In the first draft of the book, Miranda was carrying A Wrinkle in Time around. I thought, at some point she’ll have to put it down. It was almost like she was carrying it around to remind me about the kind of kid she was. I was thinking of taking it out, but what I decided with [my editor] was that if we tied it into the story it would be okay.
I didn’t want to wind the story too tightly to A Wrinkle in Time. I’d read the book as my character Miranda, and then I tried to reread it as the character Marcus [who picks up on a flaw in the logic of the book] would. That’s when I noticed the question of the logic. Reading the book as Miranda I was aware of the domestic details...it was much more about longing and family. When I read the book as Marcus, there was a whole other set of ideas in my head. And I thought, "This is perfect."
Your character Julia’s description of time travel using the diamond chips in her ring has to be one of the best explanations of the concept of time travel in literature.
That was one of the big struggles for me, in writing this book—getting my theory out there and getting everyone to understand it. It’s complicated stuff.
How did you come up with Miranda’s voice?
I don’t know. I’m the last writer who will ever say I took a nap and I had the answer, or it came to me in a dream. I never have that kind of experience, and I think most writers probably don’t. Most writers hash it out. But voice is something that can arrive somewhat mysteriously. There are a lot of similarities between Miranda’s life and my life at that age. She’s not the kind of kid I was, but I definitely took a lot from memory. The laughing man really did stand on [my corner], so I had to walk by him every day on the way to school.
What is it about the age of 12 that drives a wedge between boy-girl friendships?
I think that life gets much more complicated at 12. At that age I did have friends who were boys. But what I found was—not so much confusion about whether we were boyfriend and girlfriend or just regular friends—for me, 12 was the age at which things started to change, whether I wanted them to or not. I started to understand a lot of things about how big the world really is, and how different people really are, and that means giving up the small world that you’ve been living in. Miranda is having all these thoughts about how she lives, and class—people who are wealthier than she is. She starts incorporating these other people into her life. How does my mother look to them? Is this the kind of house you’re supposed to have?
It’s not so much that [Miranda and Sal’s] relationship can’t sustain itself because they’re boy and girl, it’s that it’s too tight and too limiting, and it’s preventing them from moving on and trying new things, and doing all the things you have to do to grow up. You can’t have both at once.
Listen to Rebecca Stead introduce and read an excerpt from When You Reach Me »»»
TeachingBooks.net resources on this interview »»»
Jennifer M. Brown is the children's editor for Shelf Awareness, a daily enewsletter for the publishing trade. She recently launched the Web site Twenty by Jenny, which recommends titles to help parents build their child's library one book at a time.
