A month ago I wrote four sentences about my granddaughter on a Sunday night and went to bed.
By the time I woke up it had gone somewhere I have never sent anything before, and it has been going ever since. Twenty-five thousand people, four hundred and seventy-eight replies, twelve hundred restacks.
The replies are the part I did not expect. Almost nobody wrote to say they liked it. They wrote to tell me what their own five-year-old had said. A boy who believed the sea was tired at low tide. A girl who kept a stone because it looked lonely. One woman quoted her grandson at some length and then said, at the end, that he is thirty-one now and she has never told anybody that story.
That is the thing I had not understood, and it is why there is now a book.
I thought I had written about a child. What I had actually done was hand several thousand adults a legitimate reason to say a sentence they had been carrying around for decades with nowhere to put it. Nobody wants to hear your grandchild anecdote. Everyone knows this, which is why we keep them to ourselves and produce them only under duress at Christmas. What the comment thread turned into was a room where the anecdote was the price of entry.
So the book is not really about the enchanted years. It is about the fact that we all had them, we cannot produce a single item from our own, and we spend the rest of our lives being charmed by children as though we are watching a species we never belonged to.
Now the part that needs saying without a joke on top of it.
The children in the book are invented.
Not composites, not lightly disguised, not renamed. Invented. There is a five-year-old girl who is generous with her workings, a seven-year-old brother who found out how the world works about eight months ago and has been correcting her ever since, and a grandfather who gets an hour a week and mostly watches. None of the three exists. The place is never named. My granddaughter is not in the book and her name is not in the book, and she will not be in the next one either.
The reason is Christopher Robin Milne.
His father wrote four books. The boy spent the rest of his life explaining that he was not the boy in them, was bullied at school with recordings of himself reciting his father’s verses, and wrote in adulthood about a childhood that had been, as he put it, taken from him and put on public display. He and his father were largely estranged by the end. The books are beautiful. The cost was borne by somebody who was six and had not been consulted.
I am not comparing myself to Milne. I am noting that the mechanism does not require literary merit to work. It requires only a real child, a public author, and a name on a page. I have two of those three and I am not adding the third.
So the book is a fiction, and the copyright page says so, and it is a fiction in the way that most books like this have always quietly been. The weather is real. The fog is real. The dog is real, or real enough, and has revised nothing.
What it actually is
Fifteen short chapters. A hill town nobody names. An hour a week, which if you do the arithmetic—and I did, at four o’clock on a Wednesday I had to spend at home—comes to about six hundred and seventy hours in total between five and eighteen. Under a month of continuous time. The entire allocation.
It reads aloud well enough if there is a child in the room. But it is not for them, and I would rather say so on the cover than pretend otherwise. It is for whoever is doing the reading, which is the same person who has been carrying an unsaid sentence about their own grandchild for thirty years.
The video above is two minutes and twenty seconds of me saying most of this out loud with worse grammar.
And to the several hundred of you who told me to write it: thank you for the shove. It is the only reason it exists.
The book on Amazon
The Professor, her brother, and me
