These books are about me.

I’ve often been asked, what’s the dif­fer­ence between books for adults, and books for young people?

I’ve come to believe it has much to do with the way kids and adults read the books. When adults read a book they encounter a sit­u­a­tion, a char­ac­ter, a detail, which enables them to say, “That’s some­thing I have expe­ri­enced.” Or, “How inter­est­ing. I have seen that hap­pen.” “Oh, I’ve done that.” And so forth. That’s to say, they see the fic­tion as a con­fir­ma­tion of their own lives, some­thing they rec­og­nize as true. But when young peo­ple read fic­tion, they absorb the depict­ed expe­ri­ence as if it were about themselves.

Just today I asked a sev­enth grad­er why she liked fan­ta­sy so much. “Because I’m always in the clouds, dream­ing,” she said. “Those books are what I want to do.”

Years ago, for bed-time, I was read­ing E. Nesbit’s, The Would-Be-Goods (1899), a charm­ing British Edwar­dian nov­el, to my six-year-old boy. As far as I could tell there was absolute­ly noth­ing in the book which was sim­i­lar to his life. But he was enjoy­ing it.

One night—having learned that kids wrote to authors, he said, “Can I write to the author (Nes­bit) and tell her how much I love this book?”

Me: “That would be nice, but I’m afraid she died many years ago.”

My boy sat bolt upright in bed. “That’s impos­si­ble!” he cried.

“Why?”

“Because she knows so much about me!”

It was a great book—for him—because it was, in some way, about him.