Stories of My Life Read online

  I decided that since I was writing a story or a poem almost every week I would try to write, instead, a chapter every week, so that by the end of the year, I’d have a book, and even if no one ever published it, it would be something substantial that I had accomplished.

  Question #2: Where do you get your ideas?

  Some of my writer friends have so many ideas, they’ll never live long enough to turn them all into books. I look at them with a certain envy, for when I finish a book I say, “Well, that was a great career while it lasted,” because I am sure I’ll never have an idea worthy of another book. But by now I’ve written a lot of books, so I must have gotten those ideas from somewhere, and that somewhere is most often from my own life. Another lesson I’ve learned along the way is that there are no truly original ideas. There are no truly original plots. As the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes said three thousand or so years ago: “There is no new thing under the sun.” Except you. Except me. Every individual is new and unique, so we may be stuck with the same old plots, but because a new person is telling the story, bringing his or her singular life to bear on the story, it is fresh and new. So the only excuse I have for daring to write is that no one else in the world would be able to tell the stories that only I can tell. And an aside to those of you wishing to write—that is your excuse as well. The raw material for our unique stories is our unique lives and perspective on life.

  I have a note card that has lived for years in my desk drawer. The card has three panel illustrations. At the top lies a zonked- out whale with X’s where its eyes should be. Below is the same beached whale with its eyes popped wide open in amazement as a voice coming from its mouth declares: “Incredible as it seems—” The sentence is completed by a person emerging from between the jaws of the beast: “—my life is based on a true story.” This book contains true stories of my life that I want to share with people I care about, a lot of whom are readers of my books. Sometimes a reader, often a friend, when hearing me tell an old story, will recognize in the story the seed of one of my books that I myself hadn’t realized. That’s one of the great things about having readers. They often know more than the writer.

  This book is not a memoir. I swore never to write one. My memory is not good enough to turn these stories into a coherent narrative. Besides, I can’t believe the people I love would want to be minor characters in the story of my life. I’ve gotten permission from my husband and children to tell tales on them, but I’m hesitant to impose on others. So there will be many important people in my life that will not appear as characters in these stories. You know who you are. If you’re relieved, good; if you’re disappointed, I apologize.

  Question #3: “How does it feel to be famous?”

  The questioner is young and earnest and has just confided that although she doesn’t know what she wants to be, she knows she wants to be famous. I don’t really know how to answer her question. How does it feel to be famous?

  And then I remember things that happened after Bridge to Terabithia won the Newbery Medal. I would be invited somewhere to speak and there would be a lovely dinner at which I was the honored guest. The people on either side of me at the table would say something gracious and congratulatory and then they would turn to the person on the other side and never speak to me again for the whole meal. There were a few times when the person in charge made it clear that she’d hired me for the weekend and expected to get her money’s worth, by gum.

  I’d come home and whine to my long-suffering husband. “I’m a human being,” I’d say, “why can’t they just treat me like a human being.”

  And then I remembered Anita. When I was in Chandler Junior High in Richmond, Virginia, all of us new kids were put in the same homeroom. It was a wonderful thing because we could make friends with each other, we didn’t have to try to cope with already cemented cliques that populated the rest of the school. I made several good friends that year, but there was one new girl that we were all shy around. The reason we were shy around Anita was because she was famous. She was the youngest member of the Carter sisters. Her mother, Maybelle, had been part of the legendary country music group the Carter Family. Her older sister June went on to marry Johnny Cash. At the time, her mother, two older sisters, and Anita sang regularly on the radio, and in concerts all over the South. We didn’t make friends with her because we didn’t know what to say to someone we considered famous.

  Because she had moved around the country a lot, Anita needed catching up in a couple of subjects and for some reason I was asked to tutor her. To my amazement she was so shy that even one on one, she barely spoke above a whisper. Yet that summer I went to a concert at the stadium, and on stage, Anita was transformed. The huge crowd loved her and she obviously loved performing for them.

  “If it is hard for me at forty-five to deal with the little bit of fame that I have, how must it have been for Anita?” I wondered. So I wrote Come Sing, Jimmy Jo about James, a shy boy who becomes a star. If you want to know what Katherine Paterson is really like, you should read that book. Like James, and perhaps Anita, I’m a shy show-off—a very private person who loves to perform.

  When my friend Nancy Graff read this section on feeling famous she said, “Oh, c’mon, Katherine, you know you get a kick out of being famous.” We both laughed. I mean, I was thrilled to be introduced to the empress of Japan and hear her say, “Katherine Paterson? Who wrote Bridge to Terabithia?” Sometimes I can’t believe my own life. I find myself standing on a stage or sitting at a table with writers I have known and admired for many years—really famous people—and think: “This is me here with these amazing people.” I want to give myself the proverbial pinch to make sure I’m awake.

  But that doesn’t mean I feel famous. Famous is not an emotion like love or hate or jealousy or fear—feelings with which I am well acquainted. You can’t feel it, but you can learn over the years to sit back and enjoy the perks.

  Autographing grandson Decker Paterson’s book at the Library of Congress ceremony 2010.

  When The Master Puppeteer won the National Book Award in 1977, all my friends in the Washington area rejoiced with me. The following year, Bridge to Terabithia won the Newbery Medal and they threw another big party. Fortunately, I moved in 1979 and they didn’t have to give me yet another party when The Great Gilly Hopkins won the National Book Award and was the Newbery Honor book. By this time I was afraid I wouldn’t have a single writer friend left. I was Biblical Job in reverse: “Why me, God? Why me?” And the answer seemed to be: Now people will listen to what you say, so you’d better say something worth listening to. When Jacob Have I Loved won a Newbery two years later, I tried to remember that. I also learned that my friends were among the most gracious people in the world.

  My special friend in Takoma Park, Maryland, was Gene Namovicz. Gene was an established writer when I first met her, but not long after we became friends, my second novel was published, then the next four that all won national prizes. Gene stood by me in my triumphs, just as she would through my troubles, and always with a wonderful sense of humor.

  Soon after the first Newbery, I was scheduled to give a speech that I knew had to be a good one, since it seemed to me that almost every important writer and critic on both sides of the Atlantic was going to be in the audience. We were on vacation at Lake George, so I sent the speech to Gene for her comments and revised accordingly. But I was still anxious. I called her and told her she’d just have to pray for me, as I was afraid I was going to fall apart. Gene, a devout Roman Catholic, promised she’d pray, but told me to calm down. It would be fine, and it was. I called her to tell her it had gone all right and thanked her for her prayers.

  “If I’d known how efficacious Roman Catholic prayers were,” I said, jokingly, “I might have converted long ago.”

  “Well, I did pray,” she said, “and He said, ‘Katherine who?’”

  When I moved to Vermont, Gene got in t
ouch with Grace Greene, a friend I had made soon after moving, and told her that as long as I was in Maryland and even in Virginia, she had been able to keep me humble, but Vermont was just too far away, so she was turning the job over to Grace. I wondered if Grace had taken her assignment too much to heart when she told me this story. A small group of us gather periodically to do pastel painting and the night of January 5, 2010, I was missing. Grace had gotten an invitation, so she knew that I was in Washington being presented as the new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, but when the others asked where I was, Grace said: “She’s in Washington being made a national embarrassment.” When she realized what she had said, she tried to correct herself. “Oh, no, I mean natural embarrassment.” Gene would have loved that very Freudian slip.

  Since real friends like mine are more precious than awards, I know I am truly blessed, and gratitude, unlike fame, is something you can actually feel.

  Anne and baby Mary Goetchius.

  Mary Elizabeth Goetchius

  When I’m asked about censorship, I recall that my parents, conservative Presbyterian missionaries, never censored what we children read. In fact, when I was eleven or twelve, Mother would hand me the book-of-the-month selection that she’d failed to return before the deadline and ask me to read it to see if it was worth her time. When I was eleven, she gave me a copy of The Yearling, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book she had read. She knew it contained profane language and “inappropriate content,” but she gave it to me because she knew I would love it. I did love it. Reading it as an adult I see how much that book has influenced me as a writer.

  Mother was a big fan of my books and promoted them to the extent that I wondered after she died, who was going to buy them now that she was gone. When I got word that The Great Gilly Hopkins was the Newbery Honor book (that year for some mysterious reason there was only one), I was told that I couldn’t tell anyone until after the official press conference. I decided that one’s dying mother didn’t count as telling and called her at once. She could barely speak by then, but when I told her the news, she asked in the playful voice I knew so well: “That naughty child?”

  Mother was born in Waco, Texas, but that didn’t make her a Texan. She always said that her father left Georgia and took his family to Texas to seek his fortune, but all he found was her, so they all went back to Georgia. They settled in Rome, where her father’s older brother George was pastor of a Presbyterian church. She was named Mary and was the middle of her parents’ three girls. Anne, the oldest, was an artist who ironically always suffered from poor eyesight. Helen, the youngest, was a bit of a rebel who often caused their straight-laced mother anxiety. But my mother was, it appears, the “good child.” Grandmother referred to her as “my little missionary,” pointing her at an early age toward service as a “foreign missionary.” In addition to the two eldest brothers who died in the Civil War, her father had two other older brothers—George, the minister, who was elected for a term as Moderator of the General Assembly of the (then) Southern Presbyterian Church—and Henry, a prosperous lawyer, who, being childless, wanted to adopt my mother. Henry never quite forgave my grandfather for not giving up one of his daughters (after all, he had a surplus) and at length adopted a son who inherited his entire estate.

  Mother never minded being the daughter of a respectable, but certainly not wealthy, insurance and real estate salesman. As a child I often begged for stories of the “olden days,” when she was young. (My own children, referring to my youth, would say: “Back when you were alive, Mom . . .”—protests that I was still alive notwithstanding.) Mother always spoke with delight about growing up on Third Avenue in Rome, Georgia. Everyone seemed to live across the street from the Goetchius family. There was Uncle George and after his death in 1900, the new Presbyterian pastor, Dr. Sydnor, and his family with children roughly the same age as the Goetchius girls. Woodrow Wilson’s first wife grew up there, and Mother remembered her father, an elder in the Presbyterian church, acting as a pall bearer when Mrs. Wilson was brought back to Rome to be buried. There was, supposedly, a thank-you note from the president that never surfaced—much like the many Abraham Lincoln letters floating around that lived on in some family’s legend but not in its archives.

  I was most envious of the neighborhood group of eight or nine girls just her age. Mother was an active member of the Third Avenue Gang, who had “spend-the-night parties,” progressive dinners, went to baseball games; in short, did everything together. One of the girls had a dollhouse in her backyard that became the gang’s clubhouse and the center of their activities until well up into their teens. When she talked about her childhood friends I was always envious. The idea of living in the same house for all your childhood and having the same knot of devoted friends seemed magical to me, who had lived in thirteen different places by the time I was thirteen. Years later, she went back to Rome for a reunion of the Third Avenue Gang, one of whom had married an heir of one of the early Hawaiian missionary families and another whose son wrote racy novels that had Rome in a twitter.

  Summers as children we would go to the farm in Virginia where our spinster aunts and bachelor uncles were strict maintainers of good behavior, but the Goetchius girls would go to Eufala, Alabama, to visit their beloved aunt Anne or aunt Annie, as they called her. (I grew up thinking her name was “Aunt Tanny.”) She was Grandmother’s older and only sibling. As children, one of our witticisms was “Eufala? I picka you up.” Annie lived on a farm and produced six children and a brood of descendents, most of whom my generation never met. The exception was Cousin Wade Herren, known in the family as “Apple,” since it was accepted that he was the “apple of his mother’s eye.” Wade became a general during World War II, and we met him when he was stationed in Washington sometime after the war. He told us proudly, not of his exploits during the war, but of how honored he was to be the military escort for Princess Elizabeth on her official visit to Washington not too long before she became the Queen of England. “Beautiful manners. Just like a lovely young Southern girl,” he enthused.

  The Goetchius girls loved the farm with their many cousins and all the African American field and house help there. On the Herren farm the children could run barefoot and take the pony cart out to the field and fill it with watermelons, hoping, perhaps encouraging, one to roll off and burst so that they could sit down and eat it in the middle of the path.

  My grandmother Elizabeth Gertrude Daniel Goetchius was known as “Trudy” when she was a child, a playful nickname that seemed totally unlikely to me, who only knew her as a forbidding figure. I always called her “Grandmother Goetchius” or at least “Grandmother,” never Granny or Grandma or Nana or any of the diminutives by which my friends spoke fondly of their grandmothers.

  I never knew my grandfather Charlie Goetchius, and it is one of the sorrows of my life. In his picture—I’ve only seen one—he’s a man I know I would have loved. He had red hair and a bushy mustache to match. I think I can see a mischievous light in his eyes, even in a formal photograph. Aunt Helen told me that she was “his girl,” and I believed her because I imagined he would have admired, not feared, that rebellious streak in his youngest daughter. An adventurous man of sorts, he was one of the first people in Rome to buy an automobile. Since Anne’s eyesight was poor, and Helen was too young, he decided to teach his daughter Mary how to drive. The lessons ceased abruptly when Mother drove his new Ford through the plate glass window of the local drugstore. Though only the window and the auto suffered damage, she didn’t take up driving again until she was in her fifties, when she and I took driving lessons from the same instructor after my father had given up on both of us. Ironically, it was Anne who soon afterward became an expert driver and was the first young woman in North Georgia to drive in parades and funerals.

  Just before Anne was set to go to college, a relative came to be president of Shorter College, a half-hour walk from their Third Avenue home. After graduating, Anne wen
t off to art school in Boston. Mother was barely sixteen when she entered Shorter, where she studied biology, having decided that she wanted to be a doctor. Doctors were badly needed in China, which she seemed to have decided early on would be the place to spend her life. Then during her senior year she was summoned out of class and told that her father was dead, felled by a massive heart attack for which there had been no warning.

  Not only had she lost her father, she had lost any hope of becoming a doctor. There was no money for medical school and besides, how could she leave her mother at such a time? The solution was to find a teaching position in the area. Helen was still at home, so she taught that first year in Clinton, South Carolina, but when Helen left to go to nursing school, she returned to Rome to be with her mother.

  By then America was at war. Along with several of her friends, Mary worked in the Red Cross/YMCA canteen. Dressed in blue uniforms with white veils, the girls were on the platform when troop trains came through. Summer was particularly exciting because the nearby orchards would send bushels of peaches to the station. The girls stood beside each car with a bushel of peaches to hand them out when the train stopped. Mother described the “whoop of the men, mostly from the north, when they piled off the cars and saw us canteen girls presiding over the peaches. It was especially fun at night when we had flares.”

  Three of the girls, including Mary, loved the canteen work, and applied for an assignment overseas. They were only twenty-three and the minimum age was twenty-five, but the New York interviewer said there was a bill before Congress to lower the age, and when it passed, she would put their names at the top of the list. When the Armistice was signed in November Mother confessed to a tinge of disappointment in the midst of the rejoicing. She would not be going to France after all.