Some of our earliest literary friends like Christopher Robin, Amelia Bedelia and Ramona Quimby stay in our consciousness our entire lives. That’s why the job of “children’s book writer” is such an important one, and not to be undertaken lightly. Author and Brooklyn resident Lisa Graff tackles that set of responsibilities with both wit and gravity in her recently released first novel for young adults called The Thing About Georgie. Graff introduces us to Georgie Bishop, a fourth grader who may seem like just an ordinary kid with a best friend, an annoying girl nemesis and parents who don’t always understand, but he’s a pretty special boy indeed. Gothamist recently sat down with the writer to try to find out a bit more what are “the things about Lisa Graff.”
One of the things about the book’s hero, Georgie is that he’s a dwarf. Why did this particular detail seem right for your story?
I really liked the idea of writing from the perspective of a child who was physically different from everyone around him in a very obvious way. I think children are constantly trying to figure out where they fit into their world—how to define themselves—and I wanted to explore what this struggle would be like for someone whose existence seemed to be pretty well defined from the get-go.
In the book you also use this lovely device of instructing your readers to try out different tasks (like putting their arm over their ear or measuring things in their room) to get a real sense of what it’s like to be Georgie’s size. Did you intend that narrator to be you, another character, or something else entirely?
In my first draft, that first-person narrator was definitely me, the author. When I first started working on Georgie I happened to be reading Tristram Shandy, so the whole talking-to-the-audience thing sort of emerged out of that. I even had a blank page stuck in the book, as a weird meta Sterne tribute. Lucky for me, I have a really great editor, and she convinced me that the author-as-narrator thing wasn’t working. Not only was it jarring, it’s just not much fun for a grown-up to burst into a kid’s story periodically and make the reader obey her every whim. So we came up with the idea that this narrator would instead be a character in the novel, which is much more interesting than having it just be the author. The author is, frankly, pretty boring.
One of the parts of your book that made me cheer was that in a climactic scene between Georgie and his parents, Georgie’s parents listen carefully to his questioning and don’t give him the pat, easy answer. A kid’s book that doesn’t talk down to kids, was that something you had as a goal when you started writing this story?
I’m so glad you thought it wasn’t pat! Because yes, that was huge for me—not to talk down to kids, and not to be cheesy. Kids know when you’re pulling a fast one, storywise, and I think that even when they’re being entertained, children want to hear the truth, just like adults do. That scene with Georgie’s parents was very important to me, because for the first time Georgie is confronting his parents about how they feel having a son who’s a dwarf, and he both wants and doesn’t want to hear an honest answer. I tried to make that scene as truthful as possible within the context of the story.
The book’s dedication is to your two little brothers, Robert and David. Do you feel like you write, to a certain extent, with the idea of entertaining them?
I’m not sure I write specifically with the idea of entertaining them, although of course I’d be thrilled if they liked my books. Like any kids, though, they can be tough critics, and they certainly don’t cut me any slack just because I’m their big sister. I flew back to California a few months ago, and I took a galley of Georgie with me; as soon as Rob saw it, he grabbed it from me and read the whole thing in just a couple of hours. Then he closed the book and said, “That’s pretty good, Lisa,” and went to play a video game. I considered that pretty high praise for a ten-year-old.
