Authorgraph No.93: Paula Danziger
In Paula Danziger’s view, you don’t need to be a writer, an illustrator or any kind of artist to qualify as a ‘creative’ human being. ‘I always say to kids – and to any grown-ups I can persuade to listen – that the most creative thing any of us can work on is our own lives. We can all create for ourselves a life that functions well and has some sense of whatever style works for us. That’s why clothes and jewellery are so important to me, I suppose, because they’re an adornment of who I am – another level to play at. And we can do this whatever our occupation.’
It’s a typically generous and maverick opinion from someone whose whole career, perhaps, can be graded as ‘A over F’. This was the mark she specialised in at school where ‘A stood for what I’d managed to do and F for how closely I’d followed the assignment. Teachers were always telling me “It’s great, Paula … but it’s not what we actually asked for.”’
She’s been confounding expectations ever since.
For instance, how many writers for children are as well known as she is on both sides of the Atlantic, have three homes between which they commute – in London, in New York and in Woodstock – and have established themselves on television talking about the books of other authors? Certainly Paula Danziger, as flamboyant in fact as she is in her fiction, has worked creatively on her own life.
So how did it all begin? How closely are characters like Kendra Kaye, Matthew Martin and Amber Brown modelled on Paula herself and her own experiences? Did she ride The Divorce Express? Or sue her own parents for malpractice? Did the cat eat her gymsuit?
As happens so often when the autobiographical dimension of a writer’s work is explored, the answer turns out to be a firm maybe. ‘I grew up in a family which nowadays would be called dysfunctional,’ she says. ‘My parents really cared about their kids … which makes it even sadder, I suppose. My father was a very angry man. He never hit my younger brother and me but was emotionally abusive, I felt. He wasn’t very happy with his life … and my mother was very self-involved. We just didn’t get along together. My parents never split up though I often hoped they would. I always used to think I was illegitimate but my father told me I was too ugly to be a love-child!’
It was this saving humour which helped her struggle through the unhappiness.
Later, at college, she considered becoming a librarian (but didn’t think she’d be quiet enough) or a speech-therapist – and was told her low, husky voice was too sexy. (‘Aren’t speech therapists allowed to be sexy?’ I wondered. ‘Not in New Jersey,’ replied Paula darkly.) So she turned to teaching – and instantly fell in love with 12-13 year-olds as an age-group even if her maverick disposition, well established by now, didn’t endear her to many colleagues. Then, in the space of six days, came two car accidents which changed her life. After the second she was hospitalised, had more than a hundred stitches in her face and, partly as a result of pain-killing drugs, suffered a terrifying loss of motor control with the consequence that, even today, she can write backwards and forwards with equal facility. Years of therapy followed … during which her therapist, Sam Slipp, encouraged her to explore her feelings through writing. Slowly, painfully, the text grew into her first book The Cat Ate My Gymsuit in which 13-year-old Marcy Lewis, and her independent-minded teacher Barbara Finney, seem to be substituting about equally for Paula Danziger herself.
Other Danziger titles followed – and, except for The Pistachio Prescription , they’re all her own titles – as she began to rival the success of Judy Blume with her sharp, funny accounts of summer camp ( There’s a Bat in Bunk Five ), sibling rivalry ( Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? ), family splits ( The Divorce Express ) new relationships ( It’s an Aardvark-eat-turtle World ), all too dominant parents in the 21st century ( This Place Has No Atmosphere ). In 1988 came Remember Me to Harold Square with its account of Kendra, Frank and a New York treasure hunt. The same characters re-appear in Thames Doesn’t Rhyme With James which provides the front cover of this BfK . There’s the same spare, wry quality to the writing as well:
‘I look at Frank.
He looks so sad.
My father called out again, “We’re waiting.”
I turn on the dishwasher and then Frank kisses me again.
I’m leaning against the turned-on dishwasher, and Frank, who is also turned on, is leaning against me …’
It’s as far as Frank gets. Indeed, it’s about as far as anyone gets in a Paula Danziger story.
Prudery?
‘Not a bit,’ she says. ‘Other writers can follow through more explicitly if they want to … I’m not puritanical but I do make certain choices. My characters. I admit, tend to be careful, even cautious.’ Mischievously, however, she goes on to point out that the main character in Judy Blume’s notorious Forever is called Danziger. ‘Not named after me, though,’ she laughs. ‘After her pharmacist.’
If, in its tact about sex, Thames Doesn’t Rhyme With James follows an established Danziger pattern, it’s changed utterly in one other respect: location. Paula’s well-known affection for our capital city warms the entire book and includes a quiz (in which answers are provided) and a suggested itinerary for a visit which reflects her own fascination with its detail and atmosphere during the years she’s spent as a part-time resident. ‘I love London. I’m very happy here. Especially I like me in London … that’s what it is. Granted I live in a comfortable neighbourhood where I feel safe but, then, I’ve never not felt safe in London. What I love best are the blue plaques. I have a friend who says my aim is to have blue plaques everywhere which say “Paula lived here … and here and here and here”. I love the sense of history, the fact that you can still see the sky, the playing with language …’
Ah, the playing with language. Trust a writer to value this – and a writer like Paula to incorporate it in her titles. Is there another children’s author who’s acknowledged the help of ‘all the taxi drivers in London’ at the front of a book?
Of course, place hasn’t been the only change in her working life in recent years. Also she’s discovered the heady delights of television performance. ‘Working with people like Phillip Schofield and Sarah Greene on Going Live and Live and Kicking was wonderful – especially as a way of promoting books and reading. I found I absolutely loved appearing on screen. In fact, it cost me a fortune because I was constantly flying back from New York, at my own expense, to do a programme!’
Already she’s looking forward to the new series this autumn.
An even bigger, and more significant, shift professionally was brought about by a move down the age-range via two new central characters. The first was Matthew Martin – indefatigable and irresistible 11-year-old – who in Everyone Else’s Parents Said Yes , Make Like a Tree and Leave , Earth to Matthew and Not For a Billion, Gazillion Dollars reminds us that the tradition of Richmal Crompton’s William Brown is alive, well and flourishing in a suitably updated, transatlantic form. Later, though, and Paula’s eyes light up when you mention her, came another Brown altogether … called Amber.
Now, such is the odd alchemy of writerly inventiveness, no one can ever be entirely sure of a character’s provenance – or any other aspect of literary creation, come to that. When, for instance, I remarked on Paula’s evident preference for the present-tense, and for writing in the first person when her central character is a girl and the third when it’s a boy, she stared at me blankly. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘I’ve never noticed.’
About Amber, though, there seems much less doubt:
‘To Carrie Marie Danziger
niece, consultant and pal’
runs the dedication. And Paula’s enthusiastic endorsement of her brother’s daughter in all three capacities certainly matches her delight in the storybook version whose voice, one suspects, would disqualify her from speech-therapy, at any rate in New Jersey, as instantly as Carrie’s apparently does … or Paula’s.
And there’s the rub, as usual. Paula, and the themes which continue to preoccupy her, is fully implicated in Amber as well. Behind the apparent simplicity of Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon – the tale of Amber/Carrie’s friendship, in the third grade, with a classmate who moved away out of her life – lies a tale with a rather different resonance, of a grown-up pal of Paula’s who moved away out of her life by dying. No, she’s not equating the two. What, instinctively, she knows (without ever mentioning it) is that, to a third grader, they might feel the same. This ability to take the emotions of young people completely seriously without losing touch with their fresh, irreverent light-heartedness is seen again in You Can’t Eat Your Chicken-Pox, Amber Brown which transports Amber to England, to Aunt Pam … and towards coping with some of the post-marital split perplexities that confront many kids these days:
‘My father has his arms round me. “I’ve missed you so much, Amber.”
We hug for a few minutes and we just stand there, looking at each other.
“You got taller,” he says.
“And scabbier,” I grin.
“You really did have the chicken pox.”
He grins back.
Aunt Pam comes over to us. “Hi, Phil.”
“Pam.” He reaches out and shakes her hand. “How are you?” They always used to hug each other before my mom and dad got separated.
I guess Dad and Aunt Pam are getting a relative divorce.’
Already there’s a third Amber Brown book on the way. It’s a show, Paula reckons, which will run and run. Writing, for her, is a painful business, quite literally, owing to an inherited ailment which puts every bone in her body, including her fingers, all too easily out of joint. With her trusty lap-top to hand, though, and her even trustier editors, Gill Evans and Margaret Frith, on the end of a ‘phone in London and New York respectively – ‘Sometimes they gang up on me,’ she says – Amber Brown Wants More Credit promises to be as safe an investment as any current literary project whether it’s completed in England, the USA or on some aircraft in-between. Happy landings, Amber Danziger.
All Paula Danziger’s books, unless otherwise stated, are published in hardback by Heinemann at £8.99, and in paperback by Piccolo at £2.99:
The Cat Ate My Gymsuit , 0 434 96577 4; 0 330 29849 6 pbk The Pistachio Prescription , 0 434 96576 6; 0 330 30018 0 pbk
There’s a Bat in Bunk Five , 0 434 93413 5; 0 330 30234 5 pbk
Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? , 0 434 96570 7; 0 330 30019 9 pbk
The Divorce Express , 0 434 96571 5; 0 330 29657 4 pbk
It’s an Aardvark-eat-turtle World , 0 434 93414 3; 0 330 30375 9 pbk
This Place Has No Atmosphere , 0 434 93414 3; 0 330 30559 X, £3.50 pbk
Remember Me to Harold Square , 0 434 93416 X; 0 330 31476 9 pbk
Thames Doesn’t Rhyme with James , 0 434 96916 8; Mammoth, 0 7497 2325 4, £2.99 pbk
Everyone Else’s Parents Said Yes , 0 330 31476 9 pbk
Make Like a Tree and Leave , 0 434 93412 7; 0 330 32225 7 pbk
Earth to Matthew , 0 434 93410 0; 0 330 32501 9 pbk
Not For a Billion Gazillion Dollars , 0 434 96216 3, £4.99; 0 330 33165 5, £3.50 pbk
Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon , 0 434 96492 1, £3.99; 0 330 33143 4 pbk
You Can’t Eat Your Chicken-Pox, Amber Brown , 0 434 97569 9, £3.99
