What the [Very Bad Swearword] Is a Children’s Book, Anyway? The Zena Sutherland Lecture

I hope none of you are here for answers. Authors are notoriously bad at answers. No, that’s not right. We’re not bad at them. We come up with answers all the time, but our answers tend to be unreliable, personal, anecdotal and highly imaginative.

These things can be drawbacks, as far as answers go, if you’re hoping to use our answers in your lives. But they are all good things, not drawbacks, when it comes to questions. Authors are good at posing questions, and our questions are often pretty solid.

I don’t write with answers in mind. I write to find out what I think about something. I wrote American Gods because I had lived in America for almost a decade and felt it was time that I learned what I thought about it.

I wrote Coraline because, when I was a child, I used to wonder what would happen if I went home and my parents had moved away without telling me.

(It could happen. Things sometimes slipped their minds. They were busy people. One night they forgot to pick me up from school, and it was only a wistful phone call from the school, at ten o’clock at night, asking if they were expected to keep me, that finally got me picked up. One morning my parents dropped me off at school without noticing that the half-term break had begun, and I wandered, confused, around a locked and empty school until I was eventually rescued by a gardener. So it was unlikely, but it was possible.)

And if my parents had moved away, what if other people moved in who looked just like them? How would I know? What would I do? And for that matter, what was behind the mysterious door at the far end of the oak-paneled drawing room, the one that opened to reveal only bricks?

I write stories to find out what I think about things.

I am writing this speech to find out what I think about something.

What I want to know is this: what is a children’s book? Or more emphatically: what the [very bad swearword] is a children’s book?

IT WAS A tiny private school in the town in which I lived, and I only attended it for a year. I was eight. One day, one of the boys came in with a copy of a magazine with naked ladies in it, stolen from his father, and we looked at it, to discover what naked ladies looked like. I do not remember what these particular naked ladies looked like, although I remember the little biographies by the pictures: one of the ladies was a magician’s assistant, which I thought very grand. We were, like all children, curious.

In the spring of that same year some kids that I used to encounter on my daily walk home from school told me a dirty joke. It had a swear word in it. In fact, I do not think it would be overstating matters to suggest that it had the swear word in it. It was not a particularly funny joke, but it was definitely sweary, and I told it to a couple of my school friends the following morning, thinking that they might find it funny, or failing that, think of me as sophisticated.