I reached the end of the book and realized that I was as clueless as when I began. Was it a children’s book? An adult book? A young adult book? A crossover book? A . . . book?

I once wrote the English-language script for a beautiful and prestigious foreign animated film, and was asked by the film company, before I began, to try and include some swearwords in there somewhere, as they needed to be sure that the film had at least a PG-13 certificate. But I don’t think it’s swearing that makes fiction adult.

What makes a book an adult book is, sometimes, that it depicts a world that’s only comprehensible if you are an adult yourself.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you’re ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you’re older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

I have told you all this in the hopes that the action of writing it all down and of talking to you would clarify things for me, that it would shine a perfect and illuminating light on that most vexing of questions, what the fuck is a children’s book anyway?

And I have talked a lot tonight, but I suspect I have not answered the question. Not really.

But then, you do not come to authors for answers. You come to us for questions. We’re really good at questions.

And I hope that, in the days, and weeks, and years to come, the question of where the dividing lines between adult and children’s fiction really are, and why they blur so, and whether we truly need them—and who, ultimately, books are for—will rise up in your mind when you least expect it to, and vex you, as you also are unable, in an entirely satisfactory manner, to answer it.

And if that is the case, then our time together has been worthwhile. I thank you.

I gave this as the 2012 Zena Sutherland Lecture. It’s given in Chicago every year in honor of the late Zena Sutherland, an internationally recognized scholar of young people’s literature.

II

SOME PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN

“Nothing much has changed, except everything.”

These Are Not Our Faces

These are not our faces.

This is not what we look like.

You think Gene Wolfe looks like his photograph in this book? Or Jane Yolen? Or Peter Straub? Or Diana Wynne Jones? Not so. They are wearing play-faces to fool you. But the play-faces come off when the writing begins.

Frozen in black and silver for you now, these are simply masks. We who lie for a living are wearing our liar-faces, false faces made to deceive the unwary. We must be—for, if you believe these photographs, we look just like everyone else.