She was polite, unless she was being gloriously rude, and she was, I suppose, relatively normal, if you were able to ignore the swirls and eddies of improbability that crashed around her. And believe me, they did: Diana would talk about her “travel jinx,” and I thought she was exaggerating until we had to fly to America on the same plane. The plane we were meant to fly on was taken out of commission after the door fell off, and it took many hours to get another plane. Diana accepted this as a normal part of the business of travel. Doors fell off planes. Sunken islands rose up beneath you if you were in boats. Cars simply and inexplicably ceased to function. Trains with Diana on them went to places they had never been before and technically could not have gone.

She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had actually happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. My favorite essay in this book describes her writing process, and shows the immense amount of craft and care that went into each book.

She made a family, and without her family she would not have written. She was well loved, and she was well worth loving.

This book shows us a master craftswoman reflecting on her life, her trade and the building blocks she used to become a writer. We will meet, in these reflections, someone who has taken the elements of a most peculiar childhood (are there any non-peculiar childhoods? Perhaps not. They are all unique, all unlikely, but Diana’s was unlikelier than most) and a formidable intellect, an understanding of language and of story, a keen grasp of politics (on so many levels—personal, familial, organizational and international), an education that was part autodidactic (but in which, as you will learn here, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien both lectured for her, even if she was never quite sure what Tolkien was actually saying), and then, armed with all these things, has become quite simply the best writer for children of her generation.

I am baffled that Diana did not receive the awards and medals that should have been hers: no Carnegie Medal, for a start (although she was twice a runner-up for it). There was a decade during which she published some of the most important pieces of children’s fiction to come out of the UK: Archer’s Goon, Dogsbody, Fire and Hemlock, the Chrestomanci books . . . these were books that should have been acknowledged as they came out as game-changers, and simply weren’t. The readers knew. But they were, for the most part, young.

I suspect that there were three things against Diana and the medals:

Firstly, she made it look easy. Much too easy. Like the best jugglers or slack-rope walkers, it looked so natural that the reader couldn’t see her working, and assumed that the writing process really was that simple, that natural, and that Diana’s works were written without thought or effort, or were found objects, like beautiful rocks, uncrafted by human hand.