Rebecca Stead Goes Back in Time

Writer Rebecca Stead revisited her 1970s New York City childhood and wove it with a time travel twist for her second book, When You Reach Me (Wendy Lamb Books, $15.99). The young adult novel, which won the prestigious John Newbery Medal for children?s literature in January, follows latchkey kid Miranda as she tries to make sense of a frayed friendship and a prescient series of notes that suddenly start appearing. We caught up with Stead, an Upper West Side mother of two, after a whirlwind book tour that brought her to Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Cincinnati and Boston. Q: Do you feel like you?ve won the Oscar of children?s literature? A: Yeah, I do kind of feel like I?ve won the Oscar. This is the closest I ever want to come to winning an Oscar. I sort of would describe the experience as getting hit by a giant wave, a really beautiful sort of amazing wave, but it still has just turned my life upside down for a little while. Q: You said on your blog that in doing readings for your book, you get the most interesting questions from kids. A: They?re very interested in the abstract ideas of the book. There?s this notion of a veil in the story, and that we all have these veils that prevent us from seeing, sort of appreciating the whole world, and every once in a while this veil blows away an d we have a moment of what feels like real understanding. And kids really respond to that veil idea. A lot of them have said, ?Oh I have that,? or, ?I?m trying to lift my veil because I want to see more.? I feel like kids are willing to take in a lot on a deep level. They tend to grasp the time travel stuff very comfortably. I think that they?re more comfortable with this kind of story than a lot of adults. Q: You say it?s very important to talk about mortality in children?s books. Why do you think that is? A: I think that it?s very comfortable for adults to think that kids don?t grapple with the really hard stuff that we think about, like mortality, for instance. And I think that you?re fooling yourself if you think your kids don?t think about death. I think that kids think about the concept of death all the time. I remember thinking about it. I know my kids think about it. I like representing in a book a world that has some of the darkness that we are dealing with in life because that makes us feel like we can relate to a story. When a story reflects something I?m afraid of or something I think about, the story becomes more real and more important to me. Q: How much of the book is based on your life growing up? A: A lot of it is based on my memory of being a 6th grader in New York, where I lived. The kind of independence I had, the kind of friendships I had. And the kind of awakening that happens at that point in life, where you start seeing life from just a little bit farther back. I grew up right here on 95th Street and I went to P.S. 75. [The book] is a pretty good map of my walk to school from my building. I actually just dropped my son off at my mom?s; she still lives in the same apartment. The school is a fairly decent representation of our school. I changed some things, but I do remember when I discovered that we had a dentist?s office in our school and thinking about who had to go there. And I remember kids getting pulled out of school for shots. There was an awareness, like, ?Oh, this is a money thing.? Q: So much of the book is dependent on New York City in the ?70s. Could you write a book as textured as this taking place today? A: Kids are not as independent today as we were in our day, generally speaking. The parent community is a little bit more careful and protective than our parents were, not that our parents didn?t love us, but there was a community norm?I was on the street alone from the time I was 9. Nine-year-olds are not doing that in this neighborhood now, for the most part. Q: You were a public defender before you became a writer. I understand there was a laptop tragedy that aided in the transition? A: I had been a public defender for a few years, but as I was having children I was doing more development work at my office and finally decided after my second son was born to just take a break. So I was home with the kids and had been writing for a bunch of years?short stories for adults, just on my own time. One day there was this big crash and my 4-year-old, who is now my 11-year-old, had sort of pushed [the computer] off of the dining room table and it hit the floor and nothing could be recovered. I mean, how unlikely is that? It was totally a message from the universe saying, ?You know what? Move on.? I wanted to keep writing but I could not imagine trying to recreate these stories. I went to the bookstore and I bought a bunch of books that I remembered loving as a kid. Then I bought some books that were being written then, which was like 2002. And I thought, maybe I should try this?create the kind of story that I would have loved to read as a kid. Q: Reading your book, I could picture it as a movie. Is that something you?ve thought about, or would you be opposed to that? A: It?s so funny because I never thought about this book as a movie. Maybe because it?s so internal to the main character?she?s sort of puzzling out this story. Although now there have been discussions about that. Nothing definite has happened, but there?s been talk of options. I haven?t even listened to my audio book. It would be tricky and I have been asked if I would consider adapting this as a screenplay. Q: So you actually could win an Oscar. A: No, I?m not even going to try because I don?t think I could re-imagine the same material as creatively as a movie. I think it would almost need a completely different brain because you would really have to do a lot to turn this into a film. Transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.