When I was a kid, I disappeared into books whenever my real life was lacking or tricky. If I was fighting with friends, then I’d sneak away and read. If I was confused about how I felt about the world, I’d try and find answers in stories.
My childhood was a happy one, and books made it even happier.
When I wasn’t playing netball or riding horses, I was often lying in the hammock out the front of our house and reading. Mum encouraged this. She’d grown up poor in housing commission places and wasn’t allowed to read for pleasure. There were just too many chores. She loved telling me about how as a child she would run away with her library book to the rifle range where soldiers practised their aim, and she’d hide away behind the targets and read. Her mum couldn’t find her down there so sometimes she stayed for hours.
Books had been her escape as a child. Her way of imagining something better. And she knew the power of them. She filled my childhood with as many books as I could read. Our spare room was lovingly named the library as my uncle had built chunky wooden shelving on three walls that housed many hundreds of books.
By the time I was ten, I was allowed to ride my yellow bike alone down the road to the tennis courts where the mobile library van parked on Tuesdays between 4-5.30. The person who drove the van was not very interested in talking about books. They were there mainly for their truck licence, not for lengthy discussions with pre-teens on the detective skills of Trixie Belden versus Nancy Drew.
But I didn’t mind. My visits were about returning my old pile of books and borrowing some more. As many as I could carry in the cane basket on the front of my bike. The book choice was limited, but we could make requests and if we were lucky those books would arrive the following week with a slip of paper poking from the top with our names in typed letters.
Even as child I was a fan of realistic fiction. Contemporary stories in worlds I recognised. I wasn’t drawn to reading The Lord of the Rings, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Instead, I loved reading stories about girls my age in contemporary worlds that I recognised. Basically, I wanted to understand who I was.
When I wasn’t reading, I was writing. Banging out stories on an old black typewriter. Agatha Christie style murder mysteries, gruesome tales of killing off the kids in my class that I didn’t like, and stories about falling in love with my neighbour while riding horses together. My first story was a post-apocalyptic tale about the world being turned into jelly while my friend Cathy and I were the heroes.
I think perhaps the joy that I found in reading as a child was what prompted me to write books for children as an adult. Partly I wanted to write for the child in me, and partly to see if I could tell stories with the same honesty and the same realism as those I loved when I was young.
Today I’m going to talk about the truths we seek in children’s books, and how those truths help us create realistic characters and realistic worlds. Those characters that I now seek to write and those characters that I once wanted to read.
The first truth I want to talk about is lies, and why we struggle to create characters who behave badly in children’s books.
My interest in this particular truth started when I was nine and I fell head over heels in love with Harriet from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic, Harriet the Spy. She was two years older than me and ambitious and driven. She spied on everyone and kept a notebook with her observations. When her friends found out, they were hurt and angry.
This book spoke to me. It was real. It was about kids doing mean things, hurting each other, feeling depressed and lonely. My life was nothing like Harriet’s, but the fact that this character was so alive on the page made me feel safe. I understood that I too could mess up my friendships and find a way back to them.
It’s only as an adult that I’ve understood the importance this book had on changing the sorts of fiction being written for young people. It helped introduce realism to children, and it’s still in print sixty years later.
This is a small section that I love because it’s so blisteringly honest:
“Harriet left, went home, ate her tomato sandwich and took to her bed for another day. She had to think. Her mother was playing bridge downtown. Harriet pretended to be sick enough so the cook didn’t yell at her and yet not sick enough for the cook to call her mother. She had to think. As she lay there in the half gloom, she looked out over the trees in the park. For a while she watched a bird, then an old man who walked like a drunk. Inside she felt herself thinking, “Everybody hates me, everybody hates me.”
At first, she didn’t listen to it and then she heard what she was feeling. She said it several times to hear it better. Then she reached. Nervously for her notebook and wrote in big, block letters, the way she used to write when she was little. EVERYBODY HATES ME.
She leaned back and thought about it. It was time for her cake and milk, so she got up and went downstairs in her pyjamas to have it. The cook started a fight with her, saying that if she were sick, she couldn’t have any cake and milk.
Harriet felt big hot tears come to her eyes and she started to scream.”
On my tenth birthday, my mum accused me of lying. She thought I’d gone looking for my birthday present and found it and then lied about it. I hadn’t. That was a long time ago and I still remember how much that hurt. That this person I loved deeply thought I was a liar.
Of course, I lied at other times. Like we all do. I lied about eating broccoli that I hid in my pocket and later flushed down the toilet. I lied about showering when I paid my brother twenty cents to have one for me. I lied about liking a homemade jumper my mum had made me when all I wanted was one from an actual shop.
But not that day. That day I was telling the truth but no matter what I said, mum wouldn’t believe me. Furious, I wrote about it in my diary. Just like Harriet had written mean things about people in her spy notebook. My red covered diary was full of bad days, and when mum called me a liar, I scrawled angry words that said imaginatively: I hate my mum.
I’ve often thought about that moment as an adult, and now find myself wondering if that was the starting point for my writing about kids who lie.
When I wrote The Secrets We Keep back in 2014, it was my first middle grade novel. I wrote it for my daughter who was eleven at the time, the same age as the main character, Clem Timmins. The book is about Clem’s struggle to deal with having a mum who is depressed.
I’ve never had depression. This wasn’t something I’ve struggled with, but my partner did at the time, and my daughter struggled with his depression. I wrote the book as a way for her to talk about what she was feeling, to give her language for feeling angry and pissed off with her dad.
In the book, Clem believes her mum burned their house down, which has led to her and her dad having to move, and Clem having to leave her old school and friends. Clem isn’t in contact with her mum, and the reader doesn’t know for half of the book if her mum died in the fire too. Clem lies to her new friend, Ellie that her mum has died, and when Ellie discovers the truth, she is understandably furious. The narrative is predicated on Clem doing something that hurts her friend. It is about the secrets that we keep when we are children, and stories that we invent to make our lives easier to present to the world.
This is the moment that Clem’s friend Ellie discovers Clem is lying.
“‘I’m sorry, Ellie …’
She shrugs like she doesn’t care. But she must. I lied to her. Big time.
‘You know the athletics carnival is on tomorrow,’ she says, doodling on the page.
‘Yeah.’
She looks up and I see sparks in her eyes. ‘I’m going to thrash you.’
I don’t know how to answer so I start fiddling with the earring in my right ear.
Ellie hands me her piece of paper and stands up. ‘I’m going to go and work with my real friend now. I’m sure you’ll be fine on your own.’
I watch her walk out of the room and imagine how pleased Tam will feel when she realises Ellie has dumped me for her.”
We spend so much time teaching children about being honest and truthful, but we fail to give them the tools to use if they aren’t.
I’ve written three books with Clem Timmins as the protagonist. She was my introduction to learning how to write realism for middle grade readers. In the first book she is in Grade 6. In the second book, she is starting high school and she meets a teenage boy a little older than her who introduces her to things that mean she lies again. And in the third book she is starting year 8 and the lies she tells are to protect herself because she isn’t growing up as fast as her friends and she fears being left behind.
It is rare in Australia that authors of contemporary middle-grade stories are allowed to write a trilogy with the same characters who grow older across the series. We have a fantasy trilogy model, but we don’t often see this occurring outside that genre. This was an incredible opportunity for me as an author to grow a character across three books and three years.
At first, I struggled to write the third Clem book. Partly because I didn’t want her to grow up. I wanted to keep her young. Keep her innocent. And it was only when a friend said I had to let Clem make mistakes and mess up that I could accept she was almost like a child I could no longer control. And then I could give her agency and the agency means she does realistic things that year 8 kids do every day. She lies, she argues with her parents, she fights with her friends, and she lets a girl pierce her ears on school camp.
None of these things are particularly out of the ordinary for most kids in year 8. It is, quite naturally, a time where children are starting to push for independence, and agency.
And children lie. To their parents, to their friends and to themselves. But it’s not books that teach children to lie. We do. Adults. We tell children that Father Christmas is real. We leave money out from the Tooth Fairy. We tell them they’ll get sick if they go to bed with wet hair. We often use lies to control our children. And sometimes we use lies to make their lives better. And children learn how to lie from us.
And I think it’s my job as an author to show the fall-out of a lie and how to recover from a lie. And in the case of Clem in the three Secrets books, she must explain why she lied and ask to be forgiven.
That is much more realistic for a young reader, than reading a book where nobody lies and nobody hurts anyone else, and everyone behaves well. Doesn’t that just make a child feel like a failure if the character they are reading about is so much better behaved than them.
Recently in my book club we talked about fantasy stories where the main character will discover they are the chosen one. It is a very common trope. Think Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, The Hunger Games. Chosen one stories mark a character as special. They are set apart from the others because they have a specific skill or talent that nobody else has. When we were talking about this trope in book club one of the authors said she’d always felt othered when she read chosen one stories as a child, as she never considered herself special. It made her doubt her ordinary talents and wonder why anyone would want to be her friend. It made her stop reading the chosen one book because she felt it wasn’t speaking to her.
I’d never articulated that, but I think as a child, I too, was much more drawn to flawed characters who messed up as I did, because they made me feel less alone.
I think sometimes a small story about a kid figuring themselves out is the best thing a child can read rather than another book about a kid saving the world from stupid adults. There’s such a lot of weight on children nowadays: children saving the planet, while adults are clapping them from home. Authors shouldn’t be living out some fantasy that children are going to save the world. Or that children should have to save the world.
Sometimes just working out how to keep a friendship is enough.
When my book Sick Bay was published in the US last year, I was surprised by how little was changed. We kept the Melbourne setting, the references to schools, even the world of the characters stayed the same. But what did change was the lying. One of the main characters in the book, Meg, lies about having panic attacks. She lies for attention. She lies because she’s watched her mum have panic attacks and it frightens her. And she lies because she’s doing whatever she can to get through a day. My American editor suggested that we should change these panic attacks. And after some lengthy discussion I agreed to change that part of the story. Meg now experiences panic attacks and only lies about one of them.
This is the section from the Australian edition of the book where Meg’s friend Riley learns that Meg is a liar.
“Next to me, Meg starts coughing and clutches at her throat. I put my hand behind her back and start rubbing up and down, hoping she’ll be okay.
‘Leave her alone, Lina. The bell’s gone. Let’s just get to class,’ I say, trying to move us away. But Lina isn’t done with us. With me.
I shoot a look at Meg. Her breathing is raspy and raw beside me.
‘Can’t believe you chose her, R,’ she says. ‘Of all the people.’ Then she turns dramatically and storms off, her minions scurrying after her.
‘Why not? She’s funny, smart and loyal!’ I yell after her. I turn to Meg. ‘You okay?’
She straightens up and her breathing changes. ‘Yep. All good.’
I take in the size of her smile and her clear eyes. Then I notice how straight she’s standing and how relaxed her face looks. ‘But the panic attack?’
‘It’s fine. I’m okay now.’
‘Wait, were you faking?’
‘No. Not exactly.’
I clench my jaw. ‘What about the other day on the oval?’
She looks down at the ground and I know what that means.
‘This whole time, you’ve been faking? You don’t really have panic attacks?’ My voice is too loud and I’m aware that kids are watching us as they hurry past to their classes. But I don’t care. Right now, I’m a ticking bomb.
‘Mum does. I learned from her.’
‘But, I … I …’
‘Felt sorry for me?’
‘No. Yeah. I don’t know. You lied!’
Meg closes her eyes and pushes her fringe out of her face. ‘Having The Bag as my friend was me just trying to get by. Panic attacks meant that Sarah fed me. That Ms Barber was kind. And it meant I got to go to Sick Bay whenever I needed.’
‘You hang in Sick Bay but you aren’t actually sick.’ She shrugs at me like I’ve got it all wrong but my skin is itching and I scratch at my neck and I feel angry. ‘You’re normal, Meg!’
Her face is shocked. I just yelled at her and now I feel bad but I also feel furious.
‘Normal? Why? Because I don’t have diabetes? Because I’m not an asthmatic? Because I don’t breathe into a bag? Nobody’s normal, Riley. We’re all just trying to cope.’”
I spend a lot of my time teaching writing in schools. And when I run writing workshops with kids, if given free rein, they often write about things that are inspired by their lives. Parents too busy to spend time with them. Having a frenemy at school. Hating a sibling. Being terrified of failing. Or loving someone who doesn’t love them back. They are very aware that for most of us, we are just trying to cope. That there is no normal. That often, things are hard. That we are all just trying to belong.
I want to capture that when I write. That feeling of failing, of wanting, of being afraid. And lying is a big part of that.
I don’t think we like accepting that children lie. But they lie for all sorts of reasons. And it’s the why that makes for good drama, not the fact that they lie in the first place. The reasons that Meg invents her panic attacks makes her the complex and flawed character that she is. By making those panic attacks real, she then becomes something else. A character with anxiety and a character who has even more hardship thrust upon her.
I don’t mind Meg lying. I think it’s honest. I think that a twelve-year-old can construct a story that requires sympathy just so that she can survive in a school where she is bullied.
In America there is a constant and very real threat that books will be removed by parent lobby groups and schools if they tackle issues the gatekeepers decide are not fit for young people to read about. The American Library Association track the number of books being banned each year, and 2021 was the worst year for attempted censorship yet, with 1597 books being challenged. Many of the books being challenged are about racism and rights and queer lives, and they are being challenged on the issue of public decency. Librarians fear the real reason is to silence unwanted perspectives and shut down critical thinking.
Harriet the Spy has been banned often in schools across America because parents fear the book teaches children to lie, spy, and talk back. There have also been complaints that the character is not a good role model for children. The very reasons that I loved the book as a child.
In a letter to a friend, author Louise Fitzhugh said she was working on something new: “It is called Harriet the Spy and is about a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.”
Fitzhugh knew she was creating a complex character, possibly an unlikeable one. And that is an important aspect of realism in children’s fiction. Main characters can behave badly, they can take issue with something and be angry about it. Creating character sympathy should not be predicated on whether a kid is “nice” all the time, or always has the answers and never messes up. My favourite characters to read as a child were not always nice. I never liked Nancy Drew. She was just too well behaved.
In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, the character Mary Lennox is introduced by the narrator as “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.” As readers, we are intrigued. We read on wondering what will happen to this character, and whether we will learn why she is like this. We wonder too if she is actually disagreeable, or if the narrator is harshly judging her.
When I co-wrote Elsewhere Girls with author Emily Gale, we made a choice to create one of the two main characters as a competitive and ruthless 14-year-old who is often unlikeable. The character of Cat is on a swimming scholarship at an elite school and simply doesn’t have time for kindness, even to her own sister, because she is too busy being ultra-competitive. She softens over the course of the book, learning that swimming is not the thing she loves, but she still remains hard and sometimes sarcastic, even if she is allowed to become funnier and warmer. This was important to us. To write a character who isn’t a ‘nice’ girl, but who is complex and angry and jealous and feels real emotions.
Balancing character sympathy and characters who are possibly hard and not very nice is tricky as an author. But it is also important. Kids are not squeaky clean and moral every minute of the day. They are complex, particularly when they are pre-teen and trying to work out their sense of identity more than ever before. We need to reflect this in the characters we create. We need to make young readers feel seen and safe.
What I loved about Harriet as a child was that she was fierce in a way no girl character had been before. But she has enormous self-esteem and even writes I Love Myself in her spy notebook.
Harriet doesn’t turn into a nice girl at the end after being shown the error of her ways. Instead, she remains throughout an unapologetic, brash and often self-centred character who learns how to become more tactful. I’m sure I was often brash when I was ten. I was certainly self-centred. Harriet didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know, but she also showed me that spying on her friends hurt them.
I loved Harriet because she was flawed and real and she made mistakes, and she hurt people and she survived. That’s what realism is. It’s showing children that we are all flawed, that we all lie, that we all make mistakes, and sometimes we have to apologise, own up, confess, and that mostly we’ll be forgiven and sometimes we won’t, but it’s usually okay.
Many years after mum accused me of lying, I raised it with her. She had no idea what I was talking about. That moment that had shaped so much of my childhood was something that she’d forgotten entirely. We laughed about it, but it made me realise that even when she thought I was lying, it wasn’t enough to hold onto. She didn’t expect me to be faultless as a child, in fact she expected me to have flaws.
The second truth I want to talk about today is puberty and given that we all experience it, why is it something we so often struggle to discuss in children’s books.
At twelve, Judy Blume taught me all I needed to know about puberty in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
At the time, I hated the fact that my body was changing. It seemed like overnight I’d gone from being a flat-chested sporty kid to a pubescent girl with boobs. I didn’t want to talk to Mum about it. Or my friends.
And Margaret Simon in Judy Blume’s classic book was facing the same. She was my age, and as confused as I was about growing up. I fell into this book like it would save me. And it did.
Here’s a tiny moment from Margaret’s story which normalises deodorant.
“We moved on the Tuesday before Labor Day. I knew what the weather was like the second I got up. I knew because I caught my mother sniffing under her arms. She always does that when it’s hot and humid, to make sure her deodorant’s working. I don’t use deodorant yet. I don’t think people start to smell bad until they’re at least twelve. So I’ve still got a few months to go.”
As a tween, I loved this book. I read it over and over again, looking for the secrets to becoming a teenager. I felt understood, I felt represented, and I felt seen.
Except the character is religious. I was not. The character was American. I was not. The character wanted her boobs to grow. I did not. Margaret Simon and I were actually nothing alike. But the very fact that she too was experiencing something as unsettling as puberty can be, was enough for me at the time.
I wanted to share that stuff with someone. If I couldn’t share it with my friends, then Margaret Simon would have to do.
Like all of Judy Blume’s books, Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret has been banned many times. It was one of the five Judy Blume books most frequently banned in the 1990s. The others were: Forever, Blubber, Deenie, and Tiger Eyes.
Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret is often challenged, because it talks about religion and puberty. Judy Blume has written about how she donated three copies to her children’s school, but “the male principal decided that the book was inappropriate because of the discussion of menstruation”— something every teenage girl deals with.
In the last Clem book that I wrote called The Edge of Thirteen, Clem is desperate to get her period and lies about it because both her friends have already got theirs. In my new book, The Jammer, Fred’s mum has recently died, and she talks about being terrified of getting her period without her mum around to steer her through. When Fred’s period starts for the first time, it escalates her grief because she feels lost without someone to talk to.
In the past five years, Australian middle grade books have started featuring periods as a normal part of life. Danielle Binks’ book, The Year the Maps Changed, Fiona Woods book, How To Spell Catastrophe and Emily Gale’s latest, The Goodbye Year all reference periods in much more matter of fact ways than we have read in recent times. Given half our young readers get their periods anytime from eleven years and on, this is a pretty important development in children’s fiction.
Puberty should feature in a matter-of-fact way in books so that readers can understand it’s just a part of life, but within that it’s important that we explore the feelings kids have towards puberty. Exploring layered responses is important in fiction because then we reassure kids that whatever they are feeling is okay. They might be scared, they might be excited, they might want to bury their head in the sand.
I remember doing a book club for Sick Bay and the bookseller running it told me happily that the boys didn’t care about the bra buying scene, and that they just talked about it like it was another part of the story. If we want to change the way children interact and reduce misogyny and increase understanding, then books are a very safe way to make changing bodies and feelings normalised.
I think I write about periods and first crushes and being embarrassed to be seen out with your parents because I remember all of these feelings from when I was twelve. I was never confident enough to talk about them with my friends so I wrote about them in my diary, and I sought out books that would reassure me that whatever I felt, I was normal.
I still remember the burning shame of being teased for having boobs when I played tennis. I still remember the crush I had on a boy who was more interested in checking out my mum than he was in me. And I still remember getting my period on the train when I was wearing a white skirt and having to borrow a friend’s jumper to tie around my waist.
But mostly I remember reading and rereading Judy Blume and wondering how she knew what I was thinking and feeling when nobody else seemed to.
Puberty is embarrassing. But it’s our job to write about that and make it a shared thing instead of something shameful. As adults, we have to stop sanitising the world we show our children. They are growing up under the fear of climate change and yet we are still pretending that they don’t grow hair under their armpits or bleed every month.
In order to approach a level of realism and honesty with young readers, in whatever genre we are writing in, we need to stop making puberty a secret, and write it into our stories in small and meaningful ways so that it feels less terrifying and more just like a part of life.
Thinking back to me as a twelve-year-old on the cusp of change, wanting advice from Judy Blume about what to expect, I would have loved to have had an entire shelf of books that explored puberty instead of just hers. Books where puberty was funny, and books where it wasn’t. And perhaps now, our kids will.
And that brings me to the final truth I think we need to tackle in our writing. Am I likeable? And do I belong?
This was what I feared most as a kid. That I’d turn up to school and my friends would have changed their minds about me. They would have discovered the truth. On a bad day, I worried mum liked my brother more. On a bad day, I hated the way I looked. My hair was wrong. My nose was too big. My laugh was too loud. The list was endless.
I was the first-born child in a middle-class family in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. I was loved, I had friends and I wasn’t lying to get by. But still if you read my childhood diary, much of what I felt was similar to the characters that I loved. Hurt that a friend didn’t like me anymore. Jealous of my brother. Angry with my mum. Hating my body. All the things we feel when we are growing up. And to have books that told me it was okay to feel these things meant I could breathe.
Now, I like writing about flawed kids who find a way to understand some of their flaws, or at least forgive themselves by the end. I’m not arguing for writing fiction that is so brutally realistic, it takes children down a very dark path and leaves them there. I’m talking about being honest, and not shying away from the imperfect or the messed-up.
I’m talking about writing kids who work out that there is no normal. That belonging isn’t always easy. And that sometimes you’re on your own.
I want kids to know that not everyone is nice all the time, and that sometimes we screw up, and it’s how we own that behaviour that redeems us. This is my final act of realism. The knowledge that I want children to take away from reading my books. That yes, they are usually still likeable even if they are flawed, grumpy, rude, mean, a liar, or a spy.
