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Picture books for older readers do exist:

Well, some in publishing aren't questioning that picture books for older readers exist—rather that a market for them exists. But would there be this many books if there was no market?

Perrot Library, Old Greenwich, Connecticut; you know photo
is not manipulated because my book is not face out

(First read part 1 of 2.)

In her book about writing biographies, Meryle Secrest describes talking to a source about a subject’s possible connection to organized crime. The source said, “If you quote me, I won’t kill you but I’ll get you killed.”

Makes the threat of a lawsuit seem like an offer for a free chocolate milkshake. No one has threatened to kill or sue me. The worst so far: a few have been testy and one wanted a cut of any profit. There’s that vampire feeling again, even though writers do not need to compensate people they write about. (If they did, newspapers could never have existed.)

The purpose of biography, Secrest says, is “not just to record but to reveal.” That’s what many people would say: that there’s no point in writing, or reading, the life of a famous person if it doesn’t uncover some previously unpublicized piece of personal information.

One exception to this is the picture book biography. They may—but do not need to—contain a bombshell. They do need to tell the person’s story in a compelling way. Most new picture books about Benjamin Franklin don’t overturn previously held beliefs about him, but any new one should come at the subject with a fresh approach. That may be focusing on a little-known incident in an otherwise famous life, or telling a person’s story non-chronologically, or presenting a life in a stylized (but still factual) manner—using, say, rhyme or humor.

…a biography that did not use events in its subject’s personal life to explain his or her renown is almost unimaginable. Still, the premise poses a few problems. For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues.

People like the notion that a little luck is involved in success—that becoming famous could be sort of like winning the lottery. One day, you’re riding along on your donkey or in your Honda Civic or whatever, a voice speaks to you, and suddenly you are on the way to being St. Paul or Leonard Bernstein.

The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what happened earlier.

…only a sliver of what we do and think and feel gets recorded...

A biography is a tool for imagining another person, to be used along with other tools. It is not a window or a mirror.

At one point, August was National Biography Month. I wrote it down a while ago, which means I got it from somewhere. However, Googling it (in quotation marks) now reveals that few sites mention it and only one puts it in August.

Did they discontinue it because the greeting cards didn’t sell?

In any event, now is still an appropriate time (as appropriate as any) to talk about the (print) lives of others.

In 2007, I saved an article from The New Yorker about the process and perils of writing biographies. Just as biographers dissect their subjects, I have dissected this fascinating analysis of people who write intimately about other people they (oftentimes) never met.

This is how the article starts:

At a time when instruments for recording and disseminating information about people’s intimate behavior are cheap and easy to use, and when newspapers and magazines and television programs and Web sites purvey that kind of information without restraint, and when even ordinary people apparently can’t do enough to tell the world everything about themselves, a defense of the professional biographer’s right to pry does not seem something that civilization stands in dire need of.

Many of her stories about getting the story involve figuring out ways to…massage the relatives, friends, ex-friends, lovers, ex-lovers, work associates, lawyers, dealers, executors, and agents…who obscure a clear view into the private world of famous people.

“The older I get the more sympathy I have for families who discover that some stranger has decided to write about their famous member without, as it were, so much as a by-your-leave. Prurience titillates…leading to bigger sales and better royalties for the writer who is, not to put too fine a point on it, making money from others’ misfortunes.”

One of the best things about shopping for books in a small, independent children’s book store owned by a former children’s librarian is the quality and the kinds of books displayed on the shelves…and the absence of celebrity titles, Disney versions of fairy tales, and picture books about canines with chronic gastrointestinal disturbances.

Last week, as I browsed around in the Banbury Cross Children’s Book Shop, a book cover caught my eye. Looking closer, I read the title: TO GO SINGING THROUGH THE WORLD. Liked the title. Read the subtitle: THE CHILDHOOD OF PABLO NERUDA. Now how could a poetry lover like me let a book like that sit on the shelf? I picked up the book, settled myself down in one of the shop’s comfy wing chairs, and began reading.

The text of Deborah Kogan Ray’s picture book biography befits a biography about the young life of a great poet: It is well written…and oftentimes lyrical. In illuminating the early life of Neruda, she blends her words with those of the Nobel Prize winner. Neruda’s words and the excerpts from his poems are printed in italics so the transitions in the text’s third person and first person narrations are made clear to readers.

I found this book about the early years of Neruda’s life interesting and informative. Neruda, born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was raised in the town of Temuco—a pioneer mill town “in the shadow of volcanoes and surrounded by rain forests” in Chile. Neruda’s mother died when he was very young. His stern father, Don Jose, was a railway man who wanted his son to do well in school so he could have a better life. Don Jose married his second wife, Dona Trinidad—who became “the guardian angel” of the poet’s childhood. The young poet was a good listener and liked to hear the “old” stories his stepmother told him about the Mapuche, the native people who were called Indians by the settlers. He listened to the conversations at his father’s table. He was “curious about everyone he met and fascinated by the world around him.”

Deborah Kogan Ray compares the young Neruda to a silent, waiting volcano with fires stirring deep within him. He was shy, self-conscious about his stutter, and “deliberately set himself apart and tried to be different” from the other more “boisterous” boys who often threw acorns at him. He built a protective shell around himself. He lived in a world of books, in the nature of the rain forest that he loved, in the thoughts and images that burned inside him, in the words he was able to write down on paper but not express orally to others.

As Pablo grew—so grew the town in which he lived. He began writing about school events for a small local newspaper. About this time, Gabriela Mistral, a famous poet who later became the first Latin American woman to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, moved to Temuco. She was the new principal of the girls’ school. Mistral read the newspaper articles Neruda had written and “was impressed by his fine use of language…” She asked to meet the young man. Mistral became Neruda’s mentor. She gave him books to read, “opened new worlds” to him, and helped to crack the shell that he had built around himself. She encouraged Neruda to open up his heart and to express all the songs that were inside so the world could hear them.

This is a fine book in so many ways. Most importantly, it illuminates the life of a young man who was different from his peers, who didn’t do well in math, who lived in a world he had made for himself, who early on had a passion for stories and words, who had a burning curiosity to find out about the things that lay beyond his town—a young man with fears and desires who, with the love and understanding of a wonderful stepmother and the help and support of a caring and accomplished mentor, grew up to become one the world’s most celebrated poets. TO GO SINGING THROUGH THE WORLD is the kind of picture book biography I recommend to readers of all ages.

The back matter of the book includes Neruda’s poem, Poetry, printed in English and his native tongue, additional information about the lives of Neruda and Mistral, and a chronology of Neruda's life. On the front and back endpapers, readers will find a partial map of South America highlighting the country of Chile, as well as an illustration of the Town of Temuco—circa 1906.

P.S. I bought the book.

TO GO SINGING THROUGH THE WORLD: THE CHILDHOOD OF PABLO NERUDA

Written & illustrated by Deborah Kogan Ray

Published by Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2006)

Pablo Neruda biography at the Nobel Prize Website

Poems by Pablo Neruda at poets.org