Q & A with Jeanne Birdsall

By Sue Corbett, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 4/10/2008

Three years ago Jeanne Birdsall won the National Book Award for The Penderwicks (Knopf), her wholesome charmer about four sisters and their widowed father on summer vacation in the Berkshires. The sequel, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, which is due out this month, finds the Penderwicks back home, plotting to keep their widowed father from dating again.

Jeanne Birdsall.  Photo: Tsar Fedorsky.

Luckily, it didn’t, for a couple of reasons. One was that I had planned all along to write more than one book about the Penderwicks because I always read books in a series when I was a child. I would have been heartbroken if there had been only one Borrowers book [the series by Mary Norton]. So I wasn’t trying to do something new. I just kept doing what I had planned to do. The other reason is I am older. I was 54 when I won the National Book Award. I have a plan now for what I want to do for the rest of my working life. But if you’re 30 and you win a big prize like that, you might ask yourself, ‘How am I going to sustain this for the next 45 years?’

So do you think you will be writing about the Penderwick sisters for the rest of your career?

I do. After I wrote the first one, when I was still trying to find a home for it, I started a prequel. I didn’t get very far before the award was announced and then I decided to write a sequel instead but now I know I’m going to be able to use a lot of the stuff from the prequel in a fourth book.

Fourth book! Does that mean the third book is already written? 

Oh, no. I won’t finish until probably the end of 2009. I’m trying for every three years. These girls have so many stories, and I don’t want to rush them. As a reader, time after time, I’ve read a sequel that was not quite as good as the original, and a third and fourth book where I’ve asked, ‘Why didn’t they just give themselves another year?’ Michelle [Frey, Birdsall’s editor] has never once pushed me. ‘Take all the time you need,’ she says, which is good because if I felt any kind of pressure at all, I’d rush to try to please her. But I’ve figured I have five books to write, and it’s going to take me until I’m 64 to finish. [A dog barks in the background.] That’s Cagney.

Ah—the namesake of Rosalind’s crush in the first book. Is Cagney a model for Hound? 

No, Hound was based on a couple of dogs, but mostly on a dog I had when I was between the ages of six and nine, Laddie. He was a giant Dalmatian. Always escaping, always eating things. I remember once he got into a cupboard and took out all the cans and squeezed them or chomped on them until he got the food to ooze out and we came home and my mother was screaming while I was thinking it was really funny. He was the genesis of Hound.

Are the Penderwicks’ adventures based on your own childhood? Do you have a gaggle of sisters? 

One older sister and no, the stories are not based on my childhood but on the fantasy childhood I would like to have had. I had a very rough upbringing and my unhappiness with it froze a part of me in that childhood. I have strong empathies and memories for what it’s like to be a child. The books that appealed to me were the ones that showed there were ways to create other kinds of families than the one you were born into. The first Penderwicks is really a love letter to the books I read as a child. Noel Streatfeild’s books, All of a Kind Family, Edward Eager, E. Nesbit. And the second book—did you notice the dedication of the second book?

I have it right here... 

It’s dedicated to David, Amy, and Tim, my stepson, stepdaughter and son-in-law. This book is a love letter to them, to thank them for letting me into their family. I don’t have any children of my own but I have two fabulous stepchildren. I didn’t help bring them up. They were already teenagers when Bill [Diehl] and I married, and I wouldn’t have made a good mother because I’m too much of a kid myself. But I do make a great aunt.

So there was no plot, like Rosalind’s Save-Daddy plan in The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, to prevent you from marrying Bill? 

No, there wasn’t. But Amy was 14 when Bill and I married and that’s a terrible age to get a big change like that in your life. It was very, very difficult for her, but now she and her husband, Tim, live with us, in a separate apartment in our house.

Next week you begin your tour for the second book. Does your husband travel with you?

No, and I wouldn’t want him to. It’s important to me to know that the home and all our animals are safe when I’m out and about. [In addition to Cagney the dog, Birdsall has three cats.]

What most surprised you about the reception for your first novel? 

I guess it was meeting people who had taken the Penderwicks into their heart. Even before I won the NBA, there was this outpouring of caring about the girls and falling in love with them. It’s such a quiet little book, and one that was so against the trends of what everyone else was writing. Even after I sold it to Knopf my goal was to write a second book that was better, with the hope that people who read and liked the second one would go back and read the first one afterwards.

What’s been the most gratifying part of your success?

The success of the first book really helped me finally put my difficult childhood behind me. The result of this was really my becoming “heart whole” for the first time in my life. That’s an extraordinary gift. It made me feel complete in a way I never did before. And I am so fortunate it happened. There’s the whole existential horror of matching up with the right editor. It’s worse than speed-dating. You don’t even get to meet the people. I feel so lucky that my manuscript wound up with Michelle. I couldn’t be happier. Somehow she manages to find out what I’ve done wrong within the world I’ve created rather than trying to change the world itself.

Do you find it harder to get yourself to write now, and is it true you write at night? 

I think all day and write at night. When the dogs are asleep, and nobody’s e-mailing me, and Bill is asleep, and the phone won’t ring. I don’t find it hard to write because I get so anxious when I’m not writing. Writing releases endorphins for me. Of course, there are more distractions now, like getting ready for this tour.

And doing interviews with the media. 

Yes, none of that before the first book! Michelle would call once a week to tell me she had heard some other person liked the book.

Tell us how you got the word about the book being a finalist for the National Book Award.

[NBA executive director] Harold Augenbraum called me up to tell me it had been nominated. I didn’t even know they gave out prizes in a young people’s category so I thought, ‘Wow. The National Book Award? This book is even better than I thought it was.’ I actually wondered, ‘Should I tell him it’s a children’s book?’ I was worried he might not know! Then he told me I couldn’t tell Michelle or anyone else until the finalists were announced. I’m sure I was the only one who kept the secret. Everybody else was smart enough to call their publisher and warn them to up the print run!

Oh, good point! They weren’t running out of books, were they?

No, they had been reprinting it because the independents had really gotten behind it. It was a book they could hand to every adult who walked in, needing a book for a child.

And then you actually won the NBA—did that surprise you? 

It was so much fun. It was like the Oscars. I felt like I floated through the whole thing. This kind of acclaim for my first book? I knew it would never happen again, so I tried to enjoy every moment. I remember when we were leaving, Bill and I were at Penn Station, waiting for the train, and I said to him, ‘Waltz with me.’ He’s so shy. He hates doing that kind of thing in public, but he did it. We waltzed a little bit around Penn Station. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. It’s also the last time I got him to dance.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall. Knopf, $15.99, 978-0-375-84090-6

The Penderwick children are voracious readers, one and all. But the biggest reader is Jane, who is always finding a reference for the events of her life in a book she’s recently read. Here are the titles she’s mentioned in the first two Penderwick novels: 

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery

The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit

The Exiles in Love by Hilary McKay

Five Children and It by E. Nesbit

Island of the Aunts (or anything else) by Eva Ibbotson

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Magic by the Lake by E. Nesbit

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

The Various by Steven Augarde

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle