Love Letters, a guest post by Polly Horvath

The brain is a curious thing.  All of us have stored within it every second of our lives.  But only people with highly superior autobiographical memory can retrieve these memories.  There are only one hundred people in the world known to have this ability. Marilu Henner is one of them.  If you give her a date and time she is right back there, able to see and feel and experience again what happened at that moment. I do not have this ability per se but I have found two things that allow me to access long-buried memories in this visceral way – hypnosis and writing.  Both involve extreme focus where you remain rooted in the present but can also be somewhere else entirely, feeling, seeing and hearing.  Stories unfold for me this way.  Library Girl took me back to the forgotten memories of my childhood and the Kalamazoo Public Library.  It took me back to that time in childhood when you are let loose from your parents’ leash and begin to explore the world on your own.

Of course, when you write you are reimagining these experiences.  The settings are being pulled from your memory but in the journey to the page become something new.  Something never before seen.  This is the creation aspect.  And it is one over which I have no control.  A common misconception among people who don’t write is that writing involves making things up.  That there is a conscious component to the act.  But the characters and what happens is always as much a surprise and an unknown to me as to the reader.  When I am writing I see the characters and hear them as the plot unspools onto the page.  They just do what they’re going to do and I watch and record it.  It is therefore often a surprise when a book is finished to go back and read it and think, oh wow, the Chocolate Shop, I’d forgotten all about that. The mummy in the museum – haven’t thought of that in years.  The adopted mothers and grandfather!  I remember now.  I had those.  But not the ones that appeared on the page. Not exactly. Still, for the writing part of the brain to have gone to the hidden memory part and selected those particular items means that they were important.  That they were accessed for a reason.  That the book is going to tell you the reason though you may not immediately understand it.  

When I wrote The Canning Season I didn’t understand for about the first five years after publication why certain elements were included. And then I did.  This is always one of the miracles of writing and part of the excitement.  That one part of your brain can do what another part has yet to catch up on.  When I finished Library Girl I knew two things – how important the library had been to me as a child as a second home.  And how important those adopted mothers and grandfather had been.

In Library Girl Essie is found as a baby in the stacks of the Huffington Indiana Public Library by four librarians who have always wanted to have a baby and for various reasons have not.  They impulsively decide to keep her and raise her secretly in the library.  I always had a surrogate mother, different women at different times who were drawn to me and gave me things my own mother could not have. I had no grandfather of my own but an old gentleman decided to become for my sister, brother and I an adopted grandfather just as in Library Girl Oscar Steinberg becomes Essie’s.  These people brought me incalculable gifts by expanding my world with the wonders of who they were and what they knew and how they saw things.  Or as in a paragraph in Library Girl explaining the different things different mothers brought to the party, “Really, thought Essie, she didn’t see how people got by with just one mother.”  

Just as the librarians and my adopted adults brought unique things to the party, the library is a whole universe of its own and like the universe, full of worlds within worlds within worlds which, when accessed, opened doors you didn’t know existed.  Start any book and you are transported to the world according to someone else.  How lucky the child who has so many worlds to enrich his/her life.  How lucky the child to have more than one adult who is special to him/her and to whom he/she is special.  

I soon realized I had given Essie all these adopted adults in her life because I recognized what a gift it was to have had them.  Who can get by with only one person to raise them? And to thank the libraries and books and readers and writers I have known.  I am convinced that all my books are about love in one way or another and this book was a love letter to all of them. And a chance to acknowledge how they had made life interesting. I had seen things uniquely and wondrously because they were unique and wondrous and because they had lent me their eyes. It is always exciting when one is faced with the prospect of opening the doors of perception. People sometimes go to extraordinary measures to do so. But it turns out all it really takes is another person or a good book.

Meet the author

Polly Horvath has written many books and for many publications including School Library Journal and The New York Times.  She has won a National Book Award, Newbery Honor, Toronto Dominion Award and many others in the U.S.A., Canada, Germany and Italy.  Her books have been Publisher Weekly and New York Times bestsellers and are translated into over twenty-five languages.  She live lives in Metchosin, B.C.

Pollyhorvath.com

X.com @HorvathPolly

About Library Girl

After living in the public library for the last eleven years, Essie must learn to adapt to a world that’s not as perfect as the stories she’s grown up with in this heartfelt middle grade novel from Newbery Honor author Polly Horvath.

Essie has grown up in the public library, raised in secret by the four librarians who found her abandoned as a baby in the children’s department. With four mothers and miles of books to read, Essie has always been very happy living there.

But now that she is eleven, Essie longs for a little more freedom . . . and maybe a friend her own age. She seems to get her wish when her moms let her go by herself to the mall. On her second trip there, she meets G.E., a mysterious boy who looks so much like her she can’t help but think they may be twins. Maybe he was raised by four dads in the appliance section of the department store. Maybe his story is intertwined with hers, and their happy ending is as one big family. But as she gets to know G.E. better, she learns that nothing is as simple as it seems in her stories—not even her own past.

With her signature warmth and offbeat humor, Newbery Honor author Polly Horvath invites book lovers to sit back in their own library nooks and check out a whimsical adventure perfect for readers trying to find their place in the world.

ISBN-13: 9780823455676
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 09/10/2024
Age Range: 9 – 12 Years

Filed under: Guest Post