The Interviews

Julie Andrews and daughter Emma Walton Hamilton Talk to James Patterson
October 9th, 2008



James Patterson- Julie and Emma, welcome to ReadKiddoRead.

Julie Andrews- Hello!

JP- Hi.

JP- Well Raising Bookworms is terrific. Actually, I have a ten-year-old and Dumpy the Dump Truck was one of his--

JA- One of his early books?

JP- Yeah.

Emma Walton- Oh, that’s great. I have an eleven-year-old, so I know where of you speak. I have an eleven and a five.

JP- Boys are tricky, which is why I did Dangerous Days of Daniel X.

EW- Right.

JP- My Jack said, when he read that one, “Dad, you finally got it right.”

JA- Aw, isn’t that great?

JP- Yes, it is.

EW- That’s the most important praise of all.

JP- That’s right. The ultimate critics. Your own children.

EW- Well, listen. We are both so admiring of the work that you’re doing, advancing the cause here. It’s just terrific. And thanks for involving us.

JP- So much of it is raising the consciousness of parents and grandparents. That it’s kind of up to them…

JA- Yes.

JP- One of my good friends, he had to raise his two boys alone because their mother died. He was a very good father, but it dawned on him very late that he was sort of the one that should have been responsible for going out and getting them terrific books to read.

EW- I’m sure you hear this, too: one of the questions that I hear a lot from parents is “But isn’t it the job of schools to get kids reading?” And of course, statistically, we know that in fact while kids learn to read at school, the most powerful influences on their reading habits are those they learn at home. And in fact we’re the ones who teach them to love reading. They might learn how to read at school but it’s up to us to teach them to love reading.

JP- Right. You’ll get some teachers who really connect. Though once again it’s very personal with which of the kids they do connect with.

EW- Yes.

JA- And what do they give them, what do they suggest that they read, too?

JP- That is huge. We’ve had a few authors, who seem to agree that selection is key. And that so many of the books that are being selected aren’t necessarily the ones that are going to turn kids on.

EW- I’m going through that right now. Sam, my son, is in seventh grade and he goes to a wonderful school, a very ambitious school, but the reading list is relentlessly dark. For my Sam it’s really a challenge because he’s a sensitive kid and what he responds to is comedy and fantasy and memoir, and he’s finding these dark, doom and gloom, kind of depressing reality fiction assignments really rough going.

JA- Tell James what he said, Emma.

EW- He just started another one called The Well of Sacrifice, cheerful title, and he picked it up and said, “Well I’m on page five and already there’s been seven deaths—woops—make that eight.” I don’t think that’s doing much to cultivate his passion for reading.

JP- We’ve taken it on ourselves with Jack. This summer, he’s ten, and he read eleven or twelve books. The one he had to read for school was the only one he really, really didn’t like.

EW- Really?

JA- Oh my.

JP- He said, I get it. I understand why the idea is important, but it’s just not an engaging story. He said they just keep repeating and preaching. People get a little caught up in the idea that you have to have a mission for every book, as opposed to letting the stories come. The kids will make of it what they will. At any rate, getting back to Raising Bookworms, what are your notions on some of the tools to get children to turn off the Game Boy?

EW- It’s all about incentive. It’s all about sparking that internal fire so that they are passionate about and interested in reading. And I think that as parents the most effective ways to do that are self-mode ways. Such as surrounding kids with as many great books as possible, exposing them to great books all the time, and reading together with them as early and as often as possible.

JP- You make a connection between reading and pleasure, which I think is great. Can you talk about that a little bit?

EW- Sure. It’s all about how when we’re little and we’re snuggling up on moms and dads and grandparents’ laps. They’re reading to us and maybe we’re nursing or we’re sucking our thumbs. Everything warm and fuzzy. Those early subliminal associations are built between reading and pleasure, and reading and love, and reading and joy. And now reading becomes associated with, at best, responsibility and obligation.

JA- And discipline.

EW- And discipline. And at worst, frustration, struggle, boredom, or chore.

JP- Right, right—“chore” is bad.

EW- All of a sudden, the scales are tipped, and now books are equated with chore instead of pleasure. It’s our job as parents to keep the pleasure alive. And that’s everything from looking for ways to provide the books that spark your individual child’s imagination, which may be different than those that spark mine or my next door neighbor’s, to also really subtle cues, like keeping books everywhere. In the car, in the bathroom…and to making sure that there’s great lighting…

JP- That idea of keeping books everywhere is particularly cool. That’s a neat one.

EW- Yeah!

JP- Now this mother-daughter writing team of yours… what sorts of things did the two of you talk about in terms of teaming up?

EW- You want to take that one, mom?

JA- Well, it happened as a happy accident that tipped us into the greatest pleasure. I was asked if I had anything for very small children by my publishers and I said, well I don’t, but let me put my thoughts together about it. I went to Emma and Sam, who is now eleven, who was then—how old Em?

EW- A year.

JA- Yeah. And I said, Emma if you went to a library and were to take one book out for Sam, what would it be about? And she said it would have to be, at this age, about trucks or tractors, because he’s truck crazy. And even before he was verbal he would point at trucks and “ooh” and “ah” at them. So Emma then said she couldn’t find any that have little family-related themes. There are a lot of how-to books out there, but there aren’t any that speak of family and love and characters. I said you’re kidding, and she said no, I’m searching, I’m so frustrated. I said, maybe there’s a window there, why don’t we try? We’re both fairly bossy ladies and we wondered if we’d be compatible, but indeed it became the greatest pleasure. I think I speak for the both of us!

It’s like playing in this delicious sandbox where we create and make outlines, and there are lots of laughs and we drink endless cups of tea while doing it. And of course as the books and the years have gone by the ability to be together to do it has diminished somewhat because I live on the west coast and she lives here on the east coast, but now have these wonderful iChat cameras that allow us to be with each other at that particular moment. So I get up incredibly early and she then talks to me at ten in the morning her time and we do a few hours of work together. It’s wonderful still.

JP- That sounds terrific on a lot of levels. Is there anything, Julie, you used in terms of bringing up Emma and getting her to be a reader that sticks out to you?

JA- Well, to digress for just one second James, my dad was the man who inspired me to read in my family. One of the things I was going to mention on how to get your kids to love reading, I think it’s also important too to take them to the bookstore and pick out one together. My dad this with me when I was about seven, and he said I’m going to go buy you a book, which thereby made it special. So we went and he picked one out for me, a wonderful little book which we happily have brought back into print through our collection. It’s called The Little Gray Men, and it is a wonderful nature study, full of adventure, full of drama, full of great thrills. But it is a nature story, much like Watership Down, in a way, that kind of a book. And it became the book that turned me on to all other books as a child. From then on, I was reader.

JP- Very often it is just a book.

JA- Yes. And the moment I could read it to Emma, I shared it with her, and now she reads it to her children and so on and so forth. So it’s a lovely little book that has stood the test of time and holds up again and again and again. The Phantom Tollbooth was another of the books that we’ve read together that you adored.

EW- And The Wind in the Willows. I think you really focused on, in my memory, when I was young, introducing me to books that were classics, the great classic books. I think you always made sure that what I was reading had great storytelling and wonderful artwork and illustrations.

JA- Well I do believe in uniting the whole, James. For us, when we’re publishing, and I’m sure it’s true for you, it’s the quality of paper…it’s all subliminal, but it’s the quality of the art, it’s the binding, it’s the end pages, it’s everything that makes a book feel pressured.

JP- And it’s all communication, which a lot of people don’t seem to understand.

JA- It’s very subliminal, but it’s wonderful when kids get it.

JP- I think it’s even beyond subliminal, but some people don’t think about it as much as they could. Now, Emma, what about the books that you’ve found for your kid, anything that sticks out?

EW- Well, as we said earlier, he did go through this major truck-obsession phase, and so for the early part of his childhood he was very much into all the books about how trucks worked. Very non-fiction oriented, actually.

JA- Very practical.

EW- Many of the photograph, realism-type books for kids with trucks in them. These days his great passions are baseball and music. This summer he read Paul O’Neill’s memoir, Me and My Dad, a wonderful memoir. And that’s where he’s finding his great joy in reading today. Although, he also loves, I have to say, great fantasy. He loves the Madeleine L'Engle Wrinkle in Time series. He loved the Chronicles of Narnia.

JP- Jack liked those, too.

EW- Those are wonderful.

JP- You talked about the “five keys” in getting and keeping kids reading, can you mention a couple of those?

EW- Sure. One of them is setting a good example ourselves. That is really critical, in letting our kids see us reading and valuing reading as often as possible. Sometimes maybe we want to come home and turn on the TV after a long day, kick back and put our feet up, but we have to remember what kind of messaging we’re doing, instead of putting our feet up with a good book or even with a newspaper. So that’s a big key.

JP- Now does the school where he is have a time that’s allotted for reading in the school? Some schools do, some don’t.

EW- It’s interesting; they do at the earlier grade levels. Once they get into middle school and high school, the curriculum is so rigorous that they don’t make time for it in the same way.

JP- How can a curriculum be so rigorous that it excludes reading?

EW- They don’t read aloud to them when they’re older, which makes me crazy.

JP- I love the schools where the teachers also read during those periods, getting back to your earlier point. A lot of schools have these reading periods, but they also insist that teachers read as well.

EW- Yes. Exactly, rather than correcting papers or something during that time. Because again you’re setting an example, you’re modeling the fact that grownups read and that reading is important and valuable. And then, you know, again, it’s all about underscoring reading with pleasure and looking for ways to support those subliminal connections, asking ourselves consistently, will this activity build or erode the association between books and pleasure for my kid? As a lot of parents do, we might say, “Oh if you don’t do that or you don’t finish your homework or you don’t stop doing this no reading tonight before bed.” But that’s totally counterintuitive, because then we’re using books as weapons.

JP- I’ve also heard people say, you can stay up late with the light on, as long as you’re reading.

JA- That’s lovely.

EW- Exactly. Another thing we do is, there’s no moratorium on books in our house, when anybody wants to buy a book it’s sort of open policy as far as I’m concerned. That certainly can’t be true all the time and obviously there are financial constraints, but we try to be wide open about supporting books.

JA- It’s so difficult with Game Boys and television competing, and so hard because all their peers are doing the same thing. The terrible part about it is that these are not engaging or involving the kids in the story…they’re not contributing in any way to imagination.

16:11 JP- There are some, such as SimCity and those games, which do require a lot more attention and brainwork from the kids. But most of them don’t.v JA- Right. It’s the zap and kill ones that drive me nuts.

EW- The other thing that I think is so key is to look for ways to draw parallels between books and life skills. There’s an expression that Esme Codell, the wonderful reading specialist, uses, which is “bibliotherapy.” I’ve often resorted to that myself. If you know your kid is wrestling with a particular issue, let’s say there’s a bully situation going on at school, if you can just quietly bring in a great book, like The Hundred Dresses or one of those wonderful books that deals with just that subject, without laying it on too heavily, they begin to make the connection between reading and solving problems. And turn to reading as a really important tool for life.

JP- That is great. Well, I don’t want to keep you too long, this is terrific. One more question for Julie: does a spoonful of sugar actually help the medicine go down?

JA- I think Emma just said that, but in a different way! I guess it does. Honey’s even better.

JP- We probably need even more of that at the schools, and certainly in the homes.

JA- I think so. Wouldn’t that be just wonderful? I was just thinking as we were talking about Game Boys and things, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a way… I hardly know what I’m speaking about, but let’s suppose you wanted to get a child to read Kidnapped, for instance. Could we turn that into a Game Goy adventure?

JP- They’re trying to do more that way. Scholastic has a book out now, The 39 Clues, and the book connects to a video experience and a card collection experience. So people are attempting to do that now.

JA- Oh that’s so great. I applaud it so highly. Em, you know the book that James’s son might love, is the circus series.

EW- The Palace of Laughter.

JA- The Palace of Laughter. If you don’t know it, James, we published a trilogy by--

EW- John Berkeley.

JA- Right, he’s a wonderful author and he writes with such vivid imagination. The stuff’s great for a boy. It’s called The Palace of Laughter, the first one.

JP- Okay. Well we will get that on our list.

JA- I think you’d love it, I think he’d love it.

EW- I think he’d really respond to it. It’s great stuff and very funny.

JP- There aren’t enough books for kids that are funny.

JA- It is a true adventure. The man’s mind goes somewhere—we all wish we could be as illuminating as that.

JP- Perfect. Well thank you very much.

EW- Thank you James!

JA- Keep up the wonderful work up, please, James. It’s such a lovely thing that you’re doing.

JP- OK, well, we’re going to keep trying.

EW- All the best.

JP- Bye-bye.

JA- Bye James.

EW- Bye.