Mary Ann in her own words...

If childhood is a writer's capital, then in my over fifty years of writing for children, I ought to be dangerously overdrawn.  But somehow my account has continued to yield a high interest rate, because in all that time it has not been seriously depleted.  And when it came to writing my first novel, after forty-five books of verse, I discovered that I still had a wealth of untapped memories that I could call up and use in a way that I never had in my poems.

I did not start out to write a novel.  Rather, I thought I would write a memoir of my childhood – memoirs being all the thing these days – a kind of reminiscence about growing up during the depression in a Connecticut town.  As a matter of fact, the very first line that I wrote was:  "Now that I am an old woman."  But as I continued on, I saw that it wasn't working.  The elegiac tone, the uncertainty of who exactly was speaking, conspired to deaden my words.  There was no flow, no satisfactory cadence, no real voice.

I reconsidered.  I knew that I wanted to write in the first person.  Well, why not bite the bullet and write of my childhood from the direct point of view of that child herself?  An autobiographical novel, that was it!  I would allow myself the writer's privilege of shaping my narrative somewhat – compressing, expanding, omitting if necessary – but basically I would tell my own story.  I certainly had enough memories to draw on.  I have been blessed with almost total recall of my early and middle childhood: the names of each elementary school teacher and most of my classmates, the exact position of my desk in each classroom, what I loved and what I loathed. 

I chose a single year to write about, a year which started with a move to a new town and house and school and ended with another move to another house and school somewhere else in the same town.  That was what had actually happened;  I would just tell about it. But the trouble was that the move from New Haven to Strawberry Hill Court in Stamford, Connecticut, had occurred when I was five years old and writing in a five-year old voice with a five-year old vocabulary did not work at all.  I had to be older, say nine or ten.  That was the voice I needed to write out of.  But by then in real life I was actually living somewhere else and not on Strawberry Hill Court at all.

But my novel was called Strawberry Hill.  From the very outset, when it was still intended to be a memoir, it was called Strawberry Hill.  One constant in all my years of writing has been that almost invariably I begin each new work with a title, and that title in turn shapes the work.  So the novel would not be exactly autobiographical after all, since its ten-year old  narrator – me – would be living in a place that she had actually lived in when she was five. 

From then on the alterations and adjustments of what had actually happened – the fictionalizing of fact, as it were – began, slowly at first and then faster and faster, as I gradually allowed my imagination free play and as my characters began to take over their own story. 

Yes, there are still "true" parts of my novel –  the New Haven and Stamford and Strawberry Hill I write about still exist, although in drastically altered form.  And yes, I have drawn on my nine and ten-year-old self for some of the details and experiences of my protagonist, Allie Sherman.  Even my beloved Greenbergs remain for the most part as I remember them.  But there it pretty much stops.  Allie's story took hold and Mary Ann's story vanished.  Mimi and Martha and Cynthia and Allie M and Dan, they're all "made-up" characters.  But they now live for me as vividly as my actual childhood friends do.

And I hope they will live for their readers, too.