Ten years after the publication of Lauren Child’s first book, Clarice Bean, That’s Me, it’s hard to believe that the influential creator of twenty-six books, including Charlie and Lola, and a popular television programme was once unable to find a publisher. At one point she was even on the verge of abandoning the struggle.
‘What I was doing in the early days is people-pleasing,’ she explains. ‘You’re trying to do what they want you to do, and you’re not feeling anything inside. You think: I get this, there’s a formula to it, I can write a picture book. And you see that, always: people think it’s easy to write a picture book. And it’s not easy, and that’s what I really found, and I failed and I failed and I failed.’
I decided: I don’t want to be an illustrator; I don’t want to write picture books. I want to get into film. I’d seen Edward Scissorhands. 'It’s the only time in my life I’ve really wanted to write to someone and say “That is the most wonderful thing.” I loved the story, I loved the imagery, I loved everything about it. It’s fantastic. And so I thought: I want to do something in film. Maybe I should come up with my own idea, maybe I want to design things for children; I’m not sure. But it was definitely moving away from books.’
Uncertain about her future, she sought the advice of a friend’s mother, an entrepreneur, who showed Child’s work to her business manager. ‘She saw me when I was in a really bad state, when you just think everyone else has got their life sussed, they all know what they’re doing, I’m the loser, life is appalling and this is how it’s going to be for me.’ But the business manager saw the potential for Child’s work to cross over to film or television and encouraged her to persist in her ambitions.
It’s a very pie in the sky notion, there’s no reason that should happen, but it triggered something for me because it was someone successful being so energetic about my work, saying: “Why not? Give it a go. Do this.”
'I listened to her partly because she was very successful, partly because she was a complete stranger, and I was pretty young and very optimistic in those days. And so I just did exactly what she said, but I did it in a different way: I was writing for film, I wasn’t writing a picture book, so it sounds different.’
Indeed, it was so unlike other work for young children at the time that publishers didn’t know what to make of Clarice Bean’s ramblings and her motley assortment of family and friends.
It was almost like a spread from a cartoon where everything had equal importance: the words, pictures, the design of it. I literally wrote A4 pages: one page about Uncle Ted, one page about her father, another about her brother, and none of it had any kind of plot. It didn’t matter what order you read it in.’
She took her work to New York, where an editor told her that her work was far too English to be published in the States. ‘Then I went and had interviews in England and they said, “This is very American.”’
In fact, it is difficult to place Clarice definitively in one country or the other. The humour is English, but Child came up with the idea for the character in New York:
‘You go into a deli and people are just talking. You can have a really interesting conversation and then you’ll never see the people again, but you can have lovely exchanges. And that’s what made me think of Clarice.’ Various visual cues suggest an American setting, but they could be there to support specific plot developments.
The cultural ambiguity is deliberate, and mainly serves a practical function. ‘I always thought that either her mum or her dad came from America, and then I decided it had to be her dad because he has a moustache.
'To draw men and make them look like men is very very hard; so I nearly always give them facial hair.'
'People often say to me, “Why does he have a moustache? It’s not of now.” And I would never have given him a moustache, but to draw men and make them look like men is very very hard; they always look too feminine. So I nearly always give them facial hair. I just do it because I don’t know how to make them look like men. There are other illustrators who are just very good with a few lines – somebody like Quentin Blake – they can make their men look like men. I can’t, so they always have a moustache.
So I thought, maybe if we imagine he’s from somewhere else we can get away with it. Maybe it’s from his hippy days. I always imagine that he met Clarice Bean’s mother when they were very young, at some festival or some curious event.
Though publishers judged Clarice too avant garde for young tastes, Child discovered a prototype – Kay Thompson’s Eloise – written some fifty years earlier. ‘I’m really glad I didn’t read it [when writing Clarice Bean] because I would have felt like I was imitating it.
'It was such a boost to find it because you think: I’ve been told by publisher after publisher that you cannot write for a child in the first person like that; you can’t let a child just witter away.
'But children love that because it’s what they do, it’s what they hear all the time. It’s having a chance to identify with somebody like you that just rambles on, makes things up. It’s been there, we forget about it and then we think you can’t do that, and then somebody comes up with it again and it all happens again. So I think it just goes in cycles.’
Clarice may not be the first first-person narrator to appear in a picture book, but they are still a rarity; unusual, too, is the deadpan manner in which Clarice reports the conversations between family members.
Her observations situate both children and adults at the centre of the story and highlight the unintentional humour in the everyday speech of both.
I think that everybody’s got a voice and everybody’s funny and tragic all at the same time, says Child. ‘It’s like watching a Neil Simon play or film. What I love about him is that you’ll watch an argument in something like California Suite between Jane Fonda’s and Alan Alda’s characters and it’s awful because it’s really cruel, but at the same time it’s incredibly funny.
'And things are funny when they’re observed. You can see the humour in it, but … Kurt’s not going to find any of that at all funny and the parents aren’t going to be laughing. It’s just because it’s observed. That’s true about life generally; you’ve got these really funny moments. So I just really wanted to include everyone in that. Everybody has an equal voice in the family. It’s not just about the children. That’s where it’s very different from Charlie and Lola.’
Though the stream of consciousness of Clarice Bean, That’s Me was relatively easy to contain in a picture book, Child had difficulty cutting What Planet Are You From, Clarice Bean? down to size, so decided after it was finished to move on to chapter books.
To begin with it was very difficult just letting go, yet still keeping it from becoming drivelly. Suddenly I got past that first 10,000 words and I felt liberated by it.’ Over the course of the three novels published so far, Clarice ages from around eight to eleven.
‘I don’t know if she can go any older without losing her Clariceness. It might be hard. She could probably go to 13. But then you have to start bringing in the whole thing of her interest in boys and all of that, and it becomes, where do we then go?
'Because it’s going to change a lot and her focus is going to change, and that might be a shame.’ Even now, each book is not just longer, but more serious, than the last. Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now, says Child, is a book about loss.
‘That book started out as a book about love. Kurt had got a new girlfriend and Marcie fell in love, and Clarice Bean’s love affair, really, was with her best friend. It was all going to be constructed around that idea.
And then I remembered my best friend when I was 11 leaving, and how it felt. The whole world turns grey, because you don’t have anyone to sit next to on a school trip and you don’t have anyone to go in a pair with when you’re doing games.
'They all sound not important to a lot of adults. I don’t think they can feel it anymore, the resonance of that. But you go somewhere every single day and you get told what to do, and you have no get-out. You can’t give up; you can’t say, “Actually I’m not going to go anymore.” That’s your life. And suddenly the one thing that made it feel okay, or brilliant, isn’t there. So I really wanted to talk about that because I think that’s the same feeling that you have later on in life with other things.
- A lot of adults would like to believe it’s not, and childhood is a very different place, but it’s all the same. We just have a bit more experience.
At the moment Child is on a lengthy detour from Clarice Bean: six novels featuring Ruby Redfort, Clarice’s favourite fictional detective.
‘I couldn’t resist it in the end because so many children wrote to me and said “Those books sound great, Lauren.” And I just thought: this is typical. I’ve slaved over all these Clarice Bean books and all these things I love doing, and I’m going to have to write some pulp fiction. But it’s fun – I love it!’
‘I used to watch a lot of those American shows. I just loved all those Jodie Foster Disney films. She’s almost like the template for Ruby Redfort. Ruby doesn’t look like Jodie, but it’s that bolshie personality. She was so great. Sometimes when I watch American TV now with my little god daughters, it’s all girls with midriffs and straightened hair and they’re all pretty, and I just think, “Nooo; bring back those gutsy tomboy girls.” Fantastic!’
After the Ruby Redfort books, Child would like to do another Clarice Bean picture book. She also has a separate project about her underway, though it is currently on hold. ‘It wasn’t exactly a novel, but it was her speaking about lots of subjects, and it was really fun to do. It’s quite a big project. I’d love to do that rather than another novel.’
Clarice is like a scrap book – her brain is like a scrap book. But I’ve got a real desire to do a new picture book. I think it’s partly because of reading Clarice Bean, That’s Me again because of this anniversary. It suddenly felt quite avant garde compared to how I’m thinking now.
'I’m now often thinking of a little encapsulated story, and I love doing that, but I’d like to write something really sprawly again. There’s something indulgent about it, but it’s just fun. And there’s no rules to any of it. I can draw anything and use any materials. Clarice is like a scrap book – her brain is like a scrap book, so it sort of works. Of all the things I do, she’s probably my favourite.'
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