Melissa Albert is the author of The Children, out June 2nd from William Morrow. Below, she and her editor, Jessica Williams, discuss Melissa Albert’s experience writing about adult fiction about childhood.
Jessica Williams, VP Editorial Director at William Morrow: I was already a fan of your work in the young adult space before reading The Children and, while this novel is different, it does share similar obsessions. I love how vividly you capture the mythic weight of childhood memories, that delicate balance between darkness and childlike wonder, how your emotions then can rise and shift so quickly, from serious dangers to fantastical highs. When did the idea for this novel first come to you? How did your initial inspiration evolve into the book I and so many of my colleagues fell in love with when we first read it on submission?
Melissa Albert, author of The Children: It began with the experience of revisiting favorite children’s books with my son and finding them darker than I remembered, and that kind of strange doubling I experienced, having read these books first as the kid and now as the mother. I was also haunted by the famous photographs of Sally Mann’s children: these beautiful, troubling depictions of an unfettered rural upbringing that are impossible to look at without considering the question of whether and to what degree the kids were exploited by their artist parent. I was very interested in writing, from the children’s perspective, about a mother whose art brings them a fame they didn’t ask for and don’t fully understand.
JW: You write vividly about childhood in The Children but somehow this novel still reads as squarely and thematically for adults, while asking the reader to recall that feeling of being a kid again. How did you access that point-of-view?
MA: I feel like the person I was around ages eight to twelve maps so closely to the books I was reading then, and all I have to do to re-access that version of myself is reread them. There’s a kind of intense becoming that happens in that preteen era that’s impossible to shake, and incredibly seductive to read and write about.
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JW: For a while now, there’s been a social and cultural conversation happening about how artists and other public figures draw on their own family relationships, particularly their minor children, in their own work. Whether that’s the children of social media influencers being featured in their content, or kids as the subjects of their parents’ photography—you mentioned Sally Mann—or fiction like in The Children. What drew you into this tension?
MA: What drew me in most powerfully was revisiting the Hundred Acre Wood with my son. As he grew to be Christopher Robin’s age, then blew past him, I became fascinated by the story of the real Christopher Robin and his rocky relationship with his namesake character. This reconnected me with my teenaged obsession with Alice Liddell—of Alice in Wonderland fame—and the Llewellyn Davies children, who inspired the boys of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. There was a charge even to the lack of information available about these kids when I was young and freshly fascinated: that mystery contributed to my sense of them as both enviable and inherently tragic, though I couldn’t have put my finger on why.
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