Volume I, Issue 1
February 2006
 main page :: interview   
by Kelly Herold, Big A little a

Sue Halpern 1. You are a well-known author of adult non-fiction and book reviewer. What inspired you to write for children?

My daughter not only inspired me, she asked me. She was seven or eight, and I had just published Four Wings and a Prayer, which follows the people who follow the monarch butterfly migration. She asked me what it was about, and when I told her, she said, "When are you going to write a book that I can read?" And then, over the next year or so she subtly asked me this question in a number of different ways. It was a little like when she was six and she told everyone that her parents were going to get her a puppy for her eighth birthday—by the time her eighth birthday came around, it was a given that she'd be getting a puppy. It was sort of the same with this book. I found that I really wanted to try to write a book that she could read and would want to read. I never took it as a given that I could.

2. Your narrator in Introducing Sasha Abramowitz is also the novel's hero. I found her voice to be completely authentic. Was creating Sasha's voice for this book a challenge for you as a writer?

One day, Sasha just started talking to me. It was a little weird, but there she was—and the good thing was that I liked her. She made me laugh, and she was very observant, and she had a heart that was struggling to get bigger. The times I spent with her at my desk were about the happiest times I've ever had as a writer.

3. I particularly admired the way you characterized Sasha's friendships in Introducing Sasha Abramowitz. Sasha's friendships with other preteens and with adults are complicated and constantly changing. Does Sasha (or at least this aspect of Sasha's life) have a real life model?

By the time I started writing the book, my daughter was a preteen, with preteen friends, so I got to watch the ins and outs of their relationships up close. My daughter read a number of magazines, too, like American Girl and New Moon, so I think I was just inculcated with the idea that one of the challenges of growing up is to figure out your place in the world, which starts with your place in your family and moves out, in concentric circles, from there—friends, school, community.

4. Will we hear more from Sasha in the future? If not, will you continue to write middle-grade fiction?

I would love for Sasha to make a return appearance. When I wrote the book it was an experiment, really, a challenge I put to myself to see if I could do it, and I started it when I was between two previously assigned books for adults. I've got to finish the second one of those before I can get back to Sasha, which is actually a motivation.

5. Harriet the Spy plays a critical role in Introducing Sasha Abramowitz. Was Harriet the Spy your favorite novel as a child? What other novels were important to you as a child?

I think I had a strange upbringing as a reader—I seem to have skipped books like Harriet the Spy—and moved almost directly from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to Jane Eyre, Little Women, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I missed all the fanciful and whimsical and emotionally age-appropriate books.

6. Do you read children's literature today? If so, who are your favorite writers and why?

My education in children's literature began in earnest when my daughter was born, and we read out loud to her every night—Narnia, Little House, Louisa May Alcott. She became a voracious reader, and would pass books on to me: all of Sharon Creech, whom we both adore (Love That Dog is my favorite), Ann Martin's A Corner of the Universe, Katherine Paterson, Philip Pullman (scary), every Roald Dahl (many times), Daniel Pinkwater, Phoebe Stone, Polly Horvath, and Suzanne Staples. I could go on and on. It is one of my great pleasures as a reader now to sit down with a book for children and tumble into that particular and very real fictional world.

Introducing Sasha Abramowitz by Sue Halpern Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 ISBN: 0-3743-8432-0