This year, Anderson won the highest honor for children’s literature, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which comes with a gift of 5 million Swedish kronor, or about $500,000. Anderson donated $100,000 of that prize to PEN America, saying the organization is “making the most profound difference in the United States right now defending all of our right in the Constitution, defending the First Amendment, defending the rights of writers and artists, and the rights of children and families and everybody to choose the books that they want to choose to read.”
We spoke to Anderson, who has a historical fiction middle-grade novel out next year called Rebellion 1776, about censorship and the danger of trying to protect kids from reading stories that reflect their realities.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you want to write about the experience of sexual assault?
I started writing Speak back in 1996, back when my oldest child was almost 13. When I was 13, that’s when I was raped. Actually, the book started in a nightmare. I had a bad dream one night about a girl sobbing and it often takes me a little bit to catch up to what my unconscious mind is doing. But I think my unconscious mind was letting me know it was time to work through this. So that’s when I began to write Speak, based on that girl in my head who was sobbing, who had a story that she couldn’t tell.
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Speak isn’t exactly what happened to me. I wasn’t ready to do that publicly yet. But it goes into a lot of the same feelings that I had, which makes the book little bit larger than a book about sexual assault. I think a lot of teenagers find in the book a little bit of a roadmap for how they can find the courage to speak up when a bad thing happens. Too often, bad things happen to our children.
When I was attacked, just at the beginning of ninth grade, I hid in the library. I forgot to go to class, I got high a lot. I did all the kinds of things that people who are trying to struggle through a traumatic experience do. Reading, even though there weren’t any books about my experience, but the act of reading, the act of going into that safe sanctuary in the library, that’s what kept me alive through those years.
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Category: WHY
