Any Episodes from Life?

Question:

I was searching your Alice website looking for facts about you because i’m writing a speech about you for my summer speech class. Your Alice series has been an important part of my life since i was in 6th grade, so about eight years now. I hated reading until i found Alice, so i decided to write my Favorite Entertainer Speech on you. Anyway, I was reading about how many books are in the series. You wrote that the last would be called Always Alice, but it’s actually Now I’ll Tell You Everything. Why did the name change like that? All of your other books have Alice’s name in them. Also If you have some extra tid-bits of information that i could use in my speech, i would love it if you shared them with my fellow students and me. Anything would help, including how i read somewhere that you put actual events of your life into the books. Cool stuff like that is helpful as well as most anything. Thank you so much for your time. I understand if you only answer the question about the book name. Thank you again.

Phyllis replied:
    
The editor and I had settled on the title, “Always Alice,”–in fact, she had the cover already chosen–a young girl half-hiding her face with her fingers–but when she presented it to the marketing department, they said that the final book should have both a title and a cover with more pizazz. And I loved the title we chose–my editor and I worked and worked, sending titles back and forth to each other until we chose the final one. They were in Riverside Park in New York for the photo shoot of the cover, and I was in New York, in Riverside Park, spending a day with my brother at the same time, but neither of us knew the other was there until weeks later when I happened to mentioned being in the city! As for one of the Alice episodes that really happened to me, the “playing Tarzan” scene in “The Agony of Alice” was straight out of my own fourth grade life. Phyllis