Revisiting Alice as an Adult

I found the Alice series in the school library when I was in third grade and read them all through grade school. I remember them being laugh-out-loud funny. I never forgot Alice.  That was more than twenty years ago. This summer I decided to reread the entire Alice collection, thinking it would be a fun, light-hearted escape from these incredibly weird times. It has been a joy, but it’s also been very revealing. I can see now just how badly a kid like me needed your books.

I had a rough childhood. My parents loved me, but they were deeply flawed. My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic whose shifting moods were confusing and terrifying and often dangerous; my father and stepmother were alcoholics who neglected my most basic needs. Alice made life bearable. I got lost in books without realizing I was escaping. It never occurred to me then that Alice’s mother’s absence was different from my own, but I’m sure that an unarticulated part of me identified with that longing for a good mother.

I did not realize just how much Alice was teaching me about how to raise and love myself and love others, particularly women, despite the failings of the adults in my life.  It took a lot of therapy to get to a point where I can express those things. One observation that my therapist returned to again and again is how remarkable it is that I’ve been able to foster and hold onto deep friendships and to seek out mentors, particularly mother-type figures, over the course of my life. After re-reading Alice’s stories, I’m confident that your writing played a central part in that.

I know this note is a bit of a mess. I was confiding in a childhood friend this morning about how rereading the Alice books made me feel. She also loved your novels as a kid. She suggested I reach out to you.  I just want you to know that your books, in so many ways, saved and guided me. I am so grateful. I owe you so much. I’m sure I’m not the only one.  Thank you, thank you.

It was just wonderful to hear from you, and I’m so happy that the books were helpful.  Not only can books help the reader but they can help the writer.  I was fortunate to have a loving mother,  but she wasn’t perfect–no mother is.  And I do remember looking at various teachers as my role models for how to dress or how to handle an awkward situation. I would even want to mimic their voices.

But I want to tell you that your letter was also dear to me because my first husband became paranoid schizophrenic five years after we married.  He probably had symptoms long before that, but I didn’t recognize them until I went through three heart-breaking terrifying years of moving with him from state to state because he thought the Communists were after him, and sometimes believed that I was one of them.  I described all this in my autobiographical account, Crazy Love, published by Morrow in 1977.  Friends have asked how I could ever write about something so very personal, but I feel that sharing so much helps not only the reader but clarifies things for yourself.

Fortunately, we had no children, and I married again to a perfectly sane man and we had two sons.  But remnants of that first marriage resurface from time to time, and I remember them with great sadness.   It’s the humor in our lives, however, that keeps things in balance, and I wish you the very best in all that’s ahead.