Kid Brain

When Abby Hanlon was publishing her first children’s book, Ralph Tells a Story, she got a note from the art director: The teeth on her drawings were too pointy. The characters looked like vampires and elves rather than kids. So Hanlon went about rounding the teeth and ears. After she handed in the book, she found herself doodling vampires and elves. If her drawings already looked too elfin, she might as well go with it. Meanwhile, at home, her own children, 5-year-old twins, were growing obsessed with Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “They wanted to read the gruesome ones. They liked being scared,” she says, slouched on a beanbag chair in the backyard shed, barely wider than a desk, that serves as her writing studio in Park Slope. Her daughter became infatuated with Mrs. Hannigan, the cruel orphanage headmistress in Annie. “That’s how I started thinking about Mrs. Gobble Gracker,” she says. “Just them gravitating toward the dark and scary and needing that.”

Mrs. Gobble Gracker is the imaginary villain in what would become Dory Fantasmagory, Hanlon’s chapter-book series. She is a 507-year-old woman who drinks coffee and wants to steal Dory, age 6, and make her her baby. She has a tight headmistress bun, a witchy black dress and cape, and, yes, sharp teeth. Mrs. Gobble Gracker herself is an invention of Dory’s older brother and sister, Luke and Violet, who hope to scare Dory into acting more mature. The plan backfires. Instead, Dory decides Mrs. Gobble Gracker is the best game ever, much to the annoyance of her siblings and everyone else. That a criticism — Your drawings don’t look right! You’re acting like a baby! — can become creative fuel, lit by the real, wacky, often dark imaginations of children, is a lesson at the heart of the series and a pretty decent description of Hanlon’s own creative process.

Since she started writing the Dory Fantasmagory series in 2012 (the sixth book, Dory Fantasmagory: Can’t Live Without You, will be published on September 26), it has been translated into 25 languages, selling 1.5 million copies. The popularity of the series grew slowly, and not until the fourth book did she earn her first review in the New York Times. It has since become the kind librarians and elementary-school teachers eagerly foist on early readers and their parents. That’s in part because the series is a unicorn of children’s literature: chapter books geared toward new readers that are a pleasure even on the hundredth read, largely because they’re funny — the kind of funny that comes from being wholly recognizable. For children, Dory’s antics and worries — If I tell the truth, I’ll get in more trouble. If she knows how weird I am, she won’t be my friend — are deeply familiar, and for parents, reading the books can illuminate their own kids’ misbehavior and even bring on some needed empathy. Dory has hints of Ramona Quimby and Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes.” Hanlon also cites as an influence Kevin Henkes, whose mouse books (Chrysthanthmum, Sheila Rae) are deeply attuned to children’s emotional lives. None of these quite scratch the same itch as Dory, though.

From the beginning, the books have embraced the uglier parts of childhood and of raising children. Hanlon knows kids have weird little minds: They say uncomfortable, unpleasant things. Their humor skews scatological. They throw tantrums and annoy their siblings. Hanlon was a New York City schoolteacher before she was a children’s-book writer, and she learned this lesson from teaching and from raising her own two children. Her greater insight was to see that children do many of these annoying things not because they’re bad but because they are often following the logic of a game. Dory pretends to be a dog and drags a toaster into her room because that’s what the game calls for. “My guiding force,” Hanlon says, “has been, How do I make a book that’s reflecting kids’ imaginations and not mine?”

Hanlon became a teacher not long after graduating from Barnard in 1998, through the city teaching-fellows program — sort of a local version of Teach for America — and she eventually earned a master’s. Her first teaching job was in Harlem, where she stayed for two years. After being “excessed” (“The school was failing, and I was last in and first out”), she taught first grade at P.S. 107 in Park Slope. The curriculum there encouraged students to take the small events of their lives — a trip to the beach, a fight with a sibling — and turn them into a story. “It showed them their little experiences had value,” Hanlon says. She would write her own stories, complete with stick-figure art, as examples for the class.

One day, a parent came up to her after school and told her he was a children’s-book agent. “He just kind of paused, like waiting for my reaction or my ‘Wow,’” she says. She was sure he had recognized her talent and was about to tell her she was meant to be a children’s-book author. That wasn’t what he was trying to tell her at all. “He was trying to tell me he could get me free books for the classroom.”

Still, she went home from school that day and decided to write a children’s book. “I never draw, I had no background at all,” she says, “but I couldn’t think of a story without also thinking of the pictures.” So she started to teach herself how to draw. She bought a copy of Make a World, by Ed Emberley, which breaks drawing down into its geometric elements — in other words, a half-step up from stick figures. When she finished her manuscript, about an imaginative kid sort of like Dory, she sent it to five book agents, including, once the school year ended, the agent dad from her class, who took months to get back to her. (“He was not impressed.”) Only one of the five responded with encouragement, a veteran named Ann Tobias, who told her she could see Hanlon had a keen understanding of children but didn’t yet have the drawing skills. She told Hanlon to take a drawing class and to send her an example of her work once she’d gotten better at it. “She didn’t want to give me her email, so we just communicated by postcard,” Hanlon adds.

After three years of sending postcards of illustrations, Tobias agreed to work with her on a new story about a boy who can’t think of anything to write during writing time in school. The plot mirrors the lesson of the class Hanlon had been teaching — that the small moment is its own exciting story. That became Ralph Tells a Story, and its brilliance is that it never feels like vegetables to kids. Ralph’s struggle is real life for them, where the biggest challenge of the day may very well be that writing is boring and hard and it feels like nothing happens worth writing about. All the little moments in the story are hilariously specific. There’s the one kid in class whose stories go on forever on long scrolls of paper; there are the kids who have 5 million questions for Ralph on the inchworm he writes about, questions no adult would ever think of asking. The book has kid brain.

By the time she started working on her next project, the Dory series, Hanlon was no longer in the classroom, but she had something better: two 5-year-old in-home consultants. She would park herself within earshot and take dictation while they played. “Kids are easy to study because they’re not holding back what they’re thinking,” she says. “They’re constantly telling you how they feel. They shared a room, and after they went to bed, I would listen to them talking to each other.” The Dory books became a secret document of their childhood filled with private jokes. Like the cow costume Dory refuses to take off in book one. “My son was wearing a cow costume from Halloween until May or June,” Hanlon recalls. “He’d be on the subway platform sweating and wouldn’t take it off.” Her son also inspired Dory’s turn as a dog, a game she won’t give up even at the pediatrician’s office, to her mother’s deep, boiling frustration. Her children eventually became not just her inspiration but her co-writers. It was the twins who suggested Mrs. Gobble Gracker drink coffee — Hanlon had originally had her drinking blood.

The action of the Dory books is almost entirely driven by the games she plays and the unintentional ways those games intersect with her real life. Through those games, Dory learns how to navigate her world: how to get along with her siblings, make friends, deal with disappointment. She struggles to learn to read, while she imagines that a little black sheep named Goblin has escaped from her book. She’s anxious about losing her first tooth and growing up, but she’s also trying to rescue the Tooth Fairy, who has been kidnapped by Mrs. Gobble Gracker. “Kids learn through playing, and they process their emotions and experiences by acting it out and pretending to be someone else,” says Hanlon.

Hanlon knew from the beginning that she wanted Dory Fantasmagory to be a chapter book, but publishers thought there was a disconnect between Dory’s age and the format. Ten years ago, you didn’t typically have chapter books about 6-year-olds because publishers didn’t believe 6-year-olds wanted to read chapter books. Hanlon knew this wasn’t true. Six-year-olds might still need pictures on every page to stay engaged, but there were plenty who wanted to read (or have read to them) substantial stories. “Kids always want to read like older kids,” she says. “That’s what gives them currency.”

The publishers who didn’t reject it for being a chapter book rejected it because there was no plot. “It was little vignettes,” she says. So Hanlon went about teaching herself narrative arc, some of which she picked up from the creators of South Park. “They had this little video where they write a South Park episode. They just write ‘but therefore, but therefore’ and then fill in the plot points between it.” The unintended consequence of each action leads to the next action. From her editor, she learned that if you can take out one part of the story and put it somewhere else, then you haven’t built the arc correctly. Those two realizations unlocked the book, and eventually Penguin bought it. Dory Fantasmagory came out when Hanlon’s twins were in first grade. It was the first chapter book they read on their own.

There’s something deeply familiar in Dory. Talk about her with other parents and you’ll often hear someone confess that their youngest (it’s usually their youngest) is “such a Dory” — committed to their imaginary world to the point of unruliness. More than one parent I know has mentioned their child spent a prolonged period pretending to be a dog. I caught myself laughing in recognition in book six when Dory covets her sister’s ChapStick. (What is it about ChapStick? Why do they want it so badly?) And unlike the popular TV series Bluey, in which the kids also have roving imaginations, the parents in Dory Fantasmagory react much the way real parents do, able to handle the game for only so long before they really need Dory to put on her shoes or sit at the table. When I read them to my children, we laugh at both Dory and her mom, who is usually saying (yelling?) things that have also come out of my mouth.

For all the parents who saw their own children reflected in Dory and smiled, there were some who saw Dory’s antics and bristled. She does a lot of annoying things you wouldn’t want your child to start doing. There’s some occasional potty talk, some flinging around of the word stupid. If you are the kind of parent who wants to pretend the world does not contain these concepts, or who has taught their kid (as we did) that the S-word is stupid (we got away with this until our daughter was at least 6), then the Dory books can present a problem and a gentle challenge: Are you parenting real or imaginary kids? How much should books reflect the world as you want it to be or the actual world they live in?

I admit I also bristled. The first book we picked up, at the recommendation of a librarian, was from the middle of the series; in it, Dory’s friend Rosabelle loses it with her younger brother. She calls him a “nosy beast” and a “butt baby” and attacks him before Dory helps him escape by stuffing him into a laundry hamper. My oldest child was maybe 5 at the time, and her younger brother was still a baby. Did I really want her walking around the house saying “butt baby”? Today, that baby brother is about Dory’s age, and when we read that scene together, we all laugh hysterically, cathartically, before they go back to fighting about who’s taking up more room on the couch and who can’t see because the other one is in the way.

Hanlon realizes now that the parents who react negatively to Dory, who don’t see the humor in it, are not really her people: “If you met me, you would not like me, you would not like my kids, you would not like my parenting.” She has also become more attuned to what’s considered inbounds for children’s literature. “In the beginning, I didn’t realize stupid was a bad word,” she says. Her longtime editor retired after book five, and her editor for book six, Jessica Garrison, is a mother of young children and is more sensitive to the language in the books. “I’ve wondered as we reprint those stories if it’s a thing where we change stupid to silly,” Garrison says. “I think a lot of parents sub in silly for stupid as they read aloud. We’re all just a little bit more caring and mindful about how we’re using words now.” For the new book, in which Krazy Glue figures prominently, she and Hanlon discussed how to use the word crazy to advance the story without being overly indulgent.

The new book centers on separation anxiety. Dory gets momentarily lost in the hardware store and after eavesdropping on some teenagers learns that Mozart isn’t alive. (Another plot point taken from Hanlon’s own children: “My kids both cried about Mozart. They were like, ‘We wanna see Mozart.’ I’m like, ‘What? He’s dead.’ They were 3.”) Soon after, Dory’s mother informs the family she’s going back to work. These events send Dory into a tornado of worry that her mother will abandon her forever. To quell her anxiety, Dory’s mother gives her a locket with a picture of her as a teenager inside. Dory loves it. “If you die, I’m going to trap your ghost inside my locket,” she tells her mother. Later, she iterates on the idea: “Maybe I can put one of Mom’s body parts in my locket. So she can always be with me,” she tells Luke and Violet. “I might have to put a special oil on it so it doesn’t rot.” “My daughter actually said that,” says Hanlon. In real life, though, Lulu kept going: “I’m going to ask my daughter to put it in my grave when I die so I can always keep your body with me. That’s how I can always keep your heart inside my body.”

Hanlon was a little surprised the death theme made it past the editors. “I sold this to them as about separation anxiety, and I didn’t mention death because I didn’t know how that was gonna go over. But I also wanted to push for this death thing because kids talk about it,” she says. “These kids just lived through a pandemic. What is the pandemic if not about that?” (She didn’t need to worry. “Absolutely loved it,” Garrison said about the death theme. “I had fielded the same questions from my 9-year-old when he was about 6.”)

Hanlon’s twins are now 16 and no longer making pillow forts in the living room. She still has a 150-page document from those prime playing years she refers to for ideas, but lately she has been finding new ways to mine the minds of children. She listens to kids she meets at author visits and reads the letters they send her, and she has started volunteering in the kindergarten class at her kids’ old school. “I just need to hear how kids speak,” she says, and what they’re thinking about. They tend to be good at plot, too. In one recent letter, a kid told her, “I think Mrs. Gobble Gracker should have an older brother and older sister who are mean to her.” She says, “I was like, Oh my God. They’re so smart. They’re one step ahead of me.”

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