A Life in Books: Lauren Child

If you have kids, you've read Lauren Child's books. If you don't have a kid, read Lauren Child's books anyway. They're damn charming. The Guardian interviews her, here.

From the piece...

In Charlie and Lola's third outing, 2003's I Am Too Absolutely Small for School, Lola's parents decree that she is "nearly quite big enough" to go into the classroom. Lola raises a series of objections: the uniform; the curriculum; school dinners, which she doesn't want to eat "alone, all by myself, on my own". In the book, of course, Charlie is on hand to reassure her and Lola ends up having a high old time, afterwards pinning her initial reluctance on her invisible friend, the can-carrying Soren Lorenson (rendered in the books in clear, raised plastic, so children can catch a glimpse of him when the light's right). But for Child herself, things didn't go quite so smoothly. Soon after she passed school age, her father, who had been teaching art at Downe House, was offered a job at Marlborough College, over the county border in Wiltshire. "We'd been living in this little village and suddenly we were in what felt like a vast metropolis," she remembers. "In fact, it wasn't a big move, but it felt enormous – shocking! I moved from my tiny village school to an infant school in the town, and I just found it overwhelming." Her parents picked up quickly on her misery and moved her after a term, but the scars clearly run deep, and go some way to explaining, perhaps, why her books focus so firmly on small, solvable problems: how to put off bedtime; what to do if you don't like mashed potato.

Child is modest about her early talents ("I wasn't the best drawer in the world, hardly child-prodigy standard"). But her father encouraged her interest in art and her mother, meanwhile, made sure there were plenty of books about the house, and inadvertently stoked a fascination with Americana still visible in her artwork today. "I was obsessed!" Child grins. "And crazy as it sounds, it was all down to Alistair Cooke. My mum was really into him – I watched his documentary series with her, and we'd always listen to Letter from America on the radio. Their sitcoms made ours seem lacklustre in comparison. And the films! When I was a child, English films so often seemed to be about the dreary, hard-slog side of life, whereas you'd watch The Philadelphia Story, and it was endless glamour: the stories were overblown and exciting, the costumes and sets were glorious."