Come and meet Alice. Here she is on the brink of being a teenager and discovering that life is just one big embarrassment. Things are not made any easier by the fact that she has no female role model - Alice's mother died when she was four - so there is just her father and older brother - and what could they possibly know about being a girl and growing up? Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's lively, witty style, mixed with poignance and perception, has captured the essence of adolescent anxieties as we follow Alice through the trials and tribulations of growing up. In the spring of year 8, Alice decides she is 'in-between' - neither child nor woman. She waits for beauty to blossom - but realises that 'in-between' may not be such a bad place to be, when Pamela acts too old for her age during a trip to Chicago and attracts some unwanted attention. Alice is glad that she's a teenager at last, but she's also happy that she does not yet have to face some of the problems - mostly with girls - that her brother faces, or even her father. For anyone who is in-between (and who isn't?), this is a book to savour.
I guess I've been writing for about as long as I can remember. Telling stories, anyway, if not writing them down. I had my first short story published when I was sixteen, and wrote stories to help put myself through college, planning to become a clinical psychologist. By the time I graduated with a BA degree, however, I decided that writing was really my first love, so I gave up plans for graduate school and began writing full time.
I'm not happy unless I spend some time writing every day. It's as though pressure builds up inside me, and writing even a little helps to release it. On a hard-writing day, I write about six hours. Tending to other writing business, answering mail, and just thinking about a book takes another four hours. I spend from three months to a year on a children's book, depending on how well I know the characters before I begin and how much research I need to do. A novel for adults, because it's longer, takes a year or more. When my work is going well, I wake early in the mornings, hoping it's time to get up. When the writing is hard and the words are flat, I'm not very pleasant to be around.
Getting an idea for a book is the easy part. Keeping other ideas away while I'm working on one story is what's difficult. My books are based on things that have happened to me, things I have heard or read about, all mixed up with imaginings. The best part about writing is the moment a character comes alive on paper, or when a place that existed only in my head becomes real. There are no bands playing at this moment, no audience applauding--a very solitary time, actually--but it's what I like most. I've now had more than 120 books published, and about 2000 short stories, articles and poems.
I live in Bethesda, Maryland, with my husband, Rex, a speech pathologist, who's the first person to read my manuscripts when they're finished. Our sons, Jeff and Michael, are grown now, but along with their wives and children, we often enjoy vacations together in the mountains or at the ocean. When I'm not writing, I like to hike, swim, play the piano and attend the theater.
I'm lucky to have my family, because they have contributed a great deal to my books. But I'm also lucky to have the troop of noisy, chattering characters who travel with me inside my head. As long as they are poking, prodding, demanding a place in a book, I have things to do and stories to tell.
