Why Am I a Writer? Blame “The Phantom Tollbooth”

I was a voracious reader as a child, spurred on by a book-loving household, some truly fantastic teachers, and not one, but two amazing school librarians, one of whom declared the “little kids books” off limits to me when I hit second grade. She introduced me to “Ramona.” She started me on Judy Blume. But nothing captured my imagination like the first fantasy book I ever read: “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster.

From the moment I held the book, I remember being transfixed by the strangeness of the cover, picture of a boy and a dog with a clock in its middle. I couldn’t wait to find out about that dog with the clock. For anyone not familiar, in “The Phantom Tollbooth” a boy receives a mysterious package, and he puts the contents together in his room, creating a tollbooth. He drives past it in his little pedal car – paying the toll, of course – and then suddenly he’s in an off-kilter, fantastic world.

The book is strange and funny and takes you somewhere you couldn’t think up yourself, but it’s somewhere that should exist given the conditions of the story. As an imaginative child, it opened a whole realm of universes for me; until that book, I’d been reading, yes, but I’d been reading about kids like me who did normal kid things, albeit often hilariously.

It was after “The Phantom Tollbooth” that I tried writing, scribbles in a notebook, ideas with nowhere to go, no body for development. But I was attracted, a fish with shiny bait, to the possibility that I could create my own world to lose myself in, like the protagonist, Milo, was lost in his.

Afterward came Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle (to whom I wrote a fan letter. She responded with a brochure with a diagram depicting the way her characters were connected. I was not completely satisfied, though now I find my characters connected). I read book after book with improbable stories, usually told with a wink and a laugh, sometimes completely straight-forward, but always with that sense of escape to somewhere else.

It took a long time for me to find my voice, writing-wise. As I got older, I thought of the endeavor of “writing” as only serious writing, writing where heavy things happen, where everything is appropriately depressing.

It didn’t work.

And then I decided to write a novel. I’d had starts and stops before, packets of virtual pages abandoned, never to be read again. This time, I was going to complete the whole thing. And I was going to use one of the strange ideas I had, I was going let my humor out, I was going to let the book be what it wanted to be, and it was exactly that: weird; funny and science-fiction.

After that first completed novel came “Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only),” an entire story based on the inspiration of that ridiculous title. It took letting go of what I thought was “good” and focusing on what I loved, from the time I was a kid, to make the writing work. Once I connected to the oddness and humor that drew me into “The Phantom Tollbooth,” to that first sense of going somewhere else just by holding a book (a concept so brilliantly executed in “The Neverending Story”), I realized that, like Milo, that’s where I was heading all along.


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