Kerry Madden's WEREWOLF HAMLET

My good friend Kerry Madden has a new book out, and it's a book of her heart. I can't wait to read it! She dropped by to talk about... My new children’s novel, Werewolf Hamlet, is coming out into the world. It’s my most personal novel aside from Offsides, which came out, almost thirty years ago in 1996 and was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age in 1997. My older kids were six and eight when Offsides was published, and I remember Doug Dutton of Dutton’s books in Brentwood kneeling down to help my son with his necktie. Flannery wanted to wear a tie to my signing at Dutton’s, and my husband was driving from his teaching job in South Central to meet us, so he couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it on our rush to drive to the Westside in LA traffic from Silver Lake.
      I still don’t know how to tie a necktie, but I remember thinking – remember this – as I watched Doug kneeling and looping Flannery’s tie in a perfect knot.
     I remember Lucy saying, “Why don’t you sign me a book? Huh? You sign one to everyone else. I want my own book.”
     So, I signed her one, and she drew a self-portrait in the book.
     How was it all three decades ago? Time is slippery, the years piling up one after another. Now Lucy is married, a mother, and the executive director of a preschool with three branches in Chicago. We have a trans son, Bo, who was born two years after Offsides was published, and while I was pregnant in 1998, I received a letter saying Offsides was going out of print. I felt like such a giant, broke, and pregnant failure. I couldn’t even afford to buy copies of my novel about to be pulped. It was also the scorching summer Mark McGwire was hitting a gazillion homeruns, and Flannery looked at my calves while baseball blared and said with pride, “Mama, look! You have Mark McGwire calves. So cool!”       Werewolf Hamlet is my ninth book, coming out with Charlesbridge Moves, Eileen Robinson’s new imprint for reluctant readers. I learned that Charlesbridge Publishing keeps books in print and for that I am grateful. I don’t have to strike it hot within three years before the book gets pulped. All my books, although well reviewed, went out of print due to lack of sales.
      But Werewolf Hamlet is a story I didn’t want to write. I didn’t want the story to be mine. I wanted a different version, and it began very differently when I wrote the first sentence in 2008. It was going to be a lark of a novel, a romp, and a way of capturing my children’s childhoods. I wrote it first as a diary, and then an editor warned me that Diary of a Wimpy Kid would kill it, so to write it as a traditional novel, because she loved the premise and the first draft. Then she left the publishing house, and it was inherited by a new editor, who didn’t love it. I rewrote it some more, and it was rejected by one and all in 2014, so that was that.
     In 2013, addiction came to our family. It was the monster at the door. It didn’t just knock. It barged in and took root - deep, ugly, gnarled roots. For the last twelve years, we have been on a journey with our son, who currently makes his home beneath a bypass in Silver Lake. In the beginning, when I protested to a counselor – “How can I have a kid who is an addict? I write books for kids! My son was my editor and inspiration for so many stories. So were my other kids.”
     Unimpressed, the counselor shrugged. “Write the book for the kids who need it.”      I resisted for a while, but since nothing I was doing (trying to rescue-fix-save, etc.) was making one bit of difference in “helping” Flannery, I took an early version of Werewolf Hamlet, and I began to write all the things that scared me about the freight train of addiction, and I channeled it all into a ten-year-old, determined to save his big brother. I put a Post-it note on my desk that said, “It’s for kids!” to keep my saggy-sad-sack mom voice out of it.
     I found a brilliant editor, Karen Boss, who understood on a deep and intrinsic level what I was trying to do, and she helped me find the heart of the novel. I’m both delighted and terrified as we approach pub date. Instead of doing a traditional reading for the launch, I’ve asked two young actors to play the brothers in some of the “interlude” scenes that take place between each chapter called “Conversations with Liam in the Night.” I wrote these interludes when my dear friend, Jennifer Richard Jacobson, told me “There are no quiet moments in your novel.” She was right, so I decided to write dialogues between the brothers, ages ten and seventeen. I found these so effortless to write because I imagined these brothers talking to each other, arguing, insulting each other with the “Shakespearian Insulter” while the younger one, Augus Gettlefinger, tries to rescue-fix-save his beloved big brother, Liam, who is rapidly changing and sneaking in and out at night.
     Someone asked me what I hope kids take away from this book, and I hope that if they learn anything, it’s that they don’t have to save anybody today. They can still love and care for the person who is causing them pain, but they still get to live their own lives and find out what they love to do whether it’s putting on plays or making movies or playing baseball or painting or drawing. Werewolf Hamlet is the book I didn’t want to write, but it’s the book I needed to write, and maybe it will offer solace or comfort to a kid who trying to figure things out and make them laugh too. It’s my love letter to my children, whom I love so deeply, and to the city where we raised them, Los Angeles, where my heart will forever reside, even more so after the devastating fires.
     As a lonely and awkward child, I read tons of books to feel less alone, and I hope Werewolf Hamlet makes readers feel less alone in the world too.