Rebecca Stead Goes Back in Time

writer rebecca stead revisited her 1970s new york city childhood and wove it with a time travel twist for her second book, when you reach me (wendy lamb books, $15.99). the young adult novel, which won the prestigious john newbery medal for children's literature in january, follows latchkey kid miranda as she tries to make sense of a frayed friendship and a prescient series of notes that suddenly start appearing.

we caught up with stead, an upper west side mother of two, after a whirlwind book tour that brought her to seattle, san francisco, chicago, cincinnati and boston.

q: do you feel like you've won the oscar of children's literature? a: yeah, i do kind of feel like i've won the oscar. this is the closest i ever want to come to winning an oscar. i sort of would describe the experience as getting hit by a giant wave, a really beautiful sort of amazing wave, but it still has just turned my life upside down for a little while.

q: you said on your blog that in doing readings for your book, you get the most interesting questions from kids. a: they're very interested in the abstract ideas of the book. there's this notion of a veil in the story, and that we all have these veils that prevent us from seeing, sort of appreciating the whole world, and every once in a while this veil blows away an d we have a moment of what feels like real understanding. and kids really respond to that veil idea. a lot of them have said, "oh i have that," or, "i'm trying to lift my veil because i want to see more." i feel like kids are willing to take in a lot on a deep level. they tend to grasp the time travel stuff very comfortably. i think that they're more comfortable with this kind of story than a lot of adults.

q: you say it's very important to talk about mortality in children's books. why do you think that is? a: i think that it's very comfortable for adults to think that kids don't grapple with the really hard stuff that we think about, like mortality, for instance. and i think that you're fooling yourself if you think your kids don't think about death. i think that kids think about the concept of death all the time. i remember thinking about it. i know my kids think about it. i like representing in a book a world that has some of the darkness that we are dealing with in life because that makes us feel like we can relate to a story. when a story reflects something i'm afraid of or something i think about, the story becomes more real and more important to me.

q: how much of the book is based on your life growing up? a: a lot of it is based on my memory of being a 6th grader in new york, where i lived. the kind of independence i had, the kind of friendships i had. and the kind of awakening that happens at that point in life, where you start seeing life from just a little bit farther back. i grew up right here on 95th street and i went to p.s. 75. [the book] is a pretty good map of my walk to school from my building. i actually just dropped my son off at my mom's; she still lives in the same apartment. the school is a fairly decent representation of our school. i changed some things, but i do remember when i discovered that we had a dentist's office in our school and thinking about who had to go there. and i remember kids getting pulled out of school for shots. there was an awareness, like, "oh, this is a money thing."

q: so much of the book is dependent on new york city in the '70s. could you write a book as textured as this taking place today? a: kids are not as independent today as we were in our day, generally speaking. the parent community is a little bit more careful and protective than our parents were, not that our parents didn't love us, but there was a community norm-i was on the street alone from the time i was 9. nine-year-olds are not doing that in this neighborhood now, for the most part.

q: you were a public defender before you became a writer. i understand there was a laptop tragedy that aided in the transition? a: i had been a public defender for a few years, but as i was having children i was doing more development work at my office and finally decided after my second son was born to just take a break. so i was home with the kids and had been writing for a bunch of years-short stories for adults, just on my own time. one day there was this big crash and my 4-year-old, who is now my 11-year-old, had sort of pushed [the computer] off of the dining room table and it hit the floor and nothing could be recovered. i mean, how unlikely is that? it was totally a message from the universe saying, "you know what? move on."

i wanted to keep writing but i could not imagine trying to recreate these stories. i went to the bookstore and i bought a bunch of books that i remembered loving as a kid. then i bought some books that were being written then, which was like 2002. and i thought, maybe i should try this-create the kind of story that i would have loved to read as a kid.

q: reading your book, i could picture it as a movie. is that something you've thought about, or would you be opposed to that? a: it's so funny because i never thought about this book as a movie. maybe because it's so internal to the main character-she's sort of puzzling out this story. although now there have been discussions about that. nothing definite has happened, but there's been talk of options. i haven't even listened to my audio book. it would be tricky and i have been asked if i would consider adapting this as a screenplay.

q: so you actually could win an oscar. a: no, i'm not even going to try because i don't think i could re-imagine the same material as creatively as a movie. i think it would almost need a completely different brain because you would really have to do a lot to turn this into a film.

transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.