More of The True Story of Kathryn Lasky

What I liked to do as a kid: My best friend Carole and I used to give circuses all the time. We got her Dad to build a whole trapeze system in a tree and we'd fly around from branch to branch and do tricks. We had an animal act too. My dog Suzy. We would dress her in skirts and stuff and even a hat and then teach her how to jump through hoops. One day my Aunt Eleanor came driving down the road and Suzy popped out through a hedge in a tutu and my mom’s hat. Aunt Eleanor nearly had a heart attack!

School: School was not among my favorite things. I went to a very strict all-girl school. All the teachers were creakingly old ladies with baggy stockings—except two: My eighth grade teacher was young and nice and very smart. Her name was Mrs. Oldham. Madame Hendren was my French teacher. She was older but chic. No baggy stockings and she wore elegant scarves and humongous brooches, and had had several husbands and countless boyfriends, and she told us all about them. I think Charles De Gaulle had been one of her boyfriends. If you don’t know who he was, look it up.

College: In grade school and high school, nobody thought I was especially smart. I must have been a late bloomer. But I did bloom in college. I went to the University of Michigan and got lots of A’s. I loved English. I became an English major. I loved Victorian literature and Romantic poetry and Renaissance literature and just about any kind of literature anyone could imagine.

My first job: A really stupid one—writing for a fashion magazine. Let’s skip that phase of my life.

My second job: teaching school—but I don’t remember much about it because I met this cute guy and fell in love. He became my husband. His name is Chris Knight. He is so different from me that I can’t believe I fell in love with him. He is short and blonde. I was tall and dark. He looks like a short Robert Redford. If you don’t know who that is, look it up. But most of all, Chris is physically very daring and I'm a wimp. He was a National Geographic photographer and a documentary filmmaker.

When we got married my parents gave us a sailboat. Would you believe it that Chris talked me into sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in this thing! It was only thirty feet long. I threw up the whole way. But I did stand a watch twice a day for four hours each time even while throwing up. In between the seasickness I did find some beautiful extraordinary things out there in the vastness of the ocean. I loved the bird life and the dolphins were so playful and to watch the dawn break on a calm morning in the North Atlantic is a spiritual experience. We sailed twice across the Atlantic. Twice is definitely enough.

When we came back I wrote my first children’s book and had my first child. Max. He’s a neat kid. Now, he is married and works in New York City. He likes martial arts and English literature. When he was younger, he read some of my books, but not all of them. He preferred horror. Anne Rice, Lovecraft.

Five years later we had another child, Meribah. She was a very serious ballet dancer, but now she is a stylist in New York City. And she is a very good writer and quite artistic.

So there you have it. What else do you need to know? I live in a big old house in Cambridge. The most important thing to me is my family. All my best ideas for books, one way or another come from experiences with my family—from being a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a wife.