From the January/February 2001 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Acceptance

by Marc Aronson

ince my career in children’s books has primarily been as an editor, it is a particularly odd thing to be accepting an award as an author. That makes me especially conscious of the many people who helped me along the way — starting with Dorothy Briley, a great nonfiction editor who trusted her instincts and took the risk of publishing this strange book; Virginia Buckley, who was a devoted and thorough editor; Jennifer Greene, who answered my endless phone calls; Joann Hill and Trish Parcells, who designed the book and made it look so good; and my wife Marina, who pushed me always to make it be what I thought it could be.

Still, I can’t hide behind thanks forever, so I have to step forward and come clean. I was quite surprised to win this award. But I have to admit that I did intend to stake a kind of claim with Ralegh: I wanted to tackle the assumptions that handicap our understanding of nonfiction for younger readers. And now I’d like to spell out that claim.

When any of us in books for young readers—authors, editors, publishers, reviewers, librarians — speaks about nonfiction, a strange awkwardness sets in. It emerges in our uncomfortable balancing of what seem to be two opposite poles: accuracy and engaging treatment. We seem to believe that if a book is really accurate, completely and precisely true, it will be dull. And that if a nonfiction book is irresistible, moving, profound, a page-turner, it is shaving the truth.

Actually, I’m being too kind. The baseline attitude of the children’s book world is that a nonfiction book is a kind of sad stepsister that would really rather be a novel, but can’t quite get there — the dull relation who never marries but makes herself useful to others. This is obvious when you look at awards: since 1990 there have been four nonfiction Newbery honors, two by Russell Freedman, one a memoir; since the National Book Award for young readers was revived in 1996 there has been one nonfiction finalist, a memoir; in the first year of the Printz award all the finalists were novels. It could be that our fiction writers are simply that much better than the rest of us, but if you look beyond the awards you see a mindset characterized more by prejudice than judgment. And it is this bias that threatens to marginalize the Siebert, ALA’s new nonfiction prize, which will be given for the first time this year.

On various listservs, whenever a question is posed about the participants’ favorite books, or the books that changed their lives, it takes days, and hundreds of submissions, before anyone notices that all of the posted responses have cited novels.

The participants — generally the very librarians and teachers of children’s literature who serve on award committees — are voting with their e-mails. For them, novels are the books that are treasured, that must be passed on to new generations of readers. Nonfiction books are useful necessities that are sometimes surprisingly readable.

I think part of the conflict about accuracy in fiction, and especially historical fiction, stems from this basic — perhaps even unconscious — belief. Since we believe nonfiction needs a spoonful of invention to make the facts go down, we are both on guard against ourselves — fearing we’ve been saps because we loved this story so much — and are desperate to have reliable historical fiction so we can have all our needs satisfied at once.

I notice these assumptions because they seem so strange to me. I find nonfiction to have many of the qualities people treasure in fiction: it takes me to new places, it reveals character and personality, it is moving, it can be written beautifully, and it has the added advantage of being true, of giving me new knowledge, of explaining the real world. It affords one additional pleasure, and I think this may be the heart of the problem: while a great deal of a fiction writer’s power rests on her imagination, the parallel faculty that a nonfiction writer has to exercise is intelligence.

A great joy in reading a wonderful biography, or history book, or even science or math book is the play of the author’s mind. There is a pure enjoyment in how she has examined evidence, constructed theories, explained vexing situations. That is the special province of nonfiction — that thrill of thinking along with an engaged mind which burrows into the world and brings back treasures for us to examine. When we set out our uncomfortable polarity of truth and enjoyment it is because we shrink back from the pure admiration of intelligence, and when we do that we undersell our readers.

I think we adults willfully forget the kind of intellectual workout kids are getting every day. Anyone who is studying geometry, a foreign language, transposed keys, revolutions of rising expectations — not to speak of the half-court trap, java-script, or how to get a date on Saturday night — appreciates calculation and intelligence. Yet we fear giving young readers a book whose keynote is intelligence. Instead we stress imagination, identification, moral uplift, emotional power, realism as a literary quality, and only then, if pressed to deal with nonfiction, utility. It is as if we associate the pleasure of exercising intelligence either with the deadly chore of homework or, in the special case of our “best readers,” with interpreting sophisticated fictional devices. Intelligence in nonfiction is suspect.

Of course, intelligence by itself is not enough to recommend a book to young readers. That’s where I think nonfiction can learn from fiction — in unexpected ways.

In adult nonfiction, authors have a grand variety of narrative forms to choose from. To take just a few examples, ever since A. J. Simmons wrote The Quest for Corvo, biographers have had the option of including their own search as part of the story. Following Barbara Tuchman or Daniel Boorstin, adult writers have shifted from detailing a chronology of events to creating a thematic depiction of a period. Influenced by anthropology, Rhys Isaac in The Transformation of Virginia began by describing two different landscapes, one as it would have been seen by a squire on horseback, the other visible to a slave walking along the same road.

If there is one lesson from the academic debates about narrative and the construction of reality, it is that while being faithful to fact an author has a great deal of room to be inventive in how he shapes the story. That is why I wrote Ralegh’s treason trial as a kind of film treatment à la Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, and why I began the book with thematic foreshadowings that I intended to deliver on much later on. I wanted to try out literary devices in an entirely nonfiction context. It is my hope that, instead of thinking that the only alternative to a dutiful narrative that plods from event to event is a novel that retells aspects of that story in the first person, authors will begin to explore many new narrative forms. That is where we can borrow from fiction, in the play of form.

To make this possible, though, the author has an obligation to his young readers: he must not only make it clear how he knows what he knows, but what he thinks of those sources. It is not enough to list the books you’ve read, you have to tell readers, especially young readers, how you evaluated them. That judgment is what an adult has to offer younger readers. No mere listing of sources on, say, Ralegh’s massacre in Ireland would do a young reader any good, for it would only lead her to the fundamental disagreements among English and Irish authors. We have to tip our own hands and show how we have tangled with the resources we’ve used. That’s how we can help our readers develop their own critical skills.

To return, then, to those poles of truth and reading pleasure, I urge authors of nonfiction for young readers to experiment, take risks, try out all sorts of new narrative forms — none of which require any kind of invented dialogue or made-up interior monologues. And they should purchase that license, that freedom, by laying a clear foundation showing their own research and thought processes. That way we trust readers and invite them to share with us in the joy of discovery while admitting the uncertainty of our answers. We are free to be as innovative as we want, without having to turn to the imaginary.

Thank you for giving me this award and this chance to make explicit the implicit ideas behind my book. I think we are at a very exciting moment in nonfiction, and I am grateful to have had this chance to make my case for its possible future.