Cynthia Kadohata

he was the mysterious woman in the black silk robe who lived in the attic. The door leading to the attic was always closed, and once every so often, I’d hear pacing. Somewhat more often, I’d hear the low hum of an electric typewriter. But it was the silence that was startling. I’d been there for two days, and had so far only caught a single glimpse of my housemate late at night, running down the stairs in a black silk robe.

We were in the same graduate writing program. On the third day, as I struggled to finish a short story to bring to my first writing workshop, the mysterious upstairs roommate chose to come downstairs at the Exact Same Time that I did. She was in the black silk robe. She wore glasses held together by a knot of tape. She sort of nodded at me, then glided off toward the kitchen. That was how I met Cynthia Kadohata.

I didn’t see her again until that first workshop — led by Lewis “Buddy” Nordan. That first class consisted primarily of our being told that we would read stories from our fellow classmates each week and critique them the following week. We had to be ruthless, ruthless, but not opinionated. Basically, we couldn’t say, “I think this story stinks.” We had to say, “This story stinks because . . .” Buddy then gave us a brief summary on each of the three short stories he was passing out for next week’s class. The third one, he told us, was titled “Snow” and was about a racetrack. I grimaced. I had not even a remote interest in reading about racetracks. My mind jumped ahead to next week, on how I would position my critique. “This story stinks because it’s about a subject that is completely uninteresting to me.”

Things grew worse. When the trio of manuscripts reached me, I saw that the one on top, “Snow,” was written by Cynthia Kadohata, my mysterious attic roommate. Wonderful. Just wonderful. I was going to hate it and I’d have to completely avoid her until class (which didn’t actually seem that difficult since I’d only seen her once in five days, anyway).

It was an assignment, so I of course had to read it. But I only needed to read the first paragraph to know—it was stunning. This was written by a girl who was in a graduate writing program, just like me. But not like me. Not like me at all. I wanted to be a writer. This attic roommate was a writer.

There are a few times in your life when you meet someone whose skill helps you recognize your own range. When you meet these people, there’s no envy — because you can’t envy the gifted. You either are, or you’re not. Cynthia Kadohata, I knew after reading that short story, was gifted. Gifted with a clear, brave, pure voice, with a way of looking at the world that brought a freshness to her every sentence, and with an ease to her prose that seemed effortless. But I knew it wasn’t effortless. Over the months, I grew to learn that the seemingly endless quiet up in the attic was the quiet that comes with intense focus.

I can’t quite remember when we actually became friends, but the obvious connection, writing, wasn’t what did it. Still, suddenly we were playing weekly backgammon and Trivial Pursuit tournaments and consuming horrifying amounts of Tostitos with sour cream. She taught me how to use chopsticks. I showed her the shortcut to the grocery store. We argued over which was the ideal breed of dog (she loves a good argument). I learned she could work herself into terrific furies. I found out she laughed a lot and danced wildly in her attic, but barefoot, with the music very low. She wrote her first short story when she was a deeply philosophical nine-year-old, contemplating the dejection that quickly follows opening presents at Christmas. And she sent her stories out — to the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review. No one else in the program yet dared, but Cynthia did. She was that sure of herself. Or that hopeful.

Tobias Wolff tried to lure her to the Syracuse writing program; Columbia successfully lured her to New York with a scholarship. I finished my thesis in Pittsburgh. We wrote each other, called each other, usually very late at night. We’d talk about anything but writing. And then, in one phone call, she just happened to mention that the New Yorker was publishing one of her stories. I’d expected her to be screaming with delight. Instead, I screamed for her. Cynthia, uncomfortable with the praise, deflected my enthusiasm.

Years went by; there were more short stories in more exemplary magazines. I’d congratulate her; she’d hem and haw and change the conversation. Cynthia moved a lot when she was a child; her parents swung from Chicago to Georgia to Arkansas to Michigan, from apartment to house to motel to house to motel, searching for better work and a better life for Cynthia and her older sister and younger brother. And it seemed that Cynthia herself couldn’t relinquish that peripatetic lifestyle. She moved again and again, and when she wasn’t moving, she was traveling through the badlands and prairies of America on a Greyhound bus, just to see. To search for connections that would inspire her writing, connections that might make her think of a home she never really had. So sometimes there’d be gaps when I’d have no idea where she was, what she was doing. Then one day she called to say she’d written a novel. Would I look at it? She just wanted to know if I liked it or not, even though it had already been bought by Viking. I read it, thought it was gorgeous, and told her so. She thanked me, and then about a year later sent me a first edition of her debut adult novel, The Floating World.

Another year went by. Cynthia was living in Los Angeles at this point. I should have been living in New York, but in my first month there, interviewing for an entry-level publishing job, I’d broken my ankle so badly I had to go back to Massachusetts so my parents could take care of me. About three days after the surgery Cynthia called and asked if I’d read something else for her. This time she didn’t want to know if I liked it or not — well, she did want to know that — but she also wanted to know where the story wasn’t working. It was another novel for Viking. Would I write up some notes?

I was flabbergasted. She wanted me to write up some notes? I felt so honored.

I began working on the manuscript the day it arrived. I wrote copious notes on about the first twenty pages before I allowed myself a break. The next day, I picked up the manuscript again and realized I couldn’t remember a word I’d read. I looked at my notes, and they made not one bit of sense. I’d learned a very valuable lesson — you can’t edit while on Percocet.

Determined to do right by the trust Cynthia had placed in me, I took no painkillers the next day. A week later, I had my dad mail off what I thought was a brilliant editorial letter to Cynthia.

And I heard nothing. Cynthia called, sure, to see how the old ankle was doing. But she said nothing about the letter. She’d call again, to say she was sending me a book she was sure I’d love, and still say nothing about the letter. I decided that somehow it never got to her, and she was too polite (Cynthia is exceedingly polite) to mention it, not wanting to seem as though she were pressuring me to hurry up and get my notes to her. So I decided to check. “Yep, got your letter,” she said, then immediately changed the subject. I tried not to panic. But I knew. She was furious. We continued checking in with each other for another six months, never once mentioning The Letter. Every time I’d put down the phone, I’d think, Phew. She didn’t explode this time. But. It was coming.

And it did. And, as with most things with Cynthia, not in the way I’d expected. One day I picked up the phone to hear her already in mid-rant. Cynthia will often begin a conversation halfway in—by which I mean she’s so intent on getting right to the point that she sometimes forgets the formalities of hello/how are you/it’s me Cynthia, and instead launches full steam into whatever she needs to talk about. She was furious. She’d just reread my notes on her novel, six months after receiving them. Six months after slamming them into a drawer after deciding I couldn’t possibly have been more off-base in my assessment of her work. But today, she’d been feeling particularly masochistic and had decided to reread my letter. And she was furious because she realized she now agreed with almost everything I’d written.

And I realized I might just have a future in editing.

Fast-forward to Cynthia’s wedding on the top of a volcano in Las Vegas. She’d asked me to be a bridesmaid. I was an assistant editor in a publishing company and couldn’t possibly afford the plane ticket. But by now my parents had met Cynthia several times and had unofficially claimed her as a second daughter. A few days after I’d told them that Cynthia was getting married, an envelope arrived containing a check and note that said: Go to Cynthia’s wedding. I went. The bride wore a sarong, a huge sunflower in her hair, and may have been barefoot. As I said, Cynthia never does anything quite as expected.

During this time, I’d had the supreme good fortune of working at Laura Geringer’s imprint at HarperCollins. As I read through the never-ending piles of submissions, I kept thinking of Cynthia. Every one of Cynthia’s novels, while published by adult divisions, actually featured an adolescent or teen protagonist. Her voice was so true. Her prose could be heartbreaking without ever slipping into sentimentality. She created characters you felt you’d known forever. As I rejected yet another poorly written manuscript, I came to a decision. Cynthia would have to write a book for children. She was born to do it. And I was going to pester her ceaselessly until she did.

And so I began. After days of mental rehearsals, I slipped my idea into a conversation. “Gee, I keep thinking about how much I loved Olivia in The Floating World, and she’s only twelve. Have you ever thought —”

She was in the middle of a new novel.

I waited until she finished the novel and asked again.

She was taking a screenplay class. The Floating World had been optioned for film, and the director wanted her to try her hand at writing the screenplay.

I waited another year.

She was still working on the screenplay. Also, her brain was bloated from eating too much over the holidays.

I waited another year.

She was writing another screenplay. But yes, she’d love to speak at my wedding.

I moved to Atheneum. The move made me all the more determined.

But this time I took a different tack. I would lure her with a box of books. Books by Bruce Brooks and Elaine Konigsburg and Frances O’Roark Dowell, books by Katherine Paterson and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor and Hilary McKay. Books and books and books. I could barely haul that box to the mailroom. Oh, and I wrote a note. “Read these.” I’d like to think I added something encouraging such as “You can be this good,” but I’m afraid I probably didn’t.

And then, once again, I waited. Finally, I received an e-mail from her: “How dark could a YA novel be?”

I nearly fell out of my chair. She was thinking about it. She was thinking about it! I practically cartwheeled into my then-publisher Ginee Seo’s office. “Cynthia Kadohata is thinking about writing something for children!” I shouted. Ginee knew I’d wanted to work with her for years. She was as gleeful as I was, and said that if Cynthia could put a story idea into a proposal, we could give her a contract. I dashed off an e-mail to Cynthia. She responded immediately: “How do you write a proposal?”

After a few more days, another e-mail arrived, titled “Proposal, or something I think might be a proposal.” It was not a proposal. It was a gorgeously written sixteen-page piece in the voice of a little girl, Katie, who was telling the reader about how her older sister Lynn would dangle her mother’s rhinestone necklace in her face and repeat the words pika-pika (a word similar in meaning to kira-kira).

Cynthia is a novelist to the core of her being. She is absolutely incapable of summarizing a story. She could not write: “This is a book about two sisters; one eight and the other twelve.” Instead, she had given me paragraphs, then pages. She had given me the opening chapter of Kira-Kira.

It took ten years of nudging, but at last she was going to write a children’s book.

It’s a tricky thing, editing a very good friend. When I’m editing her, I have to be her editor first, and I can’t think about her feelings. I have to be honest about what doesn’t work, and that can be upsetting. As I had learned, Cynthia could be, shall we say, touchy about criticism at first, even criticism with the very best intentions. So I sent out my first editorial letter on Kira-Kira with a certain amount of fear in my heart. I didn’t know if I could take another six months of furious silence.

I won’t ever know how many darts were thrown at my picture as she read my letter. I only know that with a single revision, Cynthia brought forth elements in Kira-Kira that I could never have known to ask for but that were simply perfect. For instance, I knew her much-beloved Doberman was failing while Cynthia was writing the book. She somehow transformed the personal heartbreak of watching her dog die into Katie’s lonely agony over her sister, into that scene where Katie chases wildly, desperately, after the setting sun, climbing higher and higher, not wanting the last day her sister was alive to end. And I knew she knew very well, as Katie in Kira-Kira does, what it was like to feel “other.” When Cynthia’s family moved after seven years from Arkansas to Michigan, her drawl was so thick that the teacher recommended speech therapy so people could understand her. Her strongest memories of her father are of him working impossible hours so that his family could finally have a home of their own, much as she has Katie’s parents work and sacrifice for their children in Kira-Kira.

Cynthia once said that every piece of writing strikes a balance between experience and imagination. This is certainly true for her. She mines personal experiences and weaves them with singular imagination, giving us worlds we’d never know otherwise. Imagine not knowing that we were once a country where an entire hospital would turn up to see a newborn Asian baby. Yet this very thing happened when Cynthia’s brother was born, and a similar scene takes place when Katie’s little brother is born in Kira-Kira. Imagine not knowing that we were once a country where women in some jobs were not allowed to take even a bathroom break while they were working. Her father’s descriptions of the working conditions in the poultry plants in the 1950s brought this horrifying fact to Cynthia’s attention. Cynthia in turn brings it to ours as we read about the pads the female poultry plant workers had to wear, as they were denied any breaks during the day. Yet once you’ve read about this in Cynthia’s novel, you’ll never forget. That’s the power of words under the power of a gifted writer.

I find that gifted writers are usually gifted revisionists. Gifted revisionists are an editor’s dream. Cynthia admits, now, to a bit of storming around the house, a little old-fashioned pouting, when she receives a revision letter. But I suspect such letters best serve to get her creative ire up. I’ll show her! she probably thought just before moving the scene in which Katie’s father smashes the car with a two-by-four to later in the novel so that it would have that much more emotional impact. She’ll never duck an opportunity to make her work stronger. She is fearless in the face of hard work.

Cynthia writes when life is good, she writes when life is bad. She writes when life is terrifying. Last June she flew to Kazakhstan to bring home the baby boy she was adopting. She was going alone, as a single mother. She had $12,600 strapped to her waist — for the orphanage fees, for rent, for unexpected necessities. She was scared. She went anyway. The trip was supposed to last three weeks. Bureaucracy she struggled to understand in a language she didn’t understand pushed three weeks to four, to five, to six, to seven. She hunkered down in a flat with a single light bulb and brown water spurting irregularly from the sink and bath pipes. And when she wasn’t with the baby during the Baby House’s visiting hours, she wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote. By hand. She came home with her son, Sammy, and her next novel. A children’s book.

She is a writer who has always wandered, searching for a place that feels like home — for herself, and for her writing. Since adopting Sammy, Cynthia hasn’t moved once. I’d like to think she might stay where she is for a good while with her new family. And I’d like to think that maybe Cynthia has also found a home in children’s books, in writing for children, within a community of artists who share her passion. When she finished Kira-Kira, I asked her if she would like to write more for children. Without a moment’s hesitation, she shouted (yes, she shouted), “YES!” She’d never had something come so naturally. She loved it. So yes, the mysterious woman in the attic, the surreptitious dancer, might just be home. For that, and for her many gifts, including the great gift of her friendship, I will be forever grateful.

Caitlyn M. Dlouhy is executive editor of Atheneum Books for Young Readers.