Lauren Child: Utterly Me, Clarice Bean

"What message would you like to send to children?" writer and illustrator Lauren Child was asked by Bookpage magazine.

"Just because someone says you are no good at something doesn't mean they are right," the phenomenally popular Child replied.

She should know. When she first submitted Clarice Bean, That's Me for publication it was flatly rejected: too sophisticated, too designed, too much, the publisher said. Luckily, Child didn't believe a word of it. "Although I felt a bit squashed, I thought, you're wrong, I'm right," she has since said.

After four years of rejections, that first book was published in 1999 and now, another four years, around seven books and many awards later (including Smarties bronze and gold, and the Kate Greenaway Award) she has been vindicated. Thank goodness she didn't crawl into a hole at that first rejection.

Families in all their un-glamour, the utter unfairness of childhood, the white-hot feelings of sibling conflict and attachment - these constitute Child's playground. Her mode of delivery, far from sugary sweet, is slick, funny and knowing and she uses montages of typefaces, photographs, cut-outs, line drawings. That first publisher was right: it is sophisticated and well designed, but what they underestimated was how much the audience (children and parents) would love it.

What has surprised Child is how much she has come to love the writing part of creating books. Her background is in fine arts (she even worked as an assistant to Damien Hurst), and the integration of words and images has been one of the strongest aspects of her picture books.

However, last year she tried her hand at her first novel, Utterly Me, Clarice Bean (although this, too, plays around with typefaces and doodlings in a way that belies the difficulty of reading for those just starting out, and charms older readers, too). Clarice's family is in its usual state, her father worrying about reshufflings and jumping through hoops, her grandfather prowling around at night, and Clarice herself obsessed with winning a prize for her class project.

* Lauren Child will be in Auckland on October 10, speaking at Auckland Girls Grammar School, at 7pm. Tickets, $3, are available from Jabberwocky Children's Bookshop.