Whipped Cream Difficulties

It has been a busy weekend, so I’m only getting to this one now: Beverly Cleary. I’m not going to sneer at the description of her as “beloved children’s author”: everything I’ve seen about her points to her being a kind and gentle soul who had a long full life.

The children’s books she read at school disappointed, she recalled in an article for The Horn Book in 1982. The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.
“I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote, “and I decided that someday when I grew up I would write them.”

“Beverly Cleary Wrote About Real Life, and Her Readers Loved Her for It“.

Cleary didn’t start writing until she was in her early 30s. She’d talked about it for years and, in “My Own Two Feet,” describes an epiphany she had while working at Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley: “One morning during a lull, I picked up an easy-reading book and read, ‘Bow-wow. I like the green grass, said the puppy.’ How ridiculous, I thought. No puppy I had known talked like that.”

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