About the Novel
Nuts and Bolts
I believe I was folding laundry in my family room one day when I caught, on the news, yet another story about a teacher arrested for having a sexual relationship with one of her young male students. It's one of those unbearably predictable news items that crops up every year, as certain as hurricanes in Florida or celebrities going into rehab, and the details are nearly always the same. The defendant: middle-aged and amusingly average-looking at best, often married with children, usually the recipient of numerous 'Teacher of the Year' awards. The victim: some nondescript kid you can only imagine was horny, naive, opportunistic, and-- more often than not-- still in middle school. Ugh.I remember thinking, "Why would she do such a thing?"-- because it always seems like these women have everything to lose. They have children of their own, a career for which they've studied and trained, and in most cases they seem to have been very dedicated to their work all the way up until they got into bed, or perhaps the back seat of their car, with some thirteen-year-old boy. As a parent myself, I couldn't fathom it. But then, I wasn't watching the news that day as an average parent. I was watching it as a novelist who had already written a book or three, and I had long ago learned that "why would she do that?" is the very best question from which to write a story. People almost always do things for reasons that make sense to them, even if they don't make sense to anyone else. Figure out why those seemingly inexplicable actions seemed reasonable to that person, and now you have a story.It was then that I began researching these cases, and I learned fascinating things about the women who commit these crimes. As I structured my novel around such a protagonist, it occurred to me that there would be no better environment in which to set this story than the type of school with which I had been fascinated nearly all my life-- a Waldorf school. No other educational philosophy places such a high degree of value on the purity of childhood, and on controlling it to an extreme degree. I admit I felt a lot of trepidation at the notion of setting the book in that environment, because, frankly, I knew it would piss a lot of people off. But that's no good reason to make a second-rate choice for a story, and I believed I could (and now, did) do justice to the great deal of good in the Waldorf approach to schooling.All of these items aside-- protagonist, setting, plot-- the personality on which the novel turns is that of Zach Patterson, the teenage boy who becomes Judy's victim. From the beginning, Zach was the character with whom I identified. As a teenager I had been transfixed-- perhaps a little obsessed-- with Nabokov's novel, Lolita, which remains my favorite to this day. But the limitation of Lolita is that the reader never gets to hear Dolores's point of view, and by the time I was eighteen I knew a thing or two about how that fictional girl must have felt. It bothered me a great deal, as I framed up The Kingdom of Childhood, that friends with whom I spoke made so many jokes about how lucky Zach was. One of my best male friends, upon hearing the plot, said, "Well, don't feel too sorry for him." Taken aback, I replied, "Of course the reader's supposed to feel sorry for him. He's being completely taken advantage of by this much older woman." My friend looked me in the eye and repeated, "Don't feel too sorry for him."These comments-- along with my growing irritation at the social zeitgeist celebrating the "cougar" phenomenon, even where underage males are concerned-- only increased my determination to tell the story from Zach's point of view as well as Judy's. It wasn't right, in my view, that young women are pitied as the victims of manipulative older adults, but that young men are expected to see themselves as fortunate and receive a round of high-fives. As the mother of sons, that really bugs me. And so I held nothing back in channeling into Zach all of the feelings I had as a teenage girl enmeshed in a relationship with someone who was much too old for me. I hope Zach fairly represents those nameless and faceless young men who made for easy prey for the women in the mugshots, who are themselves to be pitied.Perhaps the most personal aspects of the book, for me, are the "Germany sections." Growing up, my father taught for the University of Maryland. In 1984 he was given the opportunity to teach computer science at military bases in Germany and England, and so he packed up our family-- my mother, my little sister Heidi, and nine-year-old me-- to live overseas for a year. The first place we rented was half of a duplex in Mainbach, Germany-- a tiny, rural Bavarian town that lay beneath the flight path to the air base. Many of the details that appear in the book are true to life. There really was a beautiful garden, and a school with an advent wreath (I could still sing you the song our teacher taught us), and there was even a neighbor girl named Daniela who wasn't very nice to me. But if she had an older brother or sister I don't remember it, and I doubt her family had a barn or any kind of farm to speak of. Like any novel, the Germany sections of The Kingdom of Childhood are a rough collage of memory and invention.The year after we returned from our stay in Europe, I remember my father playing endless slideshows for what seemed like everyone who happened into our living room. We had an entire cabinet-- a cabinet-- of slides from that year. Well, time passed, and I grew up, and my relationship with my father became damaged beyond repair. Before that disaster I had claimed very few childhood photographs as my own, nearly all of them pictures of my sister, who died at the age of eleven. Any objective record of my childhood was effectively gone, leaving me with nothing but my memories-- never as dependable as we want to believe-- and my impressions of that place and that time.The Germany scenes in the novel are, as a result, two trains racing toward each other-- one carrying my disorganized jumble of memories of life in Bavaria; the other, the full spectrum of my grief at the loss of my family of origin. But in a work of fiction, all details must fold back to the story at hand. My interest in indulging my traumas and memories began and ended where the story did, and I hope the seams are invisible. The Kingdom of Childhood is a very erotic story. There's no getting away from it-- the book is, I believe, "adult" in the extreme for commercial fiction, and that's no accident. I set out to write a story about two people who become so entangled in a sexual relationship that they cannot find a way to extract themselves. I worried-- because how could I not?-- about writing a book in which an underage character is so heavily eroticized. But if the reader can't feel-- not just intellectualize, but feel-- why Zach is so overwhelmingly drawn to the sensuality and forbidden-ness of his relationship with Judy, then it makes no sense why he would stay with her, especially as his reservations begin to mount. And for the story to make sense, the reader needs to see Zach through Judy's eyes, too-- because her sexual fixation on Zach is one crucial part of the web of her psychology. But every explicit scene in the book is shown through Zach's point of view, not Judy's. That's not an accident, either.
A completed book, once turned in to the editor, has the feeling of being a message in a bottle-- the writer's own paltry effort, tossed out into the great wide world for consumption by whoever happens to find it. With a book like this one-- where I knew all along that the content would undoubtedly make a certain percentage of people very unhappy-- it was of utmost importance to me that I be able to look at the final product and feel confident that this was exactly the story I set out to write. It is. And I am.-Rebecca
