Then, as my own children fell from the peaks of childhood into the tribulations of adolescence, Ivy and Bean stopped being a record of what was happening in my house and started being an escape hatch. In What’s the Big Idea, I find the kid in her second-grade class who decided that the solution to global warming was to give the animals a boost by making himself dumber, which he intended to achieve by banging his head against the wall every morning. In No News Is Good News, there’s the bizarre passion for wax-covered cheese that swept through her third grade.
We called her the Slumlord.Īs the devious three-year-old grew, I can see her stories arriving in the books too. Ivy’s doll collection, which features in multiple books, throws me right back to my despair at the sprawling “doll tenement” in my older kid’s room. In the third book, Ivy’s obsession with girl paleontologist Mary Anning echoes just such an obsession in my house-or rather, in my yard, which was the site of a huge fossil dig.
This is because, in my opinion, seven is the pinnacle of life, and I love Ivy and Bean too much to let them be at anything other than the pinnacle of life.īut while Ivy and Bean have enjoyed their permanent seven-ness, I have been getting older, and now, when I look back over the series-an old-person sort of activity-it’s like a time-capsule of me and my family in the years between 20.įor instance, in the second book in the series, Ivy and Bean and the Ghost That Had to Go, there’s a haunted bathroom at the girls’ school, which, to me, is a memento of the day in 2004 that my older (non-devious) daughter came home from school to announce that there’d been a ghost-sighting in the janitor’s closet and steps were being taken. They are still seven in the Ivy and Bean movies, which Netflix released in September.
Ivy and Bean remained seven for the entire 16 years it took me to write the 12-book series. Then we’d argue about the definition of work, and then, after about 15 minutes, she’d trot away, completely satisfied by the outcome of her efforts, and I would put my head down on my desk. And then I’d yank open the door and tell her Yes, I did work, I most certainly did, and if she would just go downstairs and play, I could get my work done.
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