Lauren Child, Charlie and Lola author, tells of her joy at adopting a Mongolian girl
For years, the author Lauren Child has been tormented by the same question: how can you write for children when you don’t have any?
The 47-year-old creator of the popular Charlie and Lola and Clarice Bean books was repeatedly questioned about her childless status.
“I thought, 'If one more person asks me that, I’ll strangle them.’ People seemed so absolutely amazed that you can write for children if you don’t have them. Why? My boyfriend [the barrister Adrian Darbishire] said, 'You should just say being a writer is not about imitation, it’s about imagination.’”
But now, for the first time, the author reveals that she has become a mother. “I do have a child,” she says. “She’s two and a half and her name is Tuesday.”
Tuesday, who is “full of grace”, is Mongolian and was adopted after Child worked as an Artist for Peace with Unesco, during which she met street children, many of whom had been living in sewers in Ulaanbaatar, the capital.
“I wasn’t thinking of adopting from Mongolia, but that’s how it worked out,” Child says with a radiant smile. “So she doesn’t look like me, but funnily enough she does look like Lola from Charlie and Lola. My friends say: 'Lauren, you could have drawn her’.”
Child is remarkably prolific, and is adapting to a new work-life balance. “I’m trying to find time to figure it out. I’m quite lucky in my job in that I know how much time I have to get the book written and I just have to work around her.”
There is no nanny. “My sister’s around a lot. She’s absolutely brilliant with her, and I’m around all the time, so even if I have to do something, I’m still there. It doesn’t feel we’ve been apart. We can have lunch together.”
The last time she had been asked about children, she had remarked that she couldn’t believe a child could make her any more tired than her work. What does she think now?
“There’s a relief in having her and that makes me feel much more energetic,” she says. “It’s really lovely having her around. Life is tiring, but she has lifted my spirits.”
Child isn’t the first celebrity to adopt from Mongolia. In 2006, Ewan McGregor, the actor, and his wife, Eve, adopted a four-year-old Mongolian girl called Jamiyan.
Like Child, he has a connection with the country. His 2004 round-the-world motorcycling trip included a stop in Mongolia where, through Unicef, he visited children who were living in the caverns beneath the streets of Ulaanbaatar to keep warm. It is the coldest capital city in the world, with an average annual temperature of 27.6F (-2.4C).
Since the fall of communism in the early 1990s, and the associated collapse in the social welfare system, the number of street children in Mongolia has risen dramatically. According to the United Nations, there are almost 4,000 homeless children, ranging in age from five to 18. Several charities are operating in the country, offering shelter, food and education.
Foreigners wanting to adopt children from the country usually rely on an agent to act as an intermediary and each adoption needs the approval of a government department. Couples between the ages of 30 and 49 and single women aged 35 to 45 are preferred.
Child’s happiness at becoming a mother is tangible and touching. She is a glamorous woman who laughs a lot: tall, with ethereal features and a light, clear voice that occasionally reveals a West Country accent.
Her new publishers are HarperCollins, with whom she has a reported £1 million deal for her latest series for pre-teenagers about a 13-year-old detective called Ruby Redfort. Two of the six planned books have been published so far. Child’s other books have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into 30 languages.
The Charlie and Lola books are so ubiquitous that you would have had to have been on a £9.50 holiday to Jupiter (a Charlie and Lola-ism) to be unaware of their empire that encompasses everything from a BBC television series that is broadcast worldwide to greeting cards and lunch boxes.
Yet just as JK Rowling discovered with Harry Potter, empires come with responsibilities.
“Yes,” Child agrees fervently. “A brand is a job in its own right. You feel like you can’t leave it.
"I’m very fond of Charlie and Lola but there was a time when I really just wanted it to end. You want to walk away because you want to get on with something else, but if you walk away you can’t be sure how it might move without you.”
But surely Child, who was awarded an MBE in 2010, is rich enough now to retire? “I don’t think that’s true. I used to feel pretty good about the book industry but the recession has hit authors in a big way. I didn’t think it would hit children’s publishing so strongly, but there’s been such a big worldwide dip, it has affected everything.”
Child is anxious by nature. As a child she had sleepless nights about nuclear war and rabies, and now she still has occasional phases of 4am wake-ups. She grew up in a cottage in Wiltshire.
Her mother was a primary school teacher, her father was an art teacher at Marlborough College, alma mater of Samantha Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge (“I don’t think it was as posh then”). Child attended the local comprehensive, then moved to Marlborough in the sixth form.
“I enjoyed the comprehensive, but there was lots of peer pressure. I was academically competitive until I hit a certain age but then I decided that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except being popular, fashionable and getting boys to notice you. So I was relieved to leave, because Marlborough was much less pressurised.”
The fretting persisted throughout her twenties. After an unhappy time at art school, she drifted — sleeping on friends’ sofas and, at various times, dressing windows in Harvey Nichols and painting spots on works by Damien Hirst. She was 34 when her first book was published and her situation was rapidly transformed. “When you feel things are going well, it gives you that little confidence. You get on and become less bothered.”
After late career success, now she has come to late motherhood. Has she read Charlie and Lola to Tuesday yet?
“No. I will, but it will be quite weird. I’ve read other books to her. She loves the Blue Kangaroo books by Emma Chichester Clark, those are the first she listened to all the way through. My child’s first moment of being excited about a book — it’s so thrilling to see that.”
* Ruby Redfort: Look into My Eyes (HarperCollins Children’s Books) is available from Telegraph Books at £11.99 + £1.35p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit www.books.telegraph.co.uk. An enhanced e-book is available from iBooks. Lauren Child will be speaking on Sunday at the Sherborne Literary Festival at 2pm about text and image
Child is remarkably prolific, and is adapting to a new work-life balance. “I’m trying to find time to figure it out. I’m quite lucky in my job in that I know how much time I have to get the book written and I just have to work around her.”
There is no nanny. “My sister’s around a lot. She’s absolutely brilliant with her, and I’m around all the time, so even if I have to do something, I’m still there. It doesn’t feel we’ve been apart. We can have lunch together.”
The last time she had been asked about children, she had remarked that she couldn’t believe a child could make her any more tired than her work. What does she think now?
“There’s a relief in having her and that makes me feel much more energetic,” she says. “It’s really lovely having her around. Life is tiring, but she has lifted my spirits.”
Child isn’t the first celebrity to adopt from Mongolia. In 2006, Ewan McGregor, the actor, and his wife, Eve, adopted a four-year-old Mongolian girl called Jamiyan.
Like Child, he has a connection with the country. His 2004 round-the-world motorcycling trip included a stop in Mongolia where, through Unicef, he visited children who were living in the caverns beneath the streets of Ulaanbaatar to keep warm. It is the coldest capital city in the world, with an average annual temperature of 27.6F (-2.4C).
Since the fall of communism in the early 1990s, and the associated collapse in the social welfare system, the number of street children in Mongolia has risen dramatically. According to the United Nations, there are almost 4,000 homeless children, ranging in age from five to 18. Several charities are operating in the country, offering shelter, food and education.
Foreigners wanting to adopt children from the country usually rely on an agent to act as an intermediary and each adoption needs the approval of a government department. Couples between the ages of 30 and 49 and single women aged 35 to 45 are preferred.
Child’s happiness at becoming a mother is tangible and touching. She is a glamorous woman who laughs a lot: tall, with ethereal features and a light, clear voice that occasionally reveals a West Country accent.
Her new publishers are HarperCollins, with whom she has a reported £1 million deal for her latest series for pre-teenagers about a 13-year-old detective called Ruby Redfort. Two of the six planned books have been published so far. Child’s other books have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into 30 languages.
The Charlie and Lola books are so ubiquitous that you would have had to have been on a £9.50 holiday to Jupiter (a Charlie and Lola-ism) to be unaware of their empire that encompasses everything from a BBC television series that is broadcast worldwide to greeting cards and lunch boxes.
Yet just as JK Rowling discovered with Harry Potter, empires come with responsibilities.
“Yes,” Child agrees fervently. “A brand is a job in its own right. You feel like you can’t leave it.
"I’m very fond of Charlie and Lola but there was a time when I really just wanted it to end. You want to walk away because you want to get on with something else, but if you walk away you can’t be sure how it might move without you.”
But surely Child, who was awarded an MBE in 2010, is rich enough now to retire? “I don’t think that’s true. I used to feel pretty good about the book industry but the recession has hit authors in a big way. I didn’t think it would hit children’s publishing so strongly, but there’s been such a big worldwide dip, it has affected everything.”
Child is anxious by nature. As a child she had sleepless nights about nuclear war and rabies, and now she still has occasional phases of 4am wake-ups. She grew up in a cottage in Wiltshire.
Her mother was a primary school teacher, her father was an art teacher at Marlborough College, alma mater of Samantha Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge (“I don’t think it was as posh then”). Child attended the local comprehensive, then moved to Marlborough in the sixth form.
“I enjoyed the comprehensive, but there was lots of peer pressure. I was academically competitive until I hit a certain age but then I decided that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except being popular, fashionable and getting boys to notice you. So I was relieved to leave, because Marlborough was much less pressurised.”
The fretting persisted throughout her twenties. After an unhappy time at art school, she drifted — sleeping on friends’ sofas and, at various times, dressing windows in Harvey Nichols and painting spots on works by Damien Hirst. She was 34 when her first book was published and her situation was rapidly transformed. “When you feel things are going well, it gives you that little confidence. You get on and become less bothered.”
After late career success, now she has come to late motherhood. Has she read Charlie and Lola to Tuesday yet?
“No. I will, but it will be quite weird. I’ve read other books to her. She loves the Blue Kangaroo books by Emma Chichester Clark, those are the first she listened to all the way through. My child’s first moment of being excited about a book — it’s so thrilling to see that.”
* Ruby Redfort: Look into My Eyes (HarperCollins Children’s Books) is available from Telegraph Books at £11.99 + £1.35p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit www.books.telegraph.co.uk. An enhanced e-book is available from iBooks. Lauren Child will be speaking on Sunday at the Sherborne Literary Festival at 2pm about text and image
Comments
Post a Comment