Recently I discovered an old copy of The Goops – and just seeing that cover again was an instant flashback to being a child. (Did I want to act like a Goop?  Noooooo.) I realized the timeless quality of the book, originally printed at the beginning of the last century, when I read it to my granddaughter Emma, age five, a child of the millennium who absolutely got it. (Does Emma want to act like a Goop? Nooooooo.)

When my daughters and I saw the film of Little Women, a story we all had read in book form many times over, I mean we knew Beth was going to die – yet we wept.  I had flashbacks to reading the story under the covers by flashlight at night.  The Moffets, Heidi, The Secret Garden – these were experiences I went through, friends I had, not just books.

But the books that had the biggest effect on my own writing were Nancy Drew mysteries. The two novels I’ve published for adults are mysteries, and I know where they came from. As a kid, I was a Nancy Drew addict – and there were dozens of those books. I read them all. Just looking at a cover puts me back in Briarcliff Manor, New York, walking to the library as a kid (Where, believe it or not, the mother of John Hersey – author of Hiroshima – was the town librarian.) When I think of Nancy Drew I can smell the musty stacks of books in that little library, see Mrs. Hersey at her desk, feel my library card in my hand and my heart pounding excitement over finding a new Nancy Drew. Yes, I went on to read Colette and the Russians and Mrs. Hersey’s son, et al, but it was Nancy Drew who got those dead bodies into my stories.