In 1989, an 8-year-old named Gah-Ning Tang drew a picture of herself in a hot-air balloon and mailed it, along with a short letter, to her favorite author, Robert Munsch. Then, two weeks later, she wrote again. And then again and again: usually on the backs of used paper place mats that she scavenged from the Chinese restaurant where her parents worked in the tiny town of Hearst, Ontario.
By then, Munsch had published nearly two dozen children’s books, including “The Paper Bag Princess,” “Mortimer” and “Love You Forever” — a book that would outsell even “Goodnight Moon” and “Where the Wild Things Are.” He was famous and adored, particularly in Canada, where he lived and where, in some years, he received tens of thousands of fan letters, almost all of them from children.
Some of the letters arrived in bulk: An entire class of kids would, on the instruction of a teacher, write variations of the same message, asking Munsch what his favorite book was or what he liked to eat for lunch. In these instances, Munsch would send a single letter back to the class, often enclosing an unpublished story that he would amend to include the real names of several students.
But some children wrote on their own, and when they did, Munsch always responded. He hired an assistant to help him organize the bags of correspondence forwarded by his publishers, and he sometimes spent hours and hours a week just writing letters. Tang’s letters to Munsch were about her daily life — about how her little sister was always following her around everywhere, and about how boring her small town was and how badly she wanted to leave it. Each time, Munsch wrote back: about his travels, about the schools he visited and the children he met there.
Two years after he received her first drawing, Munsch recalls, “I decided to check out this kid to see what the heck she was doing.” Munsch frequently toured Canada and the United States to perform his stories at schools and children’s festivals, and he arranged a trip to Hearst. He didn’t tell Tang about his visit in advance. Instead, in the middle of a school day, she was called to the staff room to find him waiting for her. Munsch learned that Tang was living with her family in the basement below her uncle’s Chinese restaurant, its windows covered up with cardboard. He spent the evening with Tang and her sister and their cousins, who walked him around the town and then to the cemetery, by the highway, to introduce him to their late grandmother.
Munsch also spent time at their school, performing stories in the gymnasium. In front of children, Munsch — who could be disarmingly quiet around grown-ups — was joyful and unselfconscious, with wild gestures and exaggerated voices and an unrestrained, almost manic energy. “Zany,” his reviewers always said. But all the while, he was studying his audience: noting what the children liked and what they didn’t — and then reworking his stories, on the fly.
Often, when performing in classrooms, Munsch made up stories about the students, and sometimes those stories became books. In Hearst, Munsch told a story about a little girl named Gah-Ning who escapes her small town — using 300 balloons given to her by a clown — to go to the larger town of Kapuskasing, even after her father told her there was “no way” she was allowed to go there.
Later, Munsch’s editors told him that they liked the story but that some of the sales reps worried about the character’s name; they wanted him to change it to Sally. Munsch said no, because one of his rules was that if he made up a story about a real child, the child “owned” the story; she got to have her name in the printed book and have the illustrations based on her likeness. And so, in 1994, he published “Where Is Gah-Ning?” It would become of one of Munsch’s 85 published books, which have together sold 87 million copies in North America alone, making him one of the top-selling children’s authors in history.
Over the years, Tang continued writing to Munsch every month, eventually addressing her pages-long, handwritten letters to “Uncle Bob” and “Aunt Ann,” Munsch’s wife. And Munsch continued to write back, sometimes sending books he thought she might like: a murder mystery set in northern Ontario (Munsch highlighted all the mentions of Hearst), a guide to playing badminton. In 2021, Munsch asked Ann to write to Tang on his behalf, letting her know that, at age 76, he had been diagnosed with dementia and, later, with Parkinson’s disease. His letters grew shorter — and then they mostly stopped.
When I visited Munsch this summer, at his home in Guelph, Ontario, there was a recent letter from Tang on the kitchen counter, next to some pill bottles — and, on the walls, framed letters and drawings from other children. Munsch sat at the dining table, next to the walker he uses because he has been falling around the house. “The big thing now is balance,” he said. “And it’s a bad idea if I fall.” Munsch paused for a while, which he does a lot now, making it hard for the people around him to know whether they should be waiting politely for him to finish or else rescuing him from the silence. “So most days,” he continued, “I don’t have the urge to go tell stories.”
After 50 years of publishing, Munsch told me, his ability to come up with new stories seems to have vanished. So, too, has all the time he used to spend with children, who in turn shaped the stories. Plots used to just appear to him, all the time and almost fully formed, as if they were limitless. But now they don’t. When, occasionally, Munsch thinks of an idea for a story, he waits for the narrative to reveal itself, and “nothing happens.” The story never comes.
It had happened in the usual, terrible way. Munsch started crashing his bicycle, so he stopped riding it. He stopped being able to fit his car into a parking spot, so he stopped driving. Instead, he took the bus or he walked, but then he started falling. In the years since his diagnosis, new symptoms have appeared. He has grown frail. He has trouble finding words; the other day, he couldn’t think of “dinosaur.” Or he finds the word but somehow can’t say it. He forgets that friends have come to visit.
Once a compulsive reader, Munsch can no longer make it through a book. The problem is not that he can’t remember what happened in the chapter before, but rather that the text itself — the perfectly ordinary prose — seems off. “It’s like when you taste an egg and it doesn’t taste right,” Munsch told me. Also, he’s often too tired to try. Too tired to go outside, even. “My life is shrinking that way.”
Munsch started writing — mostly poems, and mostly silly ones — seven decades ago, when he was a solitary child who tended toward melancholy. “I’m not happy,” he recalls saying, over and over, to his 10-year-old self in the mirror. He was born in Pittsburgh, to a Catholic family with nine children, and he was, he says, sort of lost in the mix of things. Later he would come to think that an unhappy childhood was “not necessarily a bad thing for a children’s writer.”
When he was 18, Munsch decided to become a priest. He spent seven years studying with the Jesuits, living atop a hill in Westchester County, N.Y. As part of his training, he was required to do “good works” — and one of them was to volunteer at a nearby orphanage. Munsch concluded that he would rather work with children than be a priest, and that he was “lousy priest material” anyway, in part because his faith was wavering. “My faith wavered out the door,” he said.
Munsch left the Jesuits and enrolled in the early childhood education program at Tufts University. That year, on a student placement, he told a group of preschoolers a made-up story about a little boy who would not go to bed, even after his father and his mother and his 17 brothers and sisters and two police officers with “deep, policemen-type voices” asked him to. More than a decade later, the story would be published as “Mortimer.”
When Munsch graduated, in 1973, he took a job at a nonprofit day care in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. There, while changing a diaper, he met a colleague, Ann, who would become his wife. “I discovered,” Munsch later wrote on his website, “that I could get the kids to shut up during nap time by telling them stories.” But they had to be good stories. If he told a good story, the children would stay on their cots and eventually fall asleep; if he told a bad story — a boring story, or a prescriptive one — they would wander. The children wanted new stories every day.
Sometimes, other teachers would hear one of Munsch’s good stories and urge him to write it down, but he never did. Then, in 1975, he and Ann moved to Canada to work at the University of Guelph Family Studies Laboratory Preschool. There, the school’s director insisted that Munsch write the stories down and gave him two months off to do it. In Munsch’s telling, he spent two months minus a day doing nothing at all and then, on the last day, wrote 10 stories and sent them off to different publishers. Every publisher said no except for Annick Press, which agreed to publish “Mud Puddle,” about a mud puddle that jumps on a girl.
More books quickly followed, including, in 1980, “The Paper Bag Princess,” the first of Munsch’s books to be illustrated by his longtime collaborator, Michael Martchenko. For years, Munsch had been telling a story to his preschool students about a princess named Elizabeth who was saved from a fiery dragon by a brave prince. Then one day, Ann told him that she didn’t like the ending. Look around, she said. There’s a recession, there’s hardship. Half the mothers here don’t have husbands. There are no princes coming to save anybody.
Ding! Munsch thought. The next time he told the story, it was Princess Elizabeth who outwitted the dragon and saved Prince Ronald — only to have Ronald complain that she was filthy and smelly and “wearing a dirty old paper bag.” (The princess’s clothes had been singed by the dragon’s fiery breath.) At the end of the story, Elizabeth famously tells Ronald, “You look like a real prince, but you are a bum,” before dancing away into the sunset. And “they didn’t get married after all.” “The Paper Bag Princess” sold more than 7.5 million copies. The ending worked because, at a time when there were few girl heroes in picture books, it subverted an anticipated trope. Also, kids liked the word “bum.”
In 1985, Munsch left teaching to write and perform full time — mostly in public-school classrooms. He would often show up unannounced, approaching the front desk with a letter in hand, explaining that such-and-such a teacher and her students had written to him and that he had come to see them. Usually, he stayed with the family of one of the schoolchildren: at first because he couldn’t afford hotel rooms, but later because he found that families were a good source of stories.
Inside the classrooms, Munsch gave a good show. But the shows were also part of the process, because they inspired stories and then books. Like “Stephanie’s Ponytail,” about a little girl Munsch met in a little farm town, who had “a nice ponytail coming out of the top of her head like a tree.” Or “Think Big!” about a boy named Jamaal, whom Munsch met in Oklahoma at the Army base where Jamaal’s father was posted and who insisted that because he was the oldest child in the family, he deserved the biggest bedroom.
Sometimes, during a reading, small children would interrupt, and sometimes those interruptions made their way into his work. Once, Munsch was telling the story that later became “Jonathan Cleaned Up — Then He Heard a Sound,” about a boy who keeps cleaning the living room only to have a subway train charge through the walls and drop off passengers. A boy in the audience shouted, “I’m the king of the castle!” And Munsch said, “That’s wonderful!” And he gave the line to a character in a later book.
Over time, the stories tended to grow slender; their excess baggage was shed over dozens of retellings. Eventually, a story’s plot would stop changing, and it would settle down to the point that it could be turned into a book. The process usually required 50 tellings and could take as long as 20 years. Munsch liked to say that he was not an author but a storyteller who sometimes wrote things down.
During that time, while traveling and performing, Munsch started drinking more, and then drinking heavily: to numb his lifelong depression, to self-medicate his yet-undiagnosed bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the mid-80s, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Later, he agreed to see a psychiatrist — after Ann insisted, because he kept talking about wanting to kill himself. Munsch went on Prozac and then lithium. He found, to his relief, that the drugs helped his work; it wasn’t true that his creativity depended on some kind of madness.
And so he kept working. Later, Munsch became a mainstay on the children’s-festival circuits, where he appeared before crowds that could number in the thousands: before audiences of small, rapt children who were, in the words of his illustrator Martchenko, practically “levitating” in delight — practically howling along. Here, Munsch told his most well-known tales but also tried out new material. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it didn’t. If a story wasn’t connecting with an audience, Munsch would abruptly declare, “The end,” and move on. Even then, the children stayed with him.
The classic Munsch book, Munsch says, does not try to teach a child anything — or to improve her. “I write amoral stories,” he told me. His characters are not vessels for adult instruction or moral education or behavior modification. Naughty children do not learn lessons or get comeuppance. Sometimes, early drafts of a story are more didactic, but over time, “if I was trying to teach something, it got junked,” along with any other “silly adult things that didn’t work.”
Many other children’s authors write books that they think children need, as opposed to things for them to like, says Diane Kerner, Munsch’s longtime editor at Scholastic. (Munsch began publishing with Scholastic in the mid-1990s.) The results fill the shelves of children’s bookstores today: the joyless and relentlessly realistic books inspired by various pedagogical frameworks; the strained, platitudinous and inexpertly rhyming stories published by celebrities. But “more than anyone I’ve ever met,” Kerner says, “Bob listens to kids.”
As Munch explained, in a 1989 profile: “I’m usually listening more to my audience than I’m listening to myself. If I was just listening to myself, I’d tend to write stories about adult concerns, like acid rain. But I listen to kids and end up telling stories about pee or birthdays.”
A rare exception to the rule is “Love You Forever,” one of Munsch’s earliest books, published in 1986. It is sad. And there is a larger meaning behind it, albeit one that is mostly accessible to the adult reader. In the years before the book was published, Ann gave birth to two stillborn babies: a boy named Sam and a girl named Gilly. (The couple would later adopt three children.) In his grief, Munsch composed a refrain: “I’ll love you forever,/I’ll like you for always,/As long as I’m living/my baby you’ll be.”
One day, at a reading in Guelph, Munsch made up a story around that refrain. It was about a mother who sneaks into her baby son’s room while he is sleeping, so that she can hold him — and then keeps doing it, even after the baby becomes a toddler, then a teenager and then a grown man living in his own house. (The mother drives to her son’s house in the middle of the night and climbs through his window to be near him). Until, one day, when the woman is old and sick, and it is the son who must cradle his mother in his arms.
Munsch’s publishers didn’t want the book — they didn’t think it worked as a children’s story — so Munsch brought it to Firefly Books. It started selling quietly, across Canada and then the United States. In 1994, The New York Times published an updated list of best-selling children’s books, and the paper’s editors were astonished to find “Love You Forever” at the top.
Some readers found the book too sentimental, almost drippy. Also creepy. Even Oedipal. “It is the most loved and the most hated book I’ve ever seen,” one bookseller told The Times. But Munsch discovered that adults and children received the story differently. At readings, mothers tended to weep. But the kids thought it was funny, because it’s funny to see a child pick up his mom.
The book was a departure from another unstated Munsch rule, which was not to allow the tragedies of his own life to color his work. In 2004, Munsch started drinking again and, in 2010, he joined Narcotics Anonymous to help him fight a cocaine addiction that took hold a few years earlier. Those adult struggles never appear, in any overt way, in his published writing.
And whenever Munsch did write more serious stories, the publishers didn’t seem to want them. He told me about a story he had written about a little girl whom he met while performing at a children’s hospital in Toronto, around Christmastime. The girl died shortly after that visit, and Munsch tried to imagine what happened to her next.
“The story was: The kid woke up in the middle of the road, and she starts walking,” Munsch told me. “She says: ‘This is weird. I used to be in a hospital. What’s going on?’ She comes to two signs: One says ‘Heaven,’ and the other says ‘Hell.’ She says, ‘Oh, I understand.’” So the little girl goes to heaven, but she finds that she is not on the list for entry to heaven. Then she goes to hell, but she’s not on the list there either. Munsch paused in his retelling and looked toward Ann, who was sitting beside him. “And … I forget what happened.”
The first threat to the stories came in 2008, when Munsch had a stroke. “I totally lost the stories,” he said. When he woke up, he couldn’t recall them.
Munsch withdrew. But then he started seeing a speech therapist, who got him to practice his storytelling in front of the mirror. Over the next year, somehow, they reappeared: mixed up at first, but then disentangled and whole again. Munsch visited a school near Guelph and asked if he could try telling stories to the first graders. It wasn’t his best performance, but he was able to get through it. He started touring again, though less than before. By the time of his diagnosis, he had stopped for good.
He stopped coming up with new stories too — with the exception of a single day, in 2023. Munsch was thinking about a woman he knew, Ruth, who was in her 90s and lived nearby with her sister, Barbara, and who had recently been admitted to the hospital. “Then I started thinking about: What if she had gone to the hospital when she was 6 years old?” A story came to him. Two girls, Ruth and Barbara, are picked up by an ambulance (Ruth has a scraped knee) and dropped off at the hospital — and then bounce on a hospital bed and press a lot of buttons, causing the bed to snap shut and trap them inside.
Over the course of several days, he wrote it down and revised it: not in front of real children, as he used to, but before a chorus of imaginary children — calling out, growing bored, interrupting. When his editor read the first draft, she was “flabbergasted.” Nobody could really explain it, much less Munsch, because by then it had been years since he had come up anything new. “It just sort of happened,” he said. The story was published in 2024, as “Bounce!” (Another book, “The Perfect Paper Airplane,” which Munsch wrote many years ago and recently revised, will be published by Scholastic this fall.) He has not written anything since.
This is because of the dementia, of course. But also, maybe, because the disease and its accompanying physical frailties have isolated Munsch from the children who were always much more than his audience — who were instead a kind of appendage to his creative mind. “I can feel it going further and further away,” Munsch said, of the way he used to think and work.
Munsch is now at that unsettling, if sometimes brief, stage in the neurodegenerative process in which he is symptomatic but still self-aware. This allows him to watch himself lose himself. He wonders if, in a year, he will be “a turnip.” Recently, Munsch’s eldest grandchild, who is 7, asked him if he was sick and if he would die. “Yes,” he answered, because he believes in being honest with children.
Shortly after his diagnosis, Munsch applied for and was approved for “medical assistance in dying,” or physician-assisted death, which was legalized in Canada in 2016. “Hello, Doc — come kill me!” he joked. “How much time do I have? Fifteen seconds!” Munsch watched one of his brothers, a monk, die slowly from Lou Gehrig’s disease, as those around him pushed for more treatment — ostensibly because it was God’s will. “They kept him alive through all these interventions. I thought, Let him die.” Munsch doesn’t want to linger that way. He thinks he will choose to go “when I start having real trouble talking and communicating. Then I’ll know.”
But he can’t wait too long because, under Canada’s law, he must be able to actively consent on the day of his death. “I have to pick the moment when I can still ask for it,” Munsch explained. The hitch is that nobody can tell him exactly when his capacity to consent will desert him. If he misses his chance, he said, turning to Ann, “you’re stuck with me being a lump.”
For now, Munsch says, his old stories have survived the disease and its otherwise indiscriminate ravages. They remain with him. He can remember them in their entirety and tell them through to completion. “I notice that the stories are mostly free from the problems I have with speech,” he says. Somehow, there they are — still preserved: “these little nuggets,” polished and perfect.
When we began speaking, I told Munsch that “Mortimer” was one of my older son’s favorite books. I bought it for him when he started wanting stories with a bit more substance to them. Real yarns. Beginnings, middles, ends. “Mortimer” had plot, but not too much of it. And maybe my son related to the protagonist; he, too, was a little boy who did not like to go to sleep.
I also told Munsch about the disoriented feeling I had when I first heard my husband read the book at bedtime — as if something were wrong with the story. It came to me later. He was reading the refrain — Clang, clang, rattle-bing-bang/Gonna make my noise all day — with a cadence and inflection that was similar, but ultimately different, from the one my father used when he read me “Mortimer” 35 years earlier.
“Would you like to hear me tell ‘Mortimer’?” Munsch asked me. He leaned forward. “One night Mortimer’s mother took him upstairs to bed. …”
And suddenly, there he was: Munsch — who was still tired from having a bad fall that morning; who had been so tired that he had to nap when his grandchildren came to visit; who was tired all the time now — wholly transformed into the storyteller he always was. His face contorted and his eyebrows knotted together when he played the vexed parents. He had a deep, theatrical frown to go along with his “deep, policeman-type voices.” He was “zany,” yes. And also uncommonly sincere.
I laughed the entire way through. I also realized that I had been doing the story all wrong with my son — that the refrain in the book was not meant to be read, but rather to be sung. And really, to be bellowed, as Munsch bellowed it, in a voice so loud and liberated that it quivered in the air.
Then the story veered toward its ending, and Munsch sank back into his seat. “And upstairs,” he said quietly, “Mortimer went to sleep.”
The post When Dementia Steals the Imagination of a Children’s Book Writer appeared first on New York Times.
