"Refusing Them the Right to be Hurt"

 This is a letter I received from a fellow writer and reader of my blog after I talked last week about one reader's reaction to A Very Little Princess, a young novel of mine some adults consider too painful for young readers.

Thank you, Moira. I will let your good letter speak for itself:

Dear Marion Dane Bauer,

Your latest webpage column, “Really Touched Me,” really touches me in a very pertinent way right now.

The book I’m writing was originally going to be short and about a single incident. I reread “On My Honor” for inspiration. But, quite unexpectedly, my book grew, collecting and incorporating characters, scenes and life experiences I’ve gathered over the decades. I love the story, and I love writing it, but one thing is always at the back of my mind. The story has to do with a girl who’s 11 and 3/4ths (she would insist that I mention the 3/4ths) who must make a choice about facing a grim reality of life. The choice is imposed upon her by a beloved aunt. My protagonist mulls over it for days, and, thinking that since what she must do is deemed of no consequence by two kids her age and by adults whose opinions she’s asked for, she decides. Her choice blows up her interior world. But no one else thinks it should bother her, and certainly not as much as it does.

If I write it well, I hope that the reader feels my protagonist’s moral and ethical crisis and the pain that comes with it. But what lingers at the back, and often in the front, of my mind is, will it hurt children? Should I protect children from this pain? Will parents and possibly librarians and booksellers be as angry with me as they are with you about “On My Honor” and “The Very Little Princess?”

Nothing can stop me from writing the story—I love it too much, I want to share it, and one of my particularly aggressive characters would NEVER let me rest if I didn’t—but now and then I think, “Maybe I should just self-publish it and give copies to friends. Would an agent or publisher even want to read the entire manuscript about a girl who must choose whether to kill, and what a person should feel about killing?” But now I ask myself what you ask in your column, “… should the book have been withheld from those who would be touched, who would, perhaps, even grow a bit larger emotionally for accompanying this story journey?”

Your column reassured me that, whatever the outcome concerning finding an agent or a publisher, and any future reactions from adults, I have no choice but to allow my character to make *her* choice. With fictional children, as well as real ones, to refuse them the right to be hurt in learning the whole of being alive is to restrict the quality of those lives.

Thank you, thank you for your column. It’s just what I needed to read just when I needed to read it.

Very best regards,

Moira Manion

And Moira, I'm sure your story—with all its pain—will be exactly what some young readers need as well.