Feeling Seen in Fiction: The Connection Between Readers, Writers, and Getting Lost in a Good Story
Author Leanne Lieberman discusses the interconnectedness of being both a reader and a writer, and the incomparable magic of getting lost in a good story.
When I was very young, I didn’t understand that books were written by authors, real people, like parents and teachers. I was too engrossed in the stories of Heidi and Anne of Green Gables to think about Johanna Spyri or L.M. Montgomery.
This changed when I read my favorite books, the All-Of-A-Kind Family series. I was enchanted by the story of five sisters growing up on the lower East side of Manhattan at the cusp of the 20th century. The girls’ tenement lives might have been far from my 1980s Vancouver upbringing, but their lives resonated with me. Like the girls in those books, I too longed to get my ears pierced, spent hours at my library, and celebrated Shabbat with my family.
When the final book in the All-Of-A-Kind series ended with the mother pregnant again, I couldn’t understand how a story could just stop. My own mother’s suggestion that I write to Sydney Taylor, the author, was a revelation: I had an a-ha moment when I realized books were written by people, then a thrill of excitement that I could write a letter to one of these god-like creators, then finally a deeper, slower realization that I too wanted to be an author, a fellow magician.
I wrote my letter to Sydney Taylor with great excitement. I told her about myself, how much I loved her books, and I asked my very important question about the sex of the next All-Of-A-Kind baby. A few months later I received a reply. Sydney Taylor had passed away, but her husband, Ralph Taylor, wrote me that The All-Of-A-Kind books were based on Sydney Taylor’s family, and the next baby was a boy.
I treasured this letter. I shared it with my teacher, my class, the school librarian and glued it in my grade two school journal. Then I got busy writing.
In 2008, I published my first book, Gravity, a YA novel about an orthodox Jewish girl who falls in love with another girl. Libraries and kids’ bedrooms now had a book from me too. Gravity made The Rainbow List and received a few other honors, but the award that gave me the most pleasure was the American Jewish Library naming Gravity a Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Teens.
I thought this was the end of my Sydney Taylor story, but then one day, I got an oddly titled email: Are You the Same Leanne Lieberman?
The email was from June Cummins, a professor of children’s literature at the State University of San Diego. She wrote that she had read Gravity, and liked it, and that she was working on a biography of Sydney Taylor. She was reading fan letters and she wondered if she had found a letter from me. Was I the same Leanne Lieberman who had written a letter to Taylor from Vancouver, BC, in 1982?
For a few minutes I sat in stunned silence. Then I cried, although I still don’t know why.
Cummins and I emailed back and forth over the next few weeks. Eventually, she kindly scanned my original letter. When I read my long-winded question and my description of myself as a child with brown hair and brown eyes who liked to read, I was transported back to my 8-year-old self, in awe that books were written by actual humans, and in love with the idea of becoming one of those abracadabra people myself.
Since staring at that scan of my earnest little girl’s handwriting, I’ve written a few more books. Like many authors, I spend a lot of time teaching. This past year I told my Grade 3/4 class my story about writing to Sydney Taylor. Then I asked them to think about an author they wanted to write to. Most students chose to write to Dav Pilkey or other famous writers. As I mailed off letters to Scholastic and other publishing behemoths, I doubted whether we would get letters back. A few months later, though, a student, beaming with excitement, told me he had received a response from his favorite author, Gordon Korman. Another student was thrilled to receive a postcard from Kate DeCamillo, thanking her for loving the rabbit Edward from The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.
And the students who didn’t hear back? Like my 8-year-old self, they were more interested in the stories than the authors. A small but fierce contingent of girls were busy writing their own Hermione-themed stories. Another group spent hours madly drawing Dogman-style comics.
And that’s all any teacher or author really wants—for their reader to lose themselves in a good story.
Leanne Lieberman is the author of five young adult novels, including The Most Dangerous Thing, Gravity (Sydney Taylor Notable), The Book of Trees, and Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust (Sydney Taylor Notable and Bank Street Best Book). Her adult fiction has been published in New Quarterly, Descant, Fireweed, the Antigonish Review, and Grain. She’s a schoolteacher in Kingston, Ontario.
