'Cry Baby' is like this fairytale version of me. A lot of it is based on real events, and some of it is made up to make it more whimsical.
I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.
'Shadowboxer' was based on my life.
All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.
Ever since I began writing my Junie B. Jones series, people have been assuming that the character is based on me when I was a little girl. The fact is, though, that Junie B. and I have very little in common.
Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life.
People think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life.
I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.
The Long, Long Trailer (1954) actually happened and the man wrote a book about it. Father of the Bride, same thing; a banker wrote that who had never written anything else.
My favorite of my books is DAVE AT NIGHT, because it's loosely based on my father's childhood in an orphanage.
I sat down and wrote what I remembered about being nine, and that eventually became 'Amelia's Notebook.'
A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.
