Barbara Wersba

My favorite book when I was 11 was The Dream Watcher by Barbara Wersba. I reread it recently and was impressed at how it was still a fabulous book. Just like Streetcar Named Desire and Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, classics I never tire of.

A few years ago I told my editor Marc how much I loved this book. He said he was working with Barbara Wersba and he would gladly forward a note if I wanted to write her. I was beside myself! I raced home and wrote her and she sent me a copy which I cherish.

So much young adult literature is phenomenal. This book is part of the fabric of who I am, it spoke to my unhappy suburban life of parental disconnect and dreams of connecting with real people someday.

A few years ago I reread my favorites from when I was a kid: The Secret garden, The Cay, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Sounder, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Are you there God it's Me, Margaret . . . and more

My mother told me I didn't know how to read and took me to the shrink. He made me read aloud to him and explain why I hated the book. People don't talk like that I said. I also had to talk into a tape recorder and draw his portrait. He smoked cigars and took notes saying "Your mother is sick, your sister is sick." He wrote in three different colored pens depending on what I was saying. My mother drove me to his office on Central Ave in White Plains NY Wednesday afternoons - during school hours. My mother would run red lights all the time, explaining that it's okay to do that as long as she honks driving through the intersection. She also crossed the double yellow lines to pass people not driving fast enough for her. We saw Mr. Brown twice a week for 8 years starting when I was in second grade, age seven. His waiting room had a basket full of New Yorker magazines. My mother took books off of his personal bookshelf and would get into fights with him about the notes he had written in the margins. Pretty soon Mr. Brown wanted to talk to her alone and I was left in the waiting room to read the New Yorker but I just stared into space hoping and dreaming that my mother would come out of there a happy and wonderful woman who loved me. But instead she would be furious and refuse to speak to me and every time I tried to speak she would blare classical music on the Volvo radio. She would be gunning it home running red lights and driving over the double yellow lines with her angry toes poking out of her ugly beige sandals.