Kate DiCamillo on the Solace of Fairy Tales

When the children’s author Kate DiCamillo was a girl, she would listen over and over to a record of the Brothers Grimm story “The Juniper Tree”—in which, among other terrors, a child is decapitated. “I was not a kid who liked to be frightened,” DiCamillo said recently. But, she added, stories like the Grimms’ taught her “how to be brave in the face of that terror—which is a terror we all feel, not just kids. To wit, here I am, at sixty-one, going back to these stories and finding more comfort, more terror, and ever more relevance.” DiCamillo, who has two books out this fall—“Lost Evangeline,” along with a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of her best-selling “Because of Winn-Dixie”—joined us not long ago to recommend some of her favorite books of and about fairy tales. Her commentary—a mix of written remarks and conversation—has been edited and condensed.

The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm

by the Brothers Grimm, translated from the German by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell

These funny, terrifying stories (and the funny, terrifying illustrations, by Maurice Sendak, that accompany them in this edition) are a direct route to the collective subconscious. Each one is utterly familiar and utterly strange.

Something wonderful about the Grimms is how their stories are a kind of door between the fantastical and the facts of what it means to be human in the world. They’re a hinge between the historical truth and, on the other side, the truth of the human condition—of the way things are, and have been, and will forever be.

Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally

I grew up with Hans Christian Andersen. I can’t even articulate the impact that his sensibility has had on my sensibility. In his work, everything is animate, everything has a soul, everything has a story. Boy, that got me at a very young age. His work convinced me that all things (matchsticks and tin soldiers, flowers and fir trees) are sentient, that every being has a heart, and that every heart can be broken.

Like the Grimm stories, there’s a way that Andersen’s seem to belong to the collective imagination—they’ve been told and retold. But one thing that makes his quite different is that they’re much more about the individual. In Grimm, the adults are just tossing children out into the world, and the world is a terrible place. But in Andersen’s stories there’s much more about the individual’s journey. Like in “The Ugly Duckling,” where you feel so profoundly the sorrow of the main character’s never fitting in.

Winter’s Tales

by Isak Dinesen

I came to Dinesen through the film “Out of Africa.” Then I read the biography of her by Judith Thurman, whom I love. Dinesen’s first collection of stories is “Seven Gothic Tales.” Thurman quotes a passage from one of those stories, “The Old Chevalier,” that I think might help reveal why she wrote it:

Reality had met me such a short time ago, in such an ugly shape, that I had no wish to come into contact with it again. Somewhere in me a dark fear was still crouching, and I took refuge within the fantastic like a distressed child in his book of fairy tales. I did not want to look ahead, and not at all to look back.

My favorite story in “Winter’s Tales” is the harrowing “Sorrow-Acre,” which is a retelling of a folk story. It’s about a mother who threshes an entire field by herself—that is, who does the impossible—to save her son’s life. It undoes me every time—and it also makes me feel like you can perform the heroic even when you don’t think you can. Dinesen didn’t start writing until she was much older. She drew on a lifetime of experience, and that gives these fairy tales the authority to say, I’ve made it through. You can make it through.

The Mythmakers

by John Hendrix

This is a graphic novel about the friendship between C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who became acquainted when they were faculty members at Oxford and went on to form a writing group, Inklings, where members would read their work aloud to one another. I was never a big Tolkien reader, but I did love “The Chronicles of Narnia” as a kid—they were so magical to me that I never dared to go back to them as an adult, for fear that the magic wouldn’t be there.

I found this book fascinating and moving. So much of it is about how Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship gave birth to their works, and how those works reflect their times. Both men were in the trenches in World War One, and Hendrix really shows how their need to make stories was shaped by the upheaval and great horror they lived through. Graphic novels aren’t my favorite way to read, because I’m so drawn to the written word, but it’s very powerful having the wasteland of the trenches drawn out for you. You see it, you feel it, and then you feel the stories arising out of that. It’s, like, how do I make sense out of this? How do I comfort myself, with all this loneliness and terror? You tell a story that then can comfort somebody else in their loneliness and their terror.