New York: Katie Engelhart
Robert Munsch wrote “The Paper Bag Princess,” “Love You Forever” and other classics by performing them over and over for kids. But his stories are slipping away.
In 1989, an 8-year-old named Gah-Ning Tang drew a picture of herself in a hot-air balloon and mailed it, along with a short letter, to her favorite author, Robert Munsch.
Then, two weeks later, she wrote again. And then again and again: usually on the backs of used paper place mats that she scavenged from the Chinese restaurant where her parents worked in the tiny town of Hearst, Ontario.
Tang’s letters to Munsch were about her daily life — about how her little sister was always following her around everywhere, and about how boring her small town was and how badly she wanted to leave it. Each time, Munsch wrote back: about his travels, about the schools he visited and the children he met there.
Two years after he received her first drawing, Munsch recalls, “I decided to check out this kid to see what the heck she was doing.”
Munsch frequently toured Canada and the United States to perform his stories at schools and children’s festivals, and he arranged a trip to Hearst. He didn’t tell Tang about his visit in advance. Instead, in the middle of a school day, she was called to the staff room to find him waiting for her.
Munsch learned that Tang was living with her family in the basement below her uncle’s Chinese restaurant, its windows covered up with cardboard.
He spent the evening with Tang and her sister and their cousins, who walked him around the town and then to the cemetery, by the highway, to introduce him to their late grandmother.
Munsch also spent time at their school, performing stories in the gymnasium. In front of children, Munsch — who could be disarmingly quiet around grown-ups — was joyful and unselfconscious, with wild gestures and exaggerated voices and an unrestrained, almost manic energy. “Zany,” his reviewers always said. But all the while, he was studying his audience: noting what the children liked and what they didn’t — and then reworking his stories, on the fly.
And so, in 1994, he published “Where Is Gah-Ning?” It would become one of Munsch’s 85 published books, which have together sold 87 million copies in North America alone, making him one of the top-selling children’s authors in history.
Munsch was born in Pittsburgh, to a Catholic family with nine children, and he was, he says, sort of lost in the mix of things. Later he would come to think that an unhappy childhood was “not necessarily a bad thing for a children’s writer.”
When he was 18, Munsch decided to become a priest. He spent seven years studying with the Jesuits, living atop a hill in Westchester County, NY. Munsch concluded that he would rather work with children than be a priest.
Munsch left the Jesuits and enrolled in the early childhood education program at Tufts University. That year, on a student placement, he told a group of preschoolers a made-up story about a little boy who would not go to bed, even after his father and his mother and his 17 brothers and sisters and two police officers with “deep, policemen-type voices” asked him to. More than a decade later, the story would be published as “Mortimer.”
When Munsch graduated, in 1973, he took a job at a nonprofit day care in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. There, while changing a diaper, he met a colleague, Ann, who would become his wife.
Then, in 1975, he and Ann moved to Canada to work at the University of Guelph Family Studies Laboratory Preschool. There, the school’s director insisted that Munsch write the stories down and gave him two months off to do it.
In Munsch’s telling, he spent two months minus a day doing nothing at all and then, on the last day, wrote 10 stories and sent them off to different publishers. Every publisher said no except for Annick Press, which agreed to publish “Mud Puddle,” about a mud puddle that jumps on a girl.
More books quickly followed, including, in 1980, “The Paper Bag Princess,” the first of Munsch’s books to be illustrated by his longtime collaborator, Michael Martchenko.
Ding! Munsch thought. The next time he told the story, it was Princess Elizabeth who outwitted the dragon and saved Prince Ronald — only to have Ronald complain that she was filthy and smelly and “wearing a dirty old paper bag.” (The princess’s clothes had been singed by the dragon’s fiery breath.)
At the end of the story, Elizabeth famously tells Ronald, “You look like a real prince, but you are a bum,” before dancing away into the sunset. And “they didn’t get married after all.”
“The Paper Bag Princess” sold more than 7.5 million copies.
In 1985, Munsch left teaching to write and perform full time — mostly in public-school classrooms.
He would often show up unannounced, approaching the front desk with a letter in hand, explaining that such-and-such a teacher and her students had written to him and that he had come to see them.
Usually, he stayed with the family of one of the schoolchildren: at first because he couldn’t afford hotel rooms, but later because he found that families were a good source of stories.
Over time, the stories tended to grow slender; their excess baggage was shed over dozens of retellings. Eventually, a story’s plot would stop changing, and it would settle down to the point that it could be turned into a book. The process usually required 50 tellings and could take as long as 20 years. Munsch liked to say that he was not an author but a storyteller who sometimes wrote things down.
During that time, while traveling and performing, Munsch started drinking more, and then drinking heavily: to numb his lifelong depression, to self-medicate his yet-undiagnosed bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Later, he agreed to see a psychiatrist — after Ann insisted, because he kept talking about wanting to kill himself. Munsch went on Prozac and then lithium. He found, to his relief, that the drugs helped his work; it wasn’t true that his creativity depended on some kind of madness.
His last book was “Love You Forever,” published in 1986. It is sad. And there is a larger meaning behind it, albeit one that is mostly accessible to the adult reader. In the years before the book was published, Ann gave birth to two stillborn babies: a boy named Sam and a girl named Gilly. (The couple would later adopt three children.) In his grief, Munsch composed a refrain: “I’ll love you forever,/I’ll like you for always,/As long as I’m living/my baby you’ll be.”
One day, at a reading in Guelph, Munsch made up a story around that refrain. It was about a mother who sneaks into her baby son’s room while he is sleeping, so that she can hold him — and then keeps doing it, even after the baby becomes a toddler, then a teenager and then a grown man living in his own house. (The mother drives to her son’s house in the middle of the night and climbs through his window to be near him). Until, one day, when the woman is old and sick, and it is the son who must cradle his mother in his arms.
Munsch’s publishers didn’t want the book — they didn’t think it worked as a children’s story — so Munsch brought it to Firefly Books. It started selling quietly, across Canada and then the United States.
The first threat to the stories came in 2008, when Munsch had a stroke. “I totally lost the stories,” he said. When he woke up, he couldn’t recall them.
In 2021, at age 76, Munsch had been diagnosed with dementia and, later, with Parkinson’s disease.
Munsch withdrew. But then he started seeing a speech therapist, who got him to practice his storytelling in front of the mirror.
Over the next year, somehow, they reappeared: mixed up at first, but then disentangled and whole again.
Munsch visited a school near Guelph and asked if he could try telling stories to the first graders. It wasn’t his best performance, but he was able to get through it.
He started touring again, though less than before. By the time of his diagnosis, he had stopped for good.
He stopped coming up with new stories too — with the exception of a single day, in 2023. Munsch was thinking about a woman he knew, Ruth, who was in her 90s and lived nearby with her sister, Barbara, and who had recently been admitted to the hospital.
“Then I started thinking about: What if she had gone to the hospital when she was 6 years old?” A story came to him. Two girls, Ruth and Barbara, are picked up by an ambulance (Ruth has a scraped knee) and dropped off at the hospital — and then bounce on a hospital bed and press a lot of buttons, causing the bed to snap shut and trap them inside.
Over the course of several days, he wrote it down and revised it: not in front of real children, as he used to, but before a chorus of imaginary children — calling out, growing bored, interrupting. When his editor read the first draft, she was “flabbergasted.”
Nobody could really explain it, much less Munsch, because by then it had been years since he had come up anything new. “It just sort of happened,” he said. The story was published in 2024, as “Bounce!”
He has not written anything since.
This is because of the dementia, of course. But also, maybe, because the disease and its accompanying physical frailties have isolated Munsch from the children who were always much more than his audience — who were instead a kind of appendage to his creative mind. “I can feel it going further and further away,” Munsch said, of the way he used to think and work.
Munsch is now at that unsettling, if sometimes brief, stage in the neurodegenerative process in which he is symptomatic but still self-aware.
For now, Munsch says, his old stories have survived the disease and its otherwise indiscriminate ravages. They remain with him. He can remember them in their entirety and tell them through to completion. “I notice that the stories are mostly free from the problems I have with speech,” he says. Somehow, there they are — still preserved: “these little nuggets,” polished and perfect.
When we began speaking, I told Munsch that “Mortimer” was one of my older son’s favorite books. I bought it for him when he started wanting stories with a bit more substance to them.
And suddenly, there he was: Munsch — who was still tired from having a bad fall that morning; who had been so tired that he had to nap when his grandchildren came to visit; who was tired all the time now — wholly transformed into the storyteller he always was. His face contorted and his eyebrows knotted together when he played the vexed parents. He had a deep, theatrical frown to go along with his “deep, policeman-type voices.” He was “zany,” yes. And also uncommonly sincere.
I laughed the entire way through. I also realized that I had been doing the story all wrong with my son — that the refrain in the book was not meant to be read, but rather to be sung. And really, to be bellowed, as Munsch bellowed it, in a voice so loud and liberated that it quivered in the air.
Then the story veered toward its ending, and Munsch sank back into his seat. “And upstairs,” he said quietly, “Mortimer went to sleep.”
The New York Times
