You can read the whole transcript here. Quick plug: This is the amazing, unbelievable, and yet somehow free email version of the daily Understandably⦠daily newsletter. People are always saying nice things about it. Maybe you should sign up and try it yourself My wife and I each come from big families. A few years back, when my daughter was about 2, we were visiting family in New Hampshire.
This was what I think of now as prime Going to Bed Book era now. We probably read that book, written by Sandra Boynton in to our daughter times over the course of a year or soβan easy regular in our multiple book bedtime rotation. I'll quit here so I don't get into copyright trouble full text , but everyone around the table joined in: my wife, me, Grandma, my wife's sister who is our age but whose kids are now grown up.
I think a few others, too. The book is only words long, but still. Some of us had read it the night before; others had last read it years ago. I'll bet there at least a few readers of today's newsletter who can pick it up without reading and rattle off the whole thing. Yet, I hadn't quite understood the totality of her success: 70 million books sold over the last 40 years. Boynton lives in the foothills of the Berkshires, near her children and two doted-upon grandchildren.
Her husband, the writer and Olympic medal-winning canoeist Jamie McEwan, died in of cancer. As a writer: that combination of a widespread devotion, b financial success, and c the ability to work and live in whatever is your equivalent of a converted barn in in the country with a vintage Wurlitzerβ that's basically the dream. So, I seized the moment, and I reached out to Boynton for an interview.
We wound up doing it over email. I'll link to the full transcript here. As an example we explore the question of why the animals in The Going to Bed Book take a bath before they exercise. OK, forget that thing I said about wanting the audience and the financial rewards and my own version of the vintage Wurlitzer.
