Not so much trivial and cool, this one, as tangential but interesting.
In the book where I have the 'Heroic Ideal' essay is also a piece written by one of DWJ's sons after her death. One of the several things he talks about is DWJ's difficult relationship with her own mother and how this informed some of the darkness in DWJ's books.
He describes his grandmother as "a formidable woman", a scholarship girl who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and did not particularly want to be a parent. "She certainly could be cruel", he writes, "and very much liked to be admired by men". He goes on to describe how she seems to have informed a number of DWJ villains and then writes this about himself:
"I liked my grandmother, and I got punished for this in several of my mother's books. When I was a teenager I listened to The Doors and did a lot of photography. No doubt in my mother's eyes I was a chilly kind of thing. In Fire and Hemlock there is a chilly public schoolboy called Sebastian who likes The Doors and photography. He also happens to be in league with the glamorous and un-ageing Queen of the Fairies, with whom he tries to erase the heroine's memories and perform a human sacrifice.
"Well, thanks, Mum."
And then my heart breaks.
BTW, while we're on the subject, did anyone else flinch slightly whenever the book referred to "Doors" rather than "The Doors"?
Re: Comment thread for cool minor details
In the book where I have the 'Heroic Ideal' essay is also a piece written by one of DWJ's sons after her death. One of the several things he talks about is DWJ's difficult relationship with her own mother and how this informed some of the darkness in DWJ's books.
He describes his grandmother as "a formidable woman", a scholarship girl who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and did not particularly want to be a parent. "She certainly could be cruel", he writes, "and very much liked to be admired by men". He goes on to describe how she seems to have informed a number of DWJ villains and then writes this about himself:
"I liked my grandmother, and I got punished for this in several of my mother's books. When I was a teenager I listened to The Doors and did a lot of photography. No doubt in my mother's eyes I was a chilly kind of thing. In Fire and Hemlock there is a chilly public schoolboy called Sebastian who likes The Doors and photography. He also happens to be in league with the glamorous and un-ageing Queen of the Fairies, with whom he tries to erase the heroine's memories and perform a human sacrifice.
"Well, thanks, Mum."
And then my heart breaks.
BTW, while we're on the subject, did anyone else flinch slightly whenever the book referred to "Doors" rather than "The Doors"?