Bill Peet: An Autobiography

Weighing in at 190 pages, Bill Peet: An Autobiography has taken us several hours as a read-aloud. I’ve been aware of the book since I searched online for items on my 7-year-old’s Christmas list. Bill Peet, partly because of his winsome drawings and partly because of his entertaining and satisfying stories, has become her favorite author, and my 5-year-old is fast becoming a groupie as well. This week at the library, I presented the two of them with several choices for a read-aloud, and they chose this book.

I started it yesterday afternoon, and after 45 minutes or so I had to close it and do something else. “What do you think?” I asked the girls.

“Well,” my 7-year-old replied, “it’s kind of… boring.”

“Oh. Well, we can change to a different book. We don’t have to finish this one if you’re not enjoying it,” I said.

“No. I want to finish it,” she said flatly. “But who would have thought that someone who writes those great stories had such a boring life?”

Yet today both girls brought it to me again, and I spent another hour and a half reading till I was hoarse, and finished it. I offered them chances to quit, take a break, do something else, whatever — but they didn’t tire of it. Strange though it may sound, “boring” is apparently not a critical judgment of the book.

“Boring” isn’t the word I would choose, though perhaps it caught me off guard by being more melancholy and self-revelatory (in spots) than I was expecting. Peet’s childhood was not the happiest, and he relates this, along with his professional stresses as an artist and story man for Walt Disney (the only storyman Disney ever commissioned to do the storyboards for a full-length picture, and he ended up doing it for two). It’s extensively illustrated, and, like his stories, well-paced.

My daughters and I were both drawn in by this story that contains so many of the features that make biography such a compelling genre. The story of Peet’s development as an artist struggling to come into his own, his persistence through adversity, the social history the book includes, and even the personal elements that find their way into his stories and drawings constitute valuable knowledge for any budding artist, and help to flesh out our appreciation — even affection — for this favorite storyteller. You can visit a website devoted to Bill Peet’s life and work here.

I like the idea that my children are discovering not just favorite books, but favorite authors. It emphasizes for them that books are human creations that take an author’s unique perspective, experience, and giftedness, and weave them together into something intentional, pleasurable, meaningful, and beautiful. This is the second biography we’ve read together (the other was a Rookie bio of Laura Ingalls Wilder), and at this point I’m ready to make it a deliberate goal to investigate other writers. Heroes come in all varieties, but the best ones are those people we admire who offer their experience to us across the page, not just through whatever finished, extraordinary product signifies their success, but through their tales of the ordinary and sometimes “boring” process that leads up to it.