Beverly Cleary died in March, and it is so bittersweet for me. My son and I have been listening and re-listening to the Beverly Cleary oeuvre on audio—especially the Ramona books—for the past five years, ever since he was a preschooler who asked 400 questions a day. At that time, my years as a stay-at-home mother were stretching out longer than I had anticipated. Elias, a precocious and energetic child, had preschool a few mornings a week, and I had an intense love for him and also an overwhelming sense of feeling like a hollowed-out husk at the end of most days.
By the time we started the Ramona books, we had already been listening to story podcasts and had gone through Alice in Wonderland on audio a few times. (Pro tip: Expose your preschooler to narrators with British accents. There is nothing cuter than an American child getting out of the tub and saying, “Now I’m wet and cross!” like Alice.) Cleary provided a new kind of sustenance.
The first Ramona book is largely Beezus’s book. We’re given her perspective as the long-suffering older sister who was never quite the handful Ramona is, but who dutifully helps her mother keep Ramona occupied. I distinctly remember driving between Chapel Hill and Durham with Elias on some outing, listening to Stockard Channing narrate Beezus and Ramona that first time, and beginning to cry when Ramona ruined Beezus’s birthday cake for the second time in one day. Beezus is horrified and upset, Mrs. Quimby is worn out and exasperated, and when she is confronted with her crime, Ramona is indignant, before she bursts out in tears of her own.
That day, I hid my tears from my kid, but I was overcome with a feeling of exhaustion and also with a feeling of gratitude, a sense of being seen and of my kid being seen for what we both were. I was so incredibly worn out and exasperated a great deal of the time at the responsibilities of motherhood and at the sheer irrepressibility of my child, but here was Beverly Cleary suggesting that this was childhood for some kids. Ramona was more high-spirited than Beezus, but she was also just … herself. Delightfully, exasperatingly so.
The books that follow Beezus and Ramona shift to Ramona’s perspective. As Kathryn VanArendonk points out at Vulture, “Ramona does not narrate her own stories, but the narrator is with Ramona at all times, and the narrator never betrays Ramona’s feelings …” And Beverly Cleary was just so good when it came to depicting Ramona’s feelings, how they evolved as she aged and how she became more conscious of how she looked to others, even as she retained an often fierce commitment to her own perspective.
Through the Ramona books, I believe, my son has been able to see a version of himself, to appreciate himself as a complex child worthy of respect and of the close attention of a sensitive author. Ramona is what would these days be called an “exceptional” child-- she is gifted and sensitive, and also impulsive and self-determined. I’ve learned that she has even become a hero in the neurodivergent world. My own “twice-exceptional child,” who is gifted and has ADHD, has a hero in this girl who cannot help but be herself, who is proud of it most of the time and who other times has to learn to think through the consequences of her impulsive reactions. (As in Ramona the Brave, when Susan copies Ramona’s paper bag owl for Parents’ Night, and Ramona-- upon seeing Susan gloating over her owl-- grabs Susan’s owl and crushes it.)
The books have also helped my son think through certain scenarios-- what it’s like for a father to lose a job, for a mother to get a job, to doubt whether your teacher likes you. I have a video of Elias at three, sitting in his stroller on a walk back from preschool, retelling the plot of two chapters of Ramona the Pest, his little voice recounting how Ramona “stayed home playing checkers all by herself” because “her teacher didn’t like her anymore.” Like fairy tales, the Ramona books show the child protagonist thrust out into the world to figure things out. Cleary’s brilliance is that she shows that children needn’t be orphaned or faced with witches to feel that they are battling large and daunting forces.
In a piece I wrote about girlhood in 2018, I discuss the way “so much of my girlhood was shaped by the figure of the odd-child-out, stubbornly clinging to her personhood, to her humor.” I go on to explain that
having had a son, my interest in the space of girlhood, specifically, is still mostly focused on my own memories [and memories of endearing, courageous girl characters]. Pippi Longstocking, Little Orphan Annie, Hayley Mills in The Trouble with Angels, Ramona Quimby, The Great Gilly Hopkins. . . . This, to me, is what girlhood offered. A chance to find that seed of stubbornness and humor, to hold on to that kernel despite it all.
The Ramona books are about girlhood, but they are also about the individual experience of childhood—how it is so private, with our fears and struggles and even triumphs only truly known to ourselves—as well as about families and what it is to be seen and recognized for who you are.
For now, my son listens to the Ramona audiobooks compulsively. . . . Will literature save us, will language? All I know is that it is a way of taking perspective on the world, a way of helping build empathy. We create wide nets of language and humor and understanding, my son and I. We talk, we laugh, we struggle, many times, to understand, to empathize. We each hold on to our own nuggets of stubbornness and humor, and love each other in our weirdness, in our complex humanness. I am hoping, through books, through discourse, through play, to create the space to help him understand that other humans . . . are having their own complex, weird, interesting experience of the world. . . . Caw-caw, caw-caw, one of us calls out. I am here. Are you here? Caw-caw, the other answers. Yes. I hear you. I’m here, too.