The Wild Things (23 page)

Max stared down at her, his head tilted, watching her. He carefully removed her glasses and set them silently on the table before her. He touched her face gently, pushing a strand of hair back behind her ear. He stood above his mother for some time, knowing her now, really almost knowing her now, happy to watch her rest.

It goes without saying that this book would not exist without Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze. Back in 1963, Maurice published a strange and unprecedented picture book, a book I read as a child, was terrified by, and finally came to grips with somewhere in my early twenties. Epochs later, Spike called me out of the blue one day in 2003, asking me if I’d like to collaborate on the screenplay for a film adaptation he was doing of the book. I said yes, and I owe him an incalculable amount for thinking of me, and not, say, an experienced screenwriter.

And so the process began. Spike laid out the basics of what he had in mind -- that Max was the son of divorced and somewhat distracted parents, that he had a sister, and that when he sails to the island, the journey, and the island, and all those he meets there, are very real. Spike and I tried to flesh out the story from there, starting with the question of not
where
but
who
the Wild Things are, and what they want from life and from Max.

Over the years (decades?) we worked on the script, I was able to meet Mr. Sendak, as true and uncompromising an artist and genuine a man as there ever was. Maurice called one day and said that the idea had occurred to him and others that a novel could be written from all this accumulated material, and he asked if I’d like to do it. I said I would try, and this is the result.

If you’ve seen the movie, you will notice that the story here hews closely to the movie in many places, and departs in others. When sitting down to write this book, I thought at first that I would more or less transcribe the movie. But along the way, while getting lost, Max-like, in the thicket of the plot, I found other pathways into and out of the island, and generally added my own interpretations to the story of Max. The children’s book Max is, after all, a version of Maurice, and the movie Max is a version of Spike. The Max of this book, then, is some combination of Maurice’s Max, Spike’s Max, and the Max of my own boyhood.

For their clear and passionate readings of this book, thanks go to my wife Vendela and brother Toph, both of whom understand the Maxes of the world and thus boyhood, and thus childhood, and thus humanhood; my friends Michelle Quint and Tish Scola and Adrienne Mahar for early and astute reads of the manuscript; Nicholas Thomson, Onnesha Roychoudhuri, and Henry Jones for expert late-game proofing; Vince, Natalie, Russell, KK, Eric, Sonny, John, Ren, both Catherines, and all the other lunatic-genius makers of the film; all the editors and staff at McSweeney’s; Daniel and Michael and Nick and Roddy and Neil for leading the way and setting the (high) bar; Simon Prosser, Andrew Wylie, Sally Wilcox, and Deb Klein, who together championed this book at a crucial time; and Mac Barnett, a great young writer of books for young people. If you haven’t read his work, run somewhere and do that. Books for young people have a rich and I daresay limitless future -- knock anyone who says otherwise into a ditch -- and Mac has a central place within that limitless future. Don’t bet against him, or anyone like him.

bq.

Dave Eggers is the author of
What Is the What
, among other books. He is the editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house in San Francisco, and is the cofounder of 826 National, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for youth with locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. With his high school students he edits
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
, a yearly anthology, and with his brother Toph he cowrites the Haggis-on-Whey series of semi-informative books, which includes
Giraffes? Giraffes!
,
Animals of the Ocean (in Particular the Giant Squid)
, and
Cold Fusion
.

bq.

www.mcsweeneys.net

www.826national.org