RJ Palacio: 'I keep hearing about grown men weeping'
Hermione Hoby meets New York author RJ Palacio, whose book about a child with facial abnormalities is being hailed as a crossover classic
I never thought a children's book could make me reconsider the schmaltziest day of the year but, while waiting in New York's west village to meet RJ Palacio on Valentine's Day morning, the hearts in my latte foam and the guys on street corners hawking cellophane-wrapped roses suddenly all seem rather touching. Wonder – a children's book that's making grown men cry, and being compared to Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – recounts a year in the life of August, a 10-year-old boy with severe facial abnormalities, as he navigates school for the first time. "I won't describe what I look like," he cautions on the first page. "Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse." His characterful, rueful voice begins the story before it's picked up by his peers – all of whom are just as uncannily charming.
- Wonder
- by R.J. Palacio
-
Palacio, otherwise known as Raquel Jaramillo, has worked in publishing for years and has a cabinet full of her own unfinished stories. Writing Wonder, though, was a completely different experience to these "half-starts". The idea came to her five years ago when she and her two sons were outside an ice-cream parlour. A little girl with a condition similar to August's sat on the bench next to them and Palacio's youngest, who was then three, began to scream.
"It was just such a scene, the last thing I wanted," she says, and her large brown eyes look pained. "And as we were leaving I heard the mum behind me say in the coolest, sweetest, kindest voice, "OK guys, time to go", and my heart just broke for her. As a mother I was just in awe of this woman. And I could not stop thinking about that encounter – what I could have done differently, what I could be teaching my kids about how to deal with something like that? Is 'don't stare' the right thing to say? I'm not even sure…"
On Palacio's drive home, Natalie Merchant's "Wonder" came on the radio, a song that she used to play as a lullaby to her eldest son. "And somehow the connection between that song – the joyousness of it, 'with love, with patience and with faith she'll make her way' – and what had just happened really clicked. I got home that night and started writing. It basically wouldn't let me not finish it," she smiles. "It was just one of those things."
She tells me that she's just read Wonder to her youngest, who's now eight, and admits that the experience made her "choke up". August, or Auggie, is "a little bit my son, a little bit his friends, a little bit the son of a friend of mine who has that way of talking": she has them all to thank for the credibility of the dialogue. "I come home from work and there are gaggles of boys and they're so loud – it was perfect fodder for me because I could just transcribe what they were saying!"
Although Palacio wanted it to be "a kids' book first and foremost", she's delighted by the reaction it's getting from adults. "I keep hearing about all these people," she laughs, "like grown men who are weeping!"
She has described the book as a "meditation on kindness", but one thing that makes it so powerful is how subtle the cruelty is too. From the mother of a classmate who Photoshops Auggie's face out of the school picture, to a school-wide "game" called "the plague", which dictates that you have 30 seconds to wash your hands after touching him, it all feels authentically observed. Happily though, the acts of kindness and bravery, particularly those of Auggie's stalwart friends Jack and Summer, are just as unexpected and unsentimental.
Do her own kids and the kids of her friends confound her in that way? "Great question!" she enthuses, like a kindly teacher. "Yes. Yes! I always think if you give a kid a chance, nine out of 10 times they will surprise you and do the right thing. I really do. Kids are sweeter and kinder than we've given them credit for. We've almost come to expect kids to be mean to one another, and if we expect them to behave a certain way they'll act a certain way. But they're decent human beings, most of them."
But after a year of teen suicides and cyber-bullying headlines, it's easy to see childhood now as somehow more fraught than before. Does she think kids might be growing up in less kind times?
"I hope not, and I don't think so. God, I grew up in the 70s! New York in the 70s was not a kind place. But I've just always believed that there are more good people in the world than not, and that we're all there to kind of find one another and fend off the people that aren't so great. That's all you can do."
Reading Notes
The storyline
My name is August. I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.
August Pullman wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things. He eats ice cream. He plays on his Xbox. He feels ordinary - inside.
But Auggie is far from ordinary. Ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids don’t get stared at wherever they go.
Born with a terrible facial abnormality, Auggie has been home-schooled by his parents his whole life, in an attempt to protect him from the cruelty of the outside world. Now, for the first time, he’s being sent to a real school - and he’s dreading it. All he wants is to be accepted - but can he convince his new classmates that he’s just like them, underneath it all?
Narrated by Auggie and the people around him whose lives he touches forever, Wonder is an funny, frank, astonishingly moving debut to read in one sitting, pass on to others, and remember long after the final page.
The author
R. J. PALACIO is a graphic designer by day and a writer by night. She lives in
New York City with her family and a black dog named Bear.
What the critics say
‘The breakout publishing sensation of 2012 will come courtesy of Palacio, a New York graphic designer whose debut novel, Wonder, is destined to go the way of Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and then some. Telling the story of August, a schoolboy born with an unspecified facial deformity, it is dark, funny, touching, and no tube carriage will be without a copy this year’ The Times
Questions for you to think about
1. Don’t judge a boy by his face
• What do you think of the line ‘Don’t judge a boy by his face’ which appears on the back cover of the book?
• Did this affect how much you wanted to read the story?
• How much did this line give away about the story you were about to read?
2. Auggie’s appearance
• Throughout Wonder, Auggie describes the way that many people react to seeing his face for the first time: by immediately looking away. Have you ever been in a situation where you have responded like this to seeing someone different? Having now read Wonder, how do you feel about this now?
• Auggie’s face is not fully described until quite far on in the story, in Via’s chapter ‘August: Through the Peephole’. How close was this description to your own mental picture of Auggie? Did you have a picture of his face in your mind while reading the book? Did this description alter that picture?
3. Auggie’s personality
• How would you describe Auggie as a person in the first few chapters of the book? What about the final few chapters? Has he changed significantly? Are there any experiences or episodes during the story that you think had a particular effect on him? If so, how?
4. The astronaut helmet
• In the chapter ‘Costumes’ Auggie describes the astronaut helmet that he wore constantly as a younger child. We later learn that Miranda was the one to give Auggie the helmet, and is proud of the gift, but that it was Auggie’s father who threw it away. What do you think the helmet signifies to each of these characters and why do you think they all view it so differently?
5. Star Wars
• Star Wars is one of Auggie’s passions. Why do you think this is?
• Do you see any reasons for Auggie to identify with these characters, or to aspire to be like them?
6. The use of humour in Wonder
• Auggie’s parents bring Auggie around to the idea of attending school by joking with
him about Mr Tushman’s name, and telling him about their old college professor,
Bobbie Butt. To what extent is humour used as a tool throughout Wonder to diffuse
difficult or tense situations, or to convey a part of the story that would otherwise
be depressing or sad? Look at the chapter, ‘How I Came To Life’.
7. Via
• What did you think of Via as a character? Did you empathise with her?
• Why do you think Via was so angry to learn that Auggie cut off his Padawan braid?
• Do you think Via’s own attitude towards her brother changes throughout the story?
8. Mrs Albans
• Look at the emails between Mr Tushman, Julian’s parents and Jack’s parents in
the chapter ‘Letters, Emails, Facebook, Texts’. Up to this point in the story we
have seen how the children at Auggie’s school have reacted to him. Is Mrs Albans’
attitude towards Auggie different?
• What do you make of her statement that Auggie is handicapped?
• Do you think she is correct in saying that asking ‘ordinary’ children, such as Julian,
to befriend Auggie places a burden on them?
9. At the ice cream parlour
• The author has explained that she was inspired to write Wonder after an
experience at a local ice cream parlour, very similar to the scene described in the
chapter ‘Carvel’, where Jack sees Auggie for the first time. In this scene, Jack’s
babysitter Veronica chooses to get up and quickly walk Jack and his little brother
Jamie away from Auggie, rather than risk Jamie saying something rude or hurtful.
What do you think you would have done, if put in that position?
