IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN<\/span>: A genuinely illuminating interview with Maurice Sendak. I was wary at first, thinking he might come across as self-impressed, but that really didn\u2019t happen (in my opinion):<\/p>\n \u2026At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through:<\/p>\n Ebooks: \u201cI hate them. It\u2019s like making believe there\u2019s another kind of sex. There isn\u2019t another kind of sex. There isn\u2019t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n The term \u201cchildren\u2019s illustrator\u201d annoys him, since it seems to belittle his talent. \u201cI have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can\u2019t do that. I\u2019m in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.\u201d He and Eugene never considered bringing up children themselves, he says. He\u2019s sure he would have messed it up. His brother felt the same way: after their childhood, they were too dysfunctional. \u201cThey led desperate lives,\u201d he says of his parents. \u201cThey should have been crazy. And we \u2013 making fun of them. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me and his eyes were all teary. And he said, \u2018Why were we so unkind to Mama?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Don\u2019t do that. We were kids, we didn\u2019t understand. We didn\u2019t know she was crazy.'\u201d<\/p>\n There was a partial reconciliation with his parents, a moment of understanding. They never made much of his work except once, when he was asked to illustrate a set of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1978. They were proud of that, he says. For the illustrations, Sendak went back to the family album. \u201cThere were the photographs my father had of his younger brothers, all handsome and interesting-looking, and the women with long hair and flowers. And I went through the album and picked some of my mother\u2019s relatives and some of my father\u2019s and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried. So there was that. And there still is that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n more<\/a> (also via A&LDaily;<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN: A genuinely illuminating interview with Maurice Sendak. I was wary at first, thinking he might come across as self-impressed, but that really didn\u2019t happen (in my opinion): \u2026At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n