Rebecca - out tomorrow

Rebecca, written by me and illustrated by Sydney Smith, arrives in stores tomorrow. Here is the letter that we included in copies that went to librarians and peers.

If you have been around here long enough, you know all about me and my sister and my relationship with grief. This book gives voice to that, with love and acceptance. I hope it finds its audience. It is beautiful.

The illustrations here are the mirror images of Rebecca waiting at the top of the hill for her children, that appear near the beginning and the end of the book. That's all Sydney Smith's work. I keep telling him to make a Patreon.

[REBECCA - Letter from the Author]

Dear Reader,

You are holding the book that, nearly twenty years into my career, I am the most proud of. Certainly, it is one of the only times I ever wrote something where the words came straight and true, where I, a creature of self-doubt, never questioned what I wanted to do. I find picture books joyful and rewarding, but I have also found them hard to write at times. The truth is that children are the most complicated audience to write for. They look closely, they ask questions, they are smart and growing smarter every day, and when they are old, it is the books they read as children that they remember the clearest. 

Maybe you would agree with me when I say that it might take a minute for me to recall details of books that I read five or ten years ago (or further back, as I am forty-two), but I can immediately remember the exact details of the books I loved as a child. What a powerful thing that is. The power and privilege of that possibility is what always made writing picture books hard for me. Until Rebecca, I never had the clarity from the get-go that I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, for an audience that deserves the very best. 

I visit classrooms often. A few months ago I was in a kindergarten classroom, doing my usual, chatting and drawing with the kids. One girl was drawing a dog, she said it was her dog, but now the dog is dead because he and her dad both died in a car crash. And she just kept colouring the dog after offering that information. 

I immediately locked eyes with the teacher who gave me a silent nod, and I said to the girl, holding back my own tears, “I didn’t know that about you. Thank you for telling me.” The girl said no more about it, she was just giving me a fact about her life, her everyday reality.

My nephew, the son of another sister of ours, was three years old when our sister Becky died—our sister who was Rebecca and who had her name passed down from the Rebecca in this book. It was a long sickness, and in the end, there were weeks and months strung together holding on to your own sanity and waiting for the inevitable to happen, lost in your own grief, and sometimes, you could even forget this very small boy was there the whole time, watching, listening, playing, asking for cartoons, eating his meals, living his regular life of which this was just a part. We did our best to be normal for him, but it was not normal. 

The last week of Becky’s life, she was in a coma, with palliative care in the house we grew up in. We were all there. I remember being outside that same week with my little nephew, picking dandelions because it was spring and they had just come up. A sea of cheerful yellow suns popping up in a blanket of green, outside our house of grief. He wanted to give some to his mommy, because she was sad. He was being brave in his own way.

This is a book about grief, and children are no strangers to that. They are watching and listening. They draw pictures of dogs and pick flowers. But those are not always simple things. Life is not always that simple. I hope this book finds its audience, young and old, for we all know the joys and hardships of love, at their most powerful, and at their most mundane everyday reality.

Thank you for reading. Thank you to Sydney Smith whom I fully trusted to create something transcendent, and he did. I only ever wanted him to be the artist, to do something I could never do. I am honoured by his gift. 

With love, 

Kate Beaton