Q & A: Meghan Cox Gurdon

Home News Q & A: Meghan Cox Gurdon

Meghan Cox Gurdon is the children’s books reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. After working as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong, Japan, Somalia, London, Ireland, and Cambodia, she retired and moved back to the States. Gurdon also writes a twice-weekly domestic column for the Washington Examiner. She was on campus this week to speak about her much-reviled piece from the Journal, “Darkness Too Visible,” and the problem of disturbing material in young adult literature.

How did you get to where you are?

I used to joke that I put the Republican in public radio, because I was the only one. I was working in Japan, and there were big conferences on population and Hilary Clinton went and it was all about how there were too many people in the world, and I did the counter piece about how in fact human density brings about innovation and wonderful things. Everyone was doing their stories about the teeming slums of India, and I did my story about places like Hong Kong and Macau, which are immensely densely populated and fabulously creative. It’s a counter argument about life, really. After that, I had my first child, kept working, and I was still doing lots of foreign work, being flown around to dangerous places. It was after I was pregnant with my second child and I was in Northern Ireland in a riot, and I was about six months pregnant and I sort of had a Damascene moment, when I realized, was I going to protect my radio equipment from the rubber bullets, or was I going to protect my baby, and that was the turning point. So I decided to quit work for a long time after that. It didn’t really last very long, but I tried. As you find me now, I’ve been the children’s books critic for the Journal for about seven-and-a-half years. My world is shrinking, but it’s very nice, because it’s shrinking down to the nursery.

How does being a children’s book reviewer work?

Sorting through children’s books is really like trying to drink from a fire hose. I get literally hundreds of books every couple of weeks. To a certain degree, every book is the summation of a lot of people’s ardent hope and effort. Everyone wants to make a living, everyone wants in some way to make something of their lives. So each of these books represents a little team of people. So to that degree, one doesn’t want to be too disparaging. Every week I am looking to serve my readers. I want to give them an idea of what’s out there, which means I’m not always choosing what I think are the world’s greatest books. I’m looking for books that are aesthetically fine. I definitely have a bias in favor of beauty over ugliness. So I do bring that to bear particularly when it comes to picture books. Like anything cultural, children’s books can lift up or they can drag down. I look for good writing. With a picture book, often it’s whether it reads well aloud.

What kinds of books get old to you?

There’s an endless number of books about Abraham Lincoln. I’m really bored to tears by Abraham Lincoln. Not that he’s not wonderful, not that he was not an extraordinary president, but you know, there can be too much of a good thing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if somebody took on the Chester Arthur [21st U.S. president] question. There are whole huge areas of human endeavor and of history, particularly American history, that go almost completely ignored.

Should children’s books and adult books be written differently?

When you are a child, the whole world is new. You are just putting it together. It is unfair of adults, I think, to load on to children their own particular bugaboos. I’m not really a fan of didactic literature, of books that are really a message with a story draped over them. Much better to have a story. If there’s a message in it, it would be nice if the message was a beautiful one. In the darkest human corners, that’s part of the human experience, but I do think it should be approached differently for children than for adults. Because adults have been banged around a bit, and children haven’t been banged around yet, thank God. Some of them have, but I’m not sure it does them any service to read about harsh things. So I think sparingness of detail is necessary in children’s books. Not to lie, not to sanitize, but to be careful, and not to be overwhelming.

– Compiled by Patrick Timmis