And make a mark LEngle certainly did.
Read on below, and purchaseBecoming Madeleinehere.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY What was your relationship with Madeleine like growing up?
Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
CHARLOTTE JONES VOIKLIS:We were very close.
When we were in college, we lived with her.
I lived with her for six years straight; my sister was in and out.
Atsushi Nishijima/Disney
She had a much more adventurous young adulthood than I did.
I stayed close to home with my grandmother.
It was a big time of change for her.
She traveled a lot after my grandfather died; I think she wanted to keep busy and active.
But when she was home, it was great to be able to spend that time together.
My sister is a writer herself and so really took inspiration from her in that way.
I had a much more regular grandparent-grandchild relationship with her.
Thats something that she really did.
She was larger than life.
She made me see that anything was possible.
She was able to relate to me at any age, so I felt understood.
What was your relationship to the book when you were kids?
ROY: I just fell in love with the book.
I couldnt believe my grandmother had written it.
The teacher read part of the first chapter, and I couldnt wait.
I was 7 years old, and I read the whole thing.
I just couldnt believe that she had written it.
It was really incredible.
It was eye-opening, too, because she was my grandmother, but she wasnt just mine.
When youre 7 and as you grow up, you think the world revolves around you.
And then you realize it doesnt.
Her philosophy and her way of living in her imagination was hugely influential to me.
Shes the biggest influence in my life.
VOIKLIS: Lenas going to have a more interesting answer than me!
I do not remember the first time I read it.
And my relationship to it has changed over the years.
As I moved into being a teenager, I was less comfortable with that.
I wanted to be known for me.
Now Im in the middle.
VOIKLIS: The writing tower was a room over the garage.
Everyone called it her ivory tower, including her!
That was her private space for writing.
When she was raising her kids, they were not allowed up there.
When Lena and I came along, it shocked everybody that she let us come join her there.
She allowed that because we knew how to be quiet.
It was a special time and place with her.
What was it like working on this project?
Did you feel you got to know your grandmother in an entirely new way?
It really felt like Gran was part of the process, because of the journals and the letters.
It was healing for us, just that she was here with us.
We felt her presence.
What were these journals and letters of hers?
What did they look like and what were they used for?
VOIKLIS: She kept a journal from a very young age.
The earliest one that we have is from around 1933.
As she got older, she would include emotional rants about something she was particularly happy or upset about.
Shed also use it for writing character sketches about people.
Theres only one notebook from college.
And then she gets to be a more consistent writer as she gets older.
There was one piece of advice she gave writers, which was to keep a journal.
The sames true for a writer; you have to do your scales.
Journal writing was like that for her.
What was the most surprising thing you discovered about Madeleine?
VOIKLIS: One was realizing how ambitious she was.
In her earliest journals, she was like, c’mon grant me genius.
She wanted to be a great writer and to make her mark on the world.
She was dumped at boarding school.
It had a deep impact on her.
What new insights intoA Wrinkle in Timedid you glean?
ROY: She was horrified by McCarthyism in the 50s.
… Theres this conformity, this need to have people conform.
Maybe its just human nature.
She was grappling with that seriously.
Her father was horrified by war; shed seen it kill him, shed seen his depression.
That followed her, the darkness.
Writing is a way of making sense of the world.
This is her aspirational hymn: writing for her hope.
Was there anything about her process writingWrinklethat you learned?
They didnt understand what she was trying to do.
Theyd ask, Is this for adults or is it for children?
it’s crucial that you cut it in half.
Cut out the science-fiction parts.
Change your main character.
It was going to violate her story and what she was trying to say.
So she withdrew it from making the publishing rounds.
The person wrote back saying This is the worst book Ive ever read.
It reminds me ofThe Wizard of Oz.
And they published it anyway!
We see in early journal entries from 10 years earlier stuff about the tesseract.
Theres also stuff in her personal life.
But he was very depressed.
Hed been gassed in World War I, and hed been very successful before that war.
He published detective novels and he was a journalist.
When people are depressed, they dont mean to do it, but its a kind of emotional abandonment.
Its a chemical thing; they cant help it.
She understood that as an adult, but it was hard for her to understand as a child.
You now have such a vivid, complex memory of your grandmother.
Journals are private, and we wanted to be really respectful of that.
I think that would have been a violation and changed our relationship to our grandmother.
I didnt want to have to change how I felt about her.
Our approach felt really right because we could get close to this 11-year-old girl who was so vulnerable.
But thats just human.
It was wonderful getting to know her better.
We always related to her in a special way.
When we were together with her, she knew how to meet us where we were.
But she was right there with us.
