On the Making of “Make New Friends”

Celebrating the release of my 10th children’s book, out TODAY

Pub day is always both exciting and anticlimactic. Exciting because a project that only a few people have seen is finally out in the world; anticlimactic because until feedback starts to return to you, the work still remains a howl in the wilderness. Today my tenth children’s book, Make New Friends, comes out. (As does my eleventh cookbook, the Russ & Daughters Cookbook: 100 Years of Appetizing.) And as it is borne off into the world, I’d like to say a few words about why the book is so special to me.

Typically I have anywhere between 7-10 children’s book concepts floating around in my mind. They exist in various stages of completion. Most are just vapors, free-floating feeling, sworling without form. These ideas only begin to solidify when, through some mystical ripening, a line occurs to me around which the concept can cohere. Make New Friends began back in 2020 when the first line came to me: “Tomasso was a new kid and he knew no one at his new school.”

But the idea had been with me for a long time. On the one hand, the book is about imagination. As Tomasso sits alone at his new school, he makes new friends equipped only with a marker. Two balls become Roland and Barry; a carton of milk Coco; a brown paper bag is transformed into a Borscht Belt comedian named Henny; a white eraser becomes Karen. (Get it?) It plays on the fuzzy nature of what we mean by “to make.” On one hand, make means create: make dinner, make art, make pottery. On the other, make can mean form: make friends, make love. This being a childrens books, friends was a better avenue to pursue.

That is the seed but the soul is something else entirely. I have always felt, but have felt increasingly in recent years, it important to portray in children’s literature not just an idealized version of what we want our children to experience but what they actually experience. Happiness is all fine and good and should be celebrated. But sadness, melancholy, loneliness, fear, shame, all those emotions that make one feel really alone, that’s when you need a book that sees you the most.

One of my major gripes with the sort of Panglossian “Everybody Belongs” school of feel good DEI literature that proliferated in the last decade or so is that though it may make parents feel good — and let’s face it, mostly white parents — to read to their children that everybody belongs, for those children who don’t belong, the stories feel false. It just doesn’t mirror their lived experience and I fear that can make kids feel even more lonely. (There are, however, many books that speak directly to the lived experience of feeling like one does not belong and these are invaluable precisely because they aren’t glossy and aspirational.)

Nearly all of my (later) books, from Brick: Who Found Herself in Architecture to Solitary Animals: Introverts of the Wild are similar attempts to be with a child, to meet them where they are. In Buddhist terms, to use upaya (skillful means) to avoid the second arrow of suffering. In non-Buddhist terms, to show a child she is seen, she is loved and she is okay just the way she is.

On one level, Make New Friends follows Tomasso as he makes new friends. It is a story, as I said, about imagination and loneliness. But the real live wire heart of the book isn’t that at all. It is the relationship between Tomasso and his father, his father who, though well-meaning and clearly loving, is pressuring Tomasso to make new friends. Every night when his father gets home from work, he asks his son, “Did you make new friends?” The emotional climax of the story — to me anyway — is when Tomasso finally brings his new friends home. I’m not going to spoil it here — buy the book! — but it hits like a T-bone car crash, out of nowhere. A year and a half ago, I wrote that I was on a journey to cry. Well, it hasn’t happened yet. But page 22 nearly gets me every time for it encapsulates in one moment fear and love in a way that feels raw to me now. It is really about how you can be vulnerable, and scared, and ashamed before someone who you love and someone who loves you. It is, perhaps, a subtle feeling but so very much alive as children, and as adults.

Back in 2020, when Stephen Barr, my agent, began to take the manuscript out, we got a few nibbles from publishers but just a few. The feedback, generally, was that they loved the story but it was a little too sad. “They would like Tomasso to have actual friends at the end,” wrote Stephen. But I refused to make the change. I told him I would rather not have this book made at all than to betray Tomasso and it really did feel like a betrayal to add such a pollyannaish conclusion. Seldom have I felt so protective of a character but, of course, Tomasso isn’t just Tomasso. Tomasso is me; Tomasso is every child (and adult) who wonders whether they’re lovable, or that, even if loved, what are the limits of that love.

Thankfully, after years of refining and resistance, finally Emma Ledbetter, the wonderful editor at Abrams, acquired the manuscript. She stripped from it any of the concessions I had made to earlier drafts, restoring its rhythms and purity. Mariachiara di Giorgio, a truly brilliant and like minded illustrator from Rome, brought Tomasso, his father and his friends to life in beautiful watercolor (all by hand.) And now, finally, the book is out in the world.

So far the response has been brilliant. In a starred review Publishers Weekly called it a “a profoundly moving display of parental love.”. In another starred review Booklist wrote, “With its familiar settings and a plot based on common problems and creative solutions, this deeply satisfying picture book ends with hilarity and joy.” And also in a starred review, said Kirkus writes “Stein’s text captures the experience of loneliness with uncomplicated empathy, and the dynamic he establishes between the single father and son is simply lovely. The narrative’s climax delivers affirmation with a just-right sweetness; this portrait of vulnerability offers both guidance to adults seeking to support the youngsters in their lives and reassurance for children.”