Q&A with Amy Hest

Amy Hest is the author of The Summer We Found the Baby, a new middle grade novel for kids. Her many other books include Remembering Mrs. Rossi and Letters to Leo. She lives in New York City.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Summer We Found the Baby, and for your three main characters?

A: The idea comes from a personal family story I heard as a child. Aunt Harriet, a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx, met a nice Jewish boy. Love happened, he enlisted, and shipped out to Biloxi, Mississippi, for basic training. They were 18 years old.

Aunt Harriet decided to follow him to Biloxi and they got married. He shipped overseas and she had to go home and wait it out.

My mother’s version was very judgmental, and I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world.

I am very invested in World War II stories. I was born in 1952, and my dad was in the war. I have all his letters to my mother. They hadn’t gotten married yet. She was here working at Columbia University on the Manhattan Project. They got married after the war.

Q: This book takes place during World War II--did you need to do much research to write the book?

A: No research. My research is minimal. The only thing I did research on was Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite cake. It’s in the book—I Googled that.

Everything in the book is something personal to me. The base is called Camp Mitchel—I grew up across from Mitchel Field, an old Army base. It’s set in Eastern Long Island because I love Montauk. The ice cream in the book is because I’m a big ice cream eater. I’m a dog lover, so I had to have a dog.

Q: You tell the story from the three kids’ alternating perspectives. Did you write the novel in the order in which it appears, or did you focus more on one character before turning to another?

A: My brain is very odd. I can only write one step at a time. A lot of people can cut and paste, but I am not that writer.

The first page of this book is all I had for a couple of years. That stuck with me, but I couldn’t move on. I saw the whole book in my mind, almost as a movie. It took me 10 years to write; I did a lot of things in between.

I don’t move forward until I’m completely satisfied or have a complete semblance of what I’m doing. I wrote Julie, Martha, Bruno, Julie Martha, Bruno. Life is like that. I look at my brother, we describe the same event 50 years ago--he says one thing and [I say another] but it was the same event.

Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started writing it?

A: I knew who the baby was, and basically where the story was going to wind up. I knew Eleanor Roosevelt had to be in the story.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

A: I hope they get to enjoy spending time with Julie, Martha, and Bruno, because I do! I like getting to know people in books, and I hope readers enjoy their different voices. I see this book as a school play with three kids on stage.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have a few picture books coming out in the next few years, and I’m working on a novel about a bunch of different kids whose lives intersect on one day.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The reviews of this book are calling it historical fiction, but I don’t think of it as historical fiction. In order to write, I have to put myself back in time. It’s sort of timeless. I don’t mention cell phones or computers, but I think the feelings are contemporary. It’s funny to me when reviewers say it’s historical fiction.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb