Bridge to Terabithia — National Book Award Acceptance Speech for The Great Gilly Hopkins

I would like to thank Eleanor Cameron, Robert Coles, and Priscilla Moxom, and the Association of American Publishers, for giving Gilly this honor. Thanks also to my friends at Thomas Y. Crowell, especially my editor, Virginia Buckley, who must know that without her I would not be standing here today. And a very special thank you to my children, Lin, John, David, and Mary, who laughed when they read Gilly, and to my husband, John, who cried.

I wrote this book because, by chance rather than by design, I was for two months a foster mother. Now, as a mother, I am not a finalist for any prizes, but on the whole I’m serviceable. I was not serviceable as a foster mother, and this is why: I knew from the beginning that the children were going to be with us only a short time, so when a problem arose as problems will, I’d say to myself, “I can’t really deal with that. They’ll only be here a few weeks.” Suddenly and too late, I heard what I had been saying. I was regarding two human beings as Kleenex, disposable. And it forced me to think, what must it be like for those thousands upon thousands of children in our midst who find themselves rated disposable? So I wrote a book, a confession of sin, in which one of those embittered children meets the world’s greatest foster mother. Virginia Buckley said that my characters were mythic; a critic being less kind used the word unbelievable. I knew when I wrote the book that Gilly and Trotter were larger than life. I did it deliberately, to get attention, like that unknown lover who wrote across the underpass near our house in letters ten feet high, I LOVE YOU, GRACE KOWASKI.

But the wonderful thing about being a writer is that is gives you readers, readers who bring their own stories to the story you have written, people who have the power to take your mythic, unbelievable, ten-foot-high characters and fit them to the shape of their own lives. I met one of these people the other day.

A teacher had read aloud The Great Gilly Hopkins to her class, and Eddie, another foster child, hearing in the story of Gilly his own story, did something that apparently flabbergasted everyone who knew him. He fell in love with the book. Can you imagine how that made me feel? Here was a twelve-year-old who knew far better than I what my story was about, and he did me the honor of claiming it for himself. It seemed to me that anyone who liked a book as much as Eddie did should have a copy of his own, so I sent him one. On Saturday I got this letter:

Dear Mrs. Patterson,
Thank you for the book “The Great Gilly Hopkins.” I love the book. I am on page 16.
Your friend Always,
Eddie Young

Flannery O’Connor says this about herself when she was Eddie’s age: “I was a very ancient twelve. My views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I’m much younger now that I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children. I’m sure of it.”

So I, who have grown younger and less burdened with the years, count it a singular grace when what began for me as a confession of sin seems to lift, if only for a moment, the weight of the centuries from some young shoulder. Or, in the immortal word of that ancient seven-year-old William Ernest Teague- Pow.

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