Today Judith Viorst, author, poet, and journalist, celebrates her birthday. She became known as a writer through her Redbook columns, full of witty and stylish prose, often about family life. They naturally led to a series of children’s books, some of them addressing childhood psychological issues. The Tenth Good Thing About Barney helps children process grief about the death of a beloved cat, as the family states positive things about him at his burial.
Viorst was born in Newark, New Jersey, and married Milton Viorst in 1960. She always knew she wanted to be an author and actually began her career writing about her parents at the age of seven. However, these pieces got her into a bit of hot water; she had constructed odes to her dead parents though they were still very much living—and annoyed. That experience, however, did not stop Viorst from using those near and dear to her as the subject matter for essays or books. Her three sons, Anthony, Nicholas, and Alexander, gave her ideas and protagonists for her stories.
Alexander exhibited a potential for stardom from the beginning, first appearing in 1972 in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Viorst’s real son Alexander had lots of bad days—he fell out of trees and off chairs, knocked out his front teeth, and broke bones. She used this emotional material and created a five-year-old protagonist who tells us in the first line, “I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning, I tripped on the skateboard . . . I think I’ll move to Australia.” The day proves to be just as bad as Alexander thinks it will. At the end he goes to sleep, comforting himself that others have bad days, even in Australia.
The book presents a common human experience—a day where things just seem to go wrong from the moment you get up. Because it occurs in only one day, it suggests these problems can be contained. It allows readers to laugh about themselves and their own situations, while they are laughing at Alexander. In one school I know, they read this book the first day of class and then set up the time-out corner, labeled “Australia.” The book has been adapted for theater and millions of copies are now in print. Often, when I ask young men in their twenties about their favorite picture books, they respond with two titles—Where the Wild Things Are and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
I hope Judith Viorst isn’t having one of Alexander’s days on her birthday. For all the joy she has brought children over these last forty years, for her generous help in getting so many of us over bad days, she definitely deserves some very good ones. After all, she has given us a refrain we use from time to time when things are going awry—“I think I’ll move to Australia!”
Here’s a page from Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day:
