Madeleine L'Engle in The New Yorker

This week's New Yorker features a profile (not available online) of author Madeleine L'Engle. In the profile, the author Cynthia Zarin writes: "When I was in college, I remember a friend saying to me, 'There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L'Engle when they were small, and those who didn't.'"

I was the kind of girl who read Madeleine L'Engle. Although I wasn't crazy about the Austin series, I read all of the Murray series -- A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet (perhaps an odd choice as my childhood favorite), Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time -- as well as several of her other books. The O'Keefe series novel A House Like a Lotus was my introduction to the very concept of lesbianism (it was the repressive '80s, and my father was an evangelical minister, so I beg for a slight break on this one).

Zarin points out in the New Yorker profile that L'Engle refuses to distinguish between literature for children and adults, and this may be the key to what endears her to children -- she refuses to talk down or pander. In fact, I largely credit A Wrinkle in Time for teaching me to think philosophically. Not only did the book casually introduce me to physics (an introduction which, sadly, my education didn't much build upon), my nine-year old brain nearly burst when Meg comes to the realization that, "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!” about the creepy dystopian Camazotz.

Zarin's profile devotes much time to the disconnect between fact and fiction in L'Engle's own life, which has clearly distressed L'Engle's family but probably won't make much difference to her fiction readers. Perhaps L'Engle puts it best when Zarin asks her "[I]s there a difference between fiction and nonfiction?" to which L'Engle replies, "Not much."

For the die-hard L'Engle fan, ABC will show a made-for-TV movie of A Wrinkle in Time on May 15. I may have to skip this one, however, because I prefer to keep my mental images of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin intact (not to mention that it's also Disney-produced. Yecch.)