Judith Viorst Knows That a Child’s Fears Are Ours Too

On three separate occasions, Alexander Viorst fell out of trees and broke a leg. One day, he swallowed turpentine. And let us not forget the chewing-gum-in-the-hair gambit.

These truly were terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days. In fact, they were so terrible, horrible, no good and very bad that his mother, Judith Viorst, chose to immortalize them in a book that has become a classic survival guide for children--and parents--navigating life’s very bad days.

“Every month I get hundreds of letters from kids telling me about their bad days,” Judith Viorst said. Few of them know, or care, that the title character of “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” (Simon & Schuster) is a real person, let alone the youngest of Judith and Milton Viorst’s three sons. The book has sold more than a million copies since it came out in 1972, and Viorst’s Alexander has established himself as a kind of totem figure with whom small children can identify as they learn that laughing at a bad day is the best way to wish it away.

“They really connect with Alexander,” Viorst said. She made this pronouncement while sitting in a large white house on a cul-de-sac not far from the Washington Zoo. The dead-end street is such a secret that even seasoned cab drivers can’t find it without help. The house has high ceilings, wondrous wood floors and walls painted in imperative hues, such as lima bean green. Viorst and her family settled into the house in 1971, and she has no intention of moving, ever. To be perfectly clear, she says it would take dynamite to get her out of this house.

For kids and adults alike, moving is a drag, and a trauma. Even without her six years of training at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Viorst would feel comfortable affirming those facts.

“Moving away is one of the small but powerful dramas and traumas of everyday life,” she said. “Personally I would like everyone I love to live no farther than the next ZIP code.”

Still, recognizing that relocation is increasingly a reality of modern, dual-career life, Viorst decided to make moving the focus of her third “Alexander” book. “Alexander, Who’s Not (Do You Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going to Move” was published this fall, again by Simon & Schuster.

“I’d rather have poison ivy than have to move,” Alexander declared. “I know places to hide where they’d never find me.”

Alexander is a perpetual 5-year-old. But many grown-ups, Viorst feels certain, share his feelings. The same fears and anxieties that plague children also nag at adults. “They are universal issues,” she explained. “The images and the details of life are different--grown-ups don’t really worry about whether they’re going to find a prize in their cereal box.”

Switching between her own grown-up mind and body--Viorst is in her early 60s--and the brain of Alexander is untroubling for this author of 24 books, the best known of which is “Necessary Losses” about life’s various losses. Nor does she balk at meandering between genres or audience levels. Her titles are nearly evenly divided between adults and children, fiction and nonfiction, even poetry. Along with her books, she has for 20 years written a column for Redbook magazine on family life. She boasts, as well, a prodigious stack of unproduced television scripts.

“I’d like to try every genre before I die,” she said. “I love exercising all the different kinds of muscles you engage when you try different forms of writing.”

At 7, Viorst began sending stories to publishers whose addresses she copied from books at a library in New York. “I took myself very seriously. I was always stunned that it was not published,” she said.

With lurid green tights disrupting an otherwise all-black outfit, it seems she is less inclined to take herself so seriously these days. But at 20, “I was going to be T.S. Eliot or forget it.” Luckily, “I calmed down.”

But not too much. As a young mother, married to Middle Eastern scholar (and fellow writer) Milton Viorst, she wrote in every spare moment. Waiting for kids in her carpool, Viorst scrawled out story ideas. She scribbled on yellow pads while the kids were in the dentist’s chair. Even today, she goes nowhere without a pad and pencil. At airports, while fellow passengers groan about weather delays, Viorst writes.

“I am by nature a very disciplined person,” she said, presumably by way of understatement. “I usually have an assignment for myself of a page a day.”

The amazing thing is how quickly a page a day yields an entire book. “At the end of a month, you have a chapter,” she said--or, in the case of a children’s title, the framework for a whole book. Far from some weird form of compulsiveness, she regards her habit as “the mark of someone who wanted to have three children and a marriage and a writing career. You don’t do that by goofing around. You do it by writing when the kids are napping or any other time resembling a free moment. If you want to write, you write.”

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Such determination has blessed Viorst with a large and loyal following. At the Santa Monica Public Library, children’s librarian Olivia Narins said the “Alexander” books have become classics because Viorst is “a very, very talented writer.”

The true-to-life quality of “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” ensures its continuing appeal, agreed Ami Kirby, head of the children’s department at the same library. “She captures the struggles and tensions in everyday life that young people experience, and she does it with a sense of humor.”

Viorst may leap from genre to genre, but she said she feels most honored when she is described as a children’s author. She treasures the interaction that children’s books bring between parents and offspring, remembering, for example, that “one of the greatest moments of my life was reading ‘Charlotte’s Web’ to [the real] Alexander. I remember Alexander sitting on my lap, all nestled in, and so concerned about Wilbur that he bent down and kissed the illustration.”

That Alexander, the real one, is 28 years old now. He is married and works as a loan officer in Chicago. As a child he resisted literary stardom, wondering at first why his mother picked him as the accident-prone hero of the first book. To assuage his feelings, his mother showed him how huge his name would be on the cover. Fame! Stardom! Immortality!

“He got really into it,” she said.

Alexander encouraged his mother to turn his literary namesake into a trilogy. Occasionally now, he inquires about an additional title--and so turning him (with apologies to Lawrence Durrell), into the Alexander Quartet.