Our Favorite Writers Share Their Favorite Childhood Books
Adelle Waldman, author of THE LOVE AFFAIRS of NATHANIEL P. (forthcoming)
My favorite book was Mr. Pine’s Purple House, a story that, for an adult, is hard to read as anything other than a cautionary tale about conformity. Mr. Pine lives on a street of 50 identical white houses. Every day, coming home from work, he gets confused about which one is his. He decides to plant a tree in his front yard to set his house apart. But his neighbors see his tree and like it. Pretty soon everyone has planted a tree in his or her front yard, and Mr. Pine is no better off than when he started. The title suggests that he eventually finds a solution—but there is a twist that even now I am reluctant to reveal. It’s surprising to me now that I liked this book so much because growing up I loved conformity. I spent years being mortified by what I saw as my bookish family’s weirdness. I wanted nothing more than for us to live in a development full of identical houses, hoping, I think, that if we made our external environment the same as everyone else’s our eccentricities would fade away. So I doubt I liked Mr. Pine’s Purple House for its deeper implications. I think I just found it funny that Mr. Pine couldn’t find his own house.