From Newsgroup: rec.arts.books.childrens

I would have posted this yesterday, but the dumb system (recently) doesn't allow me to post more than half a dozen times per DAY. Something like that.
She had at least four entries in the "Something About the Author" encyclopedia series.
I had no idea she and Elizabeth Levy were related! (Levy writes funny picture-book mysteries - she probably started those in the 1970s.)
Even more amazing is that the New York Times managed to beat...Wikipedia! (I checked the death records for January, to be sure. I can't imagine they would remove it.)
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/94121-obituary-robie-harris.html
Excerpt:
...HarrisrCOs first book was also a collaborative effort: she co-authored the nonfiction book Before You Were Three: How You Began to Walk, Talk, Explore, and Have Feelings (Delacorte, 1977) with childrenrCOs author Elizabeth Levy, a close friend and her first cousin. In an interview with Leonard S. Marcus for the book You CanrCOt Say That!, (Candlewick, 2021) Harris explained that the book was inspired by the birth of her first child. She noted her own amazement at her son, and how her young nieces and nephews asked her endless question about the baby.
Harris stepped into the publishing ring solo with picture books DonrCOt Forget to Come Back (Knopf, 1978) and I Hate Kisses (Knopf, 1981). Several years later she embarked on an extensive new project while she was living in BostonrCothe work that would become her groundbreaking title ItrCOs Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, and Sexual Health (Candlewick, 1994). She did a copious amount of research consulting with doctors, nurses, psychologists, and scientists, and enlisted artist Michael EmberleyrCowhom she knew a bitrCoto illustrate. Harris wanted to have a complete manuscript before submitting it to publishers, she told PW in a 2014 article celebrating the bookrCOs 20th anniversary, because rCLitrCOs complicated and complex, and itrCOs loaded material for many people.rCY After Harris sent the project out to several houses, editor Amy Ehrlich at newly established Candlewick Press made an offer just two two weeks after receiving it.
ItrCOs Perfectly Normal was later joined by ItrCOs So Amazing!: A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Brith, Babies, and Families (Candlewick, 1999) and ItrCOs NOT the Stork!: A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends (Candlewick, 2006) to form what the publisher calls the Family Library. In addition to selling millions of copies, these titles have ranked among the most frequently challenged and banned books in the country according to the American Library Association. In an essay on this topic for PEN America, Harris wrote: rCLI write books for children because in some small way I hope that they will find the words I write useful, reassuring, interesting, and at times humorous and also in some small way help them to stay emotionally and/or physically healthy by giving honest, accurate, up-to-date, and age-appropriate information.rCY Similarly, she told Marcus, rCLThis to me is the bottom line on freedom of expression. As a reader, you have the right to speak out for or against whatever you read. As a writer, I have the right to write whatever I want to writerCoand I am just not going to stop.rCY
She did not stop and worked diligently on periodic updates to the Family Library. The latest fully updated edition of ItrCOs So Amazing was released earlier this month...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/books/robie-harris-dead.html
...Updated several times, rCLItrCOs Perfectly NormalrCY has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 27 languages, according to PEN America. The writer and pediatrician Dr. Perri Klass called it a rCLclassicrCY in The New York Times in 2017. Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive officer of PEN America, said in a statement that Ms. HarrisrCOs books rCLwere totally matter-of-fact in educating kids on these subjects.rCY
...Ms. Harris confronted the hostility without rancor. rCLI think that in this country thererCOs a range of opinions about what children should know,rCY she told an interviewer for LibrarySparks magazine in 2006, rCLand I think that many people feel that our children shouldnrCOt know about some of these things that have to do with sexuality, because, as adults, many of us werenrCOt talked to about these things.rCY
Even some who praised her have wondered if she had pushed too far in rCLItrCOs Perfectly Normal.rCY
rCLIs this too much? Harris wisely allows that it might be,rCY Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2010, about an explicit part of the book. In Slate, Aymann Ismail wrote, rCLOn virtually every page I stopped to examine, I was confronted with detailed drawings of genitals.rCY
But Ms. Harris told the interviewer: rCLOur kids already know about 99.9 percent of this stuff. What concerned me is that they have a lot of misinformation, no matter how much they tell us, and I wanted them to get accurate information.rCY...
Oddly, there were only 35 comments on the obituary before the section was closed.
A few:
Natalie, Chicago, Feb. 5
"I'm grateful to have grown up with this book, which taught me to view human bodies as normal rather than as objects to be feared and disgusted by..."
Hub, Grubber, Feb. 5
"Lots of wondering-aloud by parents and other adults worrying about child readers rCo but no comments or reflections from adults (i.e. former kids) who were her intended audience, and what they thought at the time?
"I would guess that such folks could actually say, rather than merely speculate, whether rCyItrCOs Perfectly NormalrCO helped or, as hand-wringers fear, harmed them. Was it informative? Or life-altering? Or scandalizing?
"Or perhaps, ideally, they found it to be a little bit of all of those things rCo as knowledge, at least in my experience, often is."
HLM, USA, Feb. 5
"Either this sweet, caring lady who did her research can teach your child about sex or the biggest perv in their grade will. You decide, parents. My school yard perv showed up in 2nd grade and he loved having an audience. Kids were bringing in porn to class by 3rd grade. Sex is hardly hidden in this country."
Check out the one from Greg in Seattle, too. (Warning: It's about the complications of sexual abuse - and how it was decided to write about it, in the book.)
The comments in general remind me of the slogan that the late Dr. Sol Gordon famously coined: "Are you an askable parent?"
He even put it on a button, in the 1970s.
More on that (Gordon's name doesn't appear here, fwiw) https://www.advocatesforyouth.org/resources/health-information/are-you-an-askable-parent/
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