Her mother was an artist and always splattered with paint, wore jeans. Bellingham, and how, echoing her employer, Anastasia referred to residents of a public housing complex as “the great unwashed”, and her father blew a gasket. How Anastasia got a job working for a rich lady called Mrs. One day she walked into a room and there he was, and he told her, “I am eating ice.” How she put her dad’s Billie Holiday albums on the radiator and they melted, and I didn’t know who Billie Holiday was (though I DID know what albums and radiators were), and got confused with Buddy Holly.

Surely you can come up with a better word than that?” Her baby brother Sam, who was the weird one. How her father, a Harvard Professor, criticized her for using the word, “Weird,” which I still never write, because I hear Myron Krupnik saying, “Anastasia, you live in a house that’s full of books. Anastasia who was in love with Washburn Cummings, who was black and always bouncing a basketball. Her parents, Myron and Kathryn Krupnik, and Myron’s old flame Annie, who turned out to be terrible. And that she was incredibly important to who I wanted to be when I was young, and to who I am today.

And then I started remembering Anastasia, and realized I’d never forgotten anything about her ever. What a fantastic idea, I thought, and calculated the unlikelihood of me finishing dinner, doing story-time, feeding Iris, and going to Book City in a twenty-five minute period, leaving enough time to get to the lecture. Helen phoned me tonight to confirm I was going, and thought she’d stop by a bookstore en-route to pick up some Lowry and cram. And then yesterday, I discover that Margaret Drabble has a new novel, which is so fantastic that all I want to do is read, and that then today I get to be in the same room as Lois Lowry? Where do weeks like this one come from? ) I don’t sleep much anyway, and then Jennica Harper’s new book turns up in the post, and it’s so good that I’m up late late on Monday reading it. So I went to the Lois Lowry lecture tonight. Also because she is my second baby: I can go out whenever I want, even if it’s for the third time in seven days, whereas with Harriet, I didn’t leave the house in the evening for nine months. Today was also important, because it was Iris’s first time rolling off the couch, which was slightly traumatic, but not so much because she is my second baby.

Three days ago, apropos of a conversation with Helen Spitzer on Twitter, I changed my profile picture to the cover of Anastasia Again! And then today, I discovered that Lois Lowry, Anastasia’s creator, was giving a lecture at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, mere blocks from my house. Seven years ago, I sent Lois Lowry a fan-email to tell her how much her Anastasia Krupnik books had meant to be growing up, and she sent a kind and gracious reply.

Anastasia books lois lowry