About Bridge to Terabithia - An Interview With Katherine Paterson.

Katherine Paterson - In Her Own Words.

You wrote Bridge to Terabithia after your eight-year-old son’s best friend, Lisa Hill, was struck and killed by lightning. How did writing this book help you? How do you think this book might help others?

Lisa’s death made no sense to me. It was tragic, totally unexpected, devastating. I did what writers often do when they can’t make sense out of life. I tried to shape my question into a story. Stories have to make sense—not in a logical, reasonable sense so much as an emotional sense. The ending has to somehow clarify for the reader (and first, the writer) the beginning and middle.
Terabithia was Jess and Leslie’s secret place. You’ve said that you had lots of Terabithias as a child, and that now your secret place is inside of you. Why do you think people need secret places?

My feeling is that if you don’t have a secret place—a place where your imagination can run wild and you can ask yourself any question with no one censoring your thoughts—it’s hard to grow either spiritually or intellectually. You may just keep trying to be and think what those around you seem to want. Bridge to Terabithia has been criticized by some for its profanity and disrespect for adults, and was on People for the American Way’s list of challenged books four times in the 1990s. What do you say to the people who want to remove this book from classrooms and libraries?

Well, first, I’d hope they would read the whole book for themselves with as open a mind as possible. Then I would ask that they leave the book for the many people who have read it and found profound comfort in it. I don’t think they would have been able to find that comfort if Jesse Aarons had not seemed real to them. He speaks like children I have known in that part of the world. I tried to be true to the child he was, not make him an example of proper language or behavior. 

You used the Japanese word banzai, which means “hooray!” and “live forever,” in the dedication of Bridge to Terabithia. Why did you choose this word?

Because when I thought of the friendships between David and Lisa and Jess and Leslie that is how I felt.