The Man Who Became a Boy

Henry Strauss started out as a grown man.

I was tearing the walls out of what would become our living room — living in the middle of the work, the way you do, with something always torn open and nothing quite finished. And I started writing about a man who wanted to build a house. That was the whole idea. A man, a plan, a house going up board by board.

He got his last name the way a lot of things happen in rhyming books: Strauss rhymes with house. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. People assume there’s a story behind a name, and sometimes there is, but sometimes you need a word to land on and the word picks the man.

Anyway, it didn’t work.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when it turned, but somewhere in the writing the man got smaller and younger until he was a boy, and the house got smaller too, until it was a treehouse. And the moment that happened, the story finally had a reason to exist — because a boy doesn’t build a treehouse for himself. Henry builds it for every child in town. Somewhere to come and play, and it belongs to all of them.

That’s the version worth finishing.

I think a man building a house didn’t work because it’s just work. It’s what grown men do, and nobody wonders why. But a child who decides the town needs a place for everybody — that’s a decision. He has to want it, talk somebody into it, and get it done with whatever he can find.

I was doing the same thing at the time, more or less. Just with a mortgage instead of scrap lumber, and a lot less imagination about who it was for.

A Treehouse for Henry Strauss is available signed, or on Amazon.