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.