My jam in “Where the Wild Things Are” is not the famous six-page wordless sequence in which Max and the Wild Things have a “wild rumpus” - even though, yes, it’s an enduring reminder of the importance of letting loose now and then (surely that’s what Ronnie had in mind for my upstanding mom as she turned 40). By now, I’ve read the books many times to my own children, astonished at how much is in them for my grown-up self - about that growing-up process, and about the times I grew up in, too. “Where the Wild Things Are” is the first in what Sendak called his “trilogy,” books published many years apart and linked not by shared characters or settings but by a deeper affinity of theme: How we can access an inner life to wrest ourselves out of our childhood families and face the scary larger world, thereby growing up. “First, always, I have to reach and keep hold of the child in me.” “Reaching the kids is important, but secondary,” Sendak once said. I was 11, my sister was 10, my brother 18 and out of the house, but it was 1978, and that Maurice Sendak classic was a perfectly sophisticated gift for a grown woman whose children were well past picture-book read-alouds. My mother’s glamorous friend Ronnie gave her “Where the Wild Things Are” as a 40th birthday gift.
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