Since the sum­mer I was nine­teen years old and interned at Philomel Books, I’ve worked on pic­ture books. I’ve typed up hand-writ­ten man­u­scripts, I’ve packed up art to ship back to the artist, I’ve sat with dou­ble-sided tape and an x‑acto knife to make book dum­mies, and I’ve edit­ed books. Recent­ly, I tried to count all the books I’ve worked on , and while I nev­er kept a defin­i­tive list (Tip for any­one who’s just start­ed work­ing in pub­lish­ing — keep a list!), I esti­mate that I’ve edit­ed or assist­ed a boss in edit­ing approx­i­mate­ly two hun­dred and fifty pic­ture books over the past two and a half decades. 

But when I went to write books, the sto­ries that came into my brain were nov­els. I start­ed out as an author writ­ing chap­ter books for chil­dren, but for the past decade I’ve been firm­ly focused on writ­ing longer nov­els for adults. That is, until a few years ago, when the first line of a pic­ture book popped into my head. I wasn’t expect­ing it, and was actu­al­ly in the midst of writ­ing a chap­ter in The Love We Found (pub­lished in 2025), my fifth nov­el for adults, when it happened. 

It was the sum­mer, and my then two-and-a-half-year-old daugh­ter was sit­ting in her high­chair, ready for break­fast. Along with her stan­dard one-egg omelet, I asked her what fruit she want­ed for break­fast. I offered a banana, blue­ber­ries, or straw­ber­ries. She mod­i­fied that request and asked for a blue banana. 

“We don’t have blue bananas,” I told her. ​“We have yel­low, a lit­tle bit green, and a lit­tle bit brown.” 

“That’s okay,” she said to me. ​“We can go to the store.” 

“The store doesn’t have blue bananas either,” I explained.

“So you can grow one,” she told me, with the beau­ti­ful log­ic of a toddler.

“I can’t grow a blue banana,” I informed her. ​“They don’t come in that blue.* If you want blue fruit, how about blueberries?”

She reluc­tant­ly agreed and moved on with her break­fast, but I couldn’t stop think­ing about that inter­ac­tion. It made me think about all the things my daugh­ter asked me for that I couldn’t pro­vide. Espe­cial­ly as a two-and-a-half-year-old, it was a lot. Can you make my hair look like cat ears? Can we eat din­ner tonight with Gram­my (who lives a two-hour plane flight away)? Can I come with you on the train to work? Can you sleep hold­ing my hand for the whole night? Can we get a pet and can it be a pen­guin? I thought about all the times I had to say ​“no” for rea­sons that were valid to me, but that like­ly seemed incom­pre­hen­si­ble to her, and how dis­ap­point­ing I must be on a reg­u­lar basis. 

In The Love We Found, there is a char­ac­ter, Eva, who is a children’s book author and illus­tra­tor. The chap­ter I was work­ing on the day of the blue banana inci­dent includ­ed her — in fact, it was one where she and Lucy talk about a book that Eva wrote, one I had to invent. And I real­ized that per­haps the banana inci­dent would be a great begin­ning to a sto­ry that the fic­tion­al Eva wrote. So I non-fic­tion­al­ly wrote the first cou­plet: ​“I can’t grow a blue banana, I can’t stretch like a giraffe. I can’t hear an earthworm’s whis­per, or make a spi­der laugh.”And then I wrote the last: ​“But, my dar­ling, here is some­thing that always will be true: No mat­ter what, I’ll find a way to show my love for you.”

I thought I’d got­ten the banana inci­dent out of my system…but I was wrong. Instead of work­ing on the rest of the chap­ter that day, I end­ed up draft­ing the man­u­script for the entire pic­ture book and send­ing it to my agent.

I write nov­els about love and loss because I want peo­ple to feel less alone in their expe­ri­ences, to know that there are oth­ers in the world who feel the way they do, who have gone through the same dif­fi­cul­ties they have and came out on the oth­er side. And I want peo­ple who have had dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences to under­stand what oth­ers may be going through. When I wrote this pic­ture book, I was think­ing about some­thing sim­i­lar. I want­ed it to reas­sure kids that no mat­ter whether their par­ents can ful­fill their requests or not, it doesn’t change how much and how deeply they are loved. And I want­ed to give them a sneak peek into their par­ents’ minds and hearts, to see things, for a brief moment, from their par­ents’ perspectives. 

In this book I have very con­scious­ly uncou­pled ​“per­fec­tion” and ​“love.” As peo­ple liv­ing in a world with deep divi­sions and fault lines, where fam­i­ly and friends may have dif­fer­ent beliefs and core val­ues than we do, it is impor­tant to me for my daugh­ter to know both that the peo­ple we love will not always be per­fect in our eyes, and that imper­fect peo­ple are still deserv­ing of love and under­stand­ing. Leviti­cus tells us to love not only our neigh­bors, but strangers as well. I hope that this book will help to plant that idea in her heart.

Last week, when my daugh­ter, now almost five and a half, asked, again, for some­thing I couldn’t pro­vide, I added ​“and I can’t grow a striped* banana” to my ​“I can’t.” Instead of being upset, she laughed and said, ​“you’ll always show me you love me, right Mom?” 

“Right,” I told her. 

And writ­ing this pic­ture book, my very first, is one of the ways I’ve showed her. 

*My daugh­ter did indeed ask for a blue banana, but my book is called Can You Grow a Striped Banana? because my incred­i­bly bril­liant edi­tor shared with me that there are, actu­al­ly, blue bananas in the world, most­ly grown in South­east Asia. So we changed ​“blue” to ​“striped” in the fin­ished book.