# The Truth of Coraline

????<u>I began "Coraline" with a quote that wasn't from GK Chesterton</u>, although I said it was. I said,"Fairy tales aren't true. Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated. " That, for me, was the important thing about "Coraline," the idea that dragons can be defeated.

????I wanted to tell my kids something that had taken me 30 years of living to figure out. So when I was writing "Coraline," <u>I wrote the first third of the book</u>, and then we moved to America. And I had been writing "Coraline," up to that point, in my own time. When I had free time, I would write it. Now we've moved to America. Everything has got a lot busier, and there was no free time. And nobody was waiting for it. I'd been told by a publisher that it was absolutely and <u>utterly</u> unpublishable what I was doing. So the desire to keep going-- I wanted to keep going. I knew that I had to finish it.?

????**But** I was happy that I had a third, and I knew that one day I would get to go back to it.

????**And** then, I was walking with my children in the woods, and I <u>trod</u> on <u>a yellow jacket nest</u>. The <u>yellow jacket nest</u> was under the ground. And within a couple of seconds, I was surrounded by a cloud of yellow jackets. <u>They're like small wasps, and they're mean</u>. And I shouted at my children to get away and stayed exactly where I was because I knew that if I ran after them, the cloud of yellow jackets around me would follow me and it would get to them. So I waited till they were at the top of the hill, and getting stung the whole time, and then ran after them.?

????**And** I remember climbing into the bath-- I put all of the three of us into the bath, they were very small-- and counted the <u>stings</u>. I had about 30 stings, and each of them had been stung once or twice. **And** the problem was, in shaking my head like that and try and <u>dislodge</u> some yellow jackets, my glasses had gone flying, which meant that the next day, I needed to go down, go back to where that had happened, and get my glasses back, and that was terrifying. Going back to get my glasses was scary. Standing there getting stung while my kids ran away was not scary. It was absolutely nothing brave about it. Going back the next day to find my glasses, that was brave. And that moment just sat there, and it sat there, for me, <u>informing</u> everything that I felt like I wanted to write "Coraline" for.?

????**And** I suddenly knew a third of the way in what the book was about. I'd been writing a scary book. I knew that it was about the idea that dragons can be defeated. I knew that I was trying to tell kids that, Yes, you can face up to the things that scare you. Yes, you can deal with it. Yes, you can <u>triumph</u>. But it was at that moment that I understood that actually what I was just trying to say to them, the entire message of this book, was being brave doesn't mean you're not scared. It means you're scared, and you do the right thing, and you do it anyway. And that gave me a <u>handle</u> into the rest of the book. That gave me a place to walk into the rest of the book. And it meant that when I took Coraline back into the other world now her parents had been kidnapped. She knew they were there, but the action of going back was now scary, and it should be scary.?

????What is wonderful now here we are almost 20 years after "Coraline," the book, was published. And I will do signings, and I will do events. At every event I do, every signing I do, there is a woman in her late teens and her 20s, now even in their 30s, who have a <u>battered</u> <u>school printing edition</u> of "Coraline" with them. And they're the ones who just stop and they tell me very, very quietly that the book and Coraline saved their lives in their teens when they were going through a very bad place-- when they were being abused, when parents' marriage falling apart, bad things happening at school. And they would tell themselves that if Coraline could get through what Coraline got through in the book, they could get through that.?

????**But** the best thing about it is I told them a giant lie. I told them a story about a little girl who went through a door that didn't exist. Talked about a girl that doesn't exist, a place that doesn't exist. On the other side of it is her other mother, with buttons for eyes, who definitely doesn't exist. And everything that happens in there was made up by me. It's not true. But it helps them. It carries them through. It is true, and they took the true things from it. And that human beings are able to do that is so important, so gratifying, and so cool.

生詞：

Coraline:《鬼媽媽》

quote: 名言

utterly: 完全的

trod on : [trɑ?d]踩到了

a yellow jacket nest: 一個(gè)黃馬褂的窩

wasps:[wɑsps] 黃蜂

mean: 狂躁

stung: [st??]叮

sting: 蟄傷；被叮的包

handle: 抓手

battered: 破破舊舊

school printing edition： 校制版

giant: 巨大；

gratifying: 令人開心；滿意

dislodge: [d?s?lɑ?d?] 驅(qū)逐

informing: 通知

triumph：[?tra??mf] 勝利