Mac Barnett| Longreads | May 5, 2026 | 3,941 words (16 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett, which was published by Little, Brown and Company on May 5, 2026.
This is me when I was a kid:
That’s not a real book. I don’t mean in the “Are children’s books real books?” sense. It’s fake, a prop I picked out from a box at the photography studio instead of a football or basketball or soccer ball, because I loved to read. Or, to be precise, I loved books. When that picture was taken, I was three years old. I didn’t know how to read. I was just pretending. It was make-believe.
When I was little, my mom read to me every day. In the afternoons we would sit on our living room couch, with a book. My mom was a very funny person (she’s still alive, she’s still funny), and sometimes when she would read me a funny picture book, she’d have to pause because she was laughing so hard she was crying, and she couldn’t see the page. I was amazed. Sure, I thought these books were funny, but if the funniest person I knew was laughing at it? Then it must be good.
Books were so central to our family life that it was only much later, when I was an adult, that I had the surprising realization that my mom is not herself a big reader. She is especially indifferent to, and often weirdly hostile to, fiction. (She is going to yell at me for telling you that. But it’s true.) But my mom thought it was important that I have lots of books—she was a single mother determined to do things right. And when it became clear that “it was working”—that I loved books, and especially loved storybooks—she bought a big bookcase, which she put in our dining room, even though it didn’t really fit, and she started putting picture books on the bottom shelf, where I could pull them out and look at them whenever I wanted.
My mom bought my picture books secondhand, at garage sales. She would painstakingly cover up the previous owners’ names with Wite-Out, so I would never think my books had belonged to anyone else. When she found out I didn’t care about that, she stopped (it was a lot of work) and just put my name below the other kids’, which were always written in the fancy cursive of a bygone age, like how I imagined Shirley Temple’s name must have looked in her books. The first books I owned came from the generation before mine and the one before that—sometimes my name would be the third or fourth on the flyleaf. This was lucky: The 1940s through the 1970s was a period of explosive innovation in American picture book making, and those old books still felt fresh and forward-looking. (My clothes came from the same garage sales, and the same era, which is why I am wearing a sailor suit in that picture up there, even though it was taken in 1985.)
* I use “chapter books” here to refer to all novels written for children, because that’s what kids call them: chapter books. But in American publishing parlance, “chapter books” refers to a specialized category of short novels intended for newly independent readers. Most novels for kids, from Pinocchio to Harriet the Spy to Harry Potter, are classified as middle grade, which sounds more like the way you’d describe gasoline than literature. (To make things even more confusing, “middle grade” sounds like “middle school,” which kids in the United States attend from grade six through grade eight, whereas middle grade novels are read mostly by elementary school kids. What a mess!) Industry jargon that’s divorced from the way kids actually talk about books is more evidence of the disconnection between children and the people who make books for them. I’ve never heard a kid say, “I read middle grade novels.” But the book business either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care.
When I started reading chapter books,* my mom put them on a new shelf, the one right above the picture books. My favorite stories were the ones with secret doors, portals that led to other worlds. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Phantom Tollbooth. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was certain secret doors existed in real life, and spent a lot of time looking for them.
My searches went poorly. The California suburbs are not known for their high levels of wardrobe ownership, and, tragically, I didn’t have any eccentric uncles whose attics were always kept locked. There was some interesting stuff in my mom’s boyfriend’s closet, but no gateways to other realms. Still, my faith in magic was undeterred. I just needed to look in better places— England, for example, or my mom’s new boyfriend’s closet.
And when I got into novels, novels for adults, those also went in the same big bookcase. By high school the whole history of my reading life—novels up top, chapter books in the middle, and picture books at the bottom—was available, always, in our dining room. My mom never put away my children’s books, and so I never got the sense that they were lesser, or subliterary, or something to be outgrown. The books I loved as a kid had worth; they were important, and they deserved a place in our little library— that was the message I got from our big bookcase. It’s not, necessarily, a message my mom meant to send—our house was short on storage space, and she hated giving things away—but it shaped the writer I became, which means that if you ask her, my mom will say that she absolutely did it on purpose, so we might as well give her credit.
When I was a teenager, I volunteered at an elementary school, tutoring kids who were having trouble learning to read. The primers on hand in their classrooms—the specialized category of children’s books called early readers, or sometimes easy readers—were all pretty terrible: simplistic, didactic, and boring. “Jane sees the dog”–type stuff. One time a kid struggled mightily to decode a sentence and, upon having finally succeeded, looked up at me and said, “This sucks.” I nodded. He was right. “Then why am I reading it?” he asked, and I couldn’t answer. We both just sat there. We were confused, and we were also mad, but not at each other. We’d been betrayed by the book.
I was certain secret doors existed in real life, and spent a lot of time looking for them.
Early readers come at a crucial moment in a kid’s reading life. From the beginning of a child’s life, reading is a social activity: Adults you respect, and often love, tell you a story, and sometimes your whole family or classroom hears the story too. A book is a shared art experience, one that binds you more closely to the most important people in your life.
And then comes a time when adults tell you, “You know this thing that we’ve been doing together? Now you must do it alone. And you should enjoy it.” Now is when to dazzle young readers with the many joys and riches of literature! But the first books we hand kids to read on their own are too often lacking.
Don’t get me wrong: There are some great early readers, but the category as a whole lacks the richness and variety of the picture books these kids have grown up with, and of the novels in their future. Primers tend toward the preachy, thanks to pedagogical mission creep: “We’re already teaching kids to read, so why not teach them to behave while we’re at it?” And many primers are unnecessarily facile. When an author simplifies their language, they can wind up also stripping away their story’s narrative and thematic texture. The result is a book that’s less sophisticated than the child reading it. Kids deserve a good tale told clearly. Just because you’re learning to read doesn’t mean you don’t want a real story.
So anyway, I was trying to teach a kid to read, and he thought all the primers in the big plastic tub in his classroom sucked. I too thought they sucked. So I went home to my big bookcase, crouched down in front of the picture books, and picked out some old favorites. Their spines and covers evoked a deep and immediate recognition, and I was surprised at how clearly I remembered specific images and phrases from these books, which I hadn’t read for more than a decade.
This happens to a lot of us, I think: We unknowingly carry a cryogenically frozen love for the books we read as children. Years later, when our lives intersect with children and children’s books, the ice thaws; that old love floods us.
Have you seen that video of the guy who bought a lion cub at Harrods in 1969 (which I know people say was a “real swingin’ time” in London, but I guess I didn’t understand exactly how swingin’)? The guy raised the lion cub in his basement and took him for walks in a church graveyard, but when he finally realized that a lion shouldn’t live in London, even in 1969, he released Christian (that was the lion’s name, Christian) into the wild.
Then, two years later, the guy goes to Kenya with a film crew to look for the lion. He’s standing there in the savanna, in bell-bottoms, and here comes Christian, who is now a huge lion, with a mane and everything, picking his way very slowly, very disconcertingly, very prowlingly, down some rocks. Then Christian stops short. The lion recognizes the man. Seriously, you can watch it on YouTube. This huge lion bounds over to the bell-bottoms-wearing guy, his old friend from when he was a cub, and starts hugging him and licking him and purring, and all the while, because the documentary was made in the early seventies, psychedelic folk rock plays joyously in the background.
That’s what it was like when I rediscovered my old copy of Frog and Toad Together. I was the lion.
And when I brought my old books into the classroom to share with the boy I was tutoring, our sessions went much better. He made progress, even though many of the picture books were more difficult than the primers we’d been using,* because he actually cared about the stories he was trying to read. His tremendous efforts were rewarded with a good narrative. And today? That boy is the president of the International Literacy Association. Cue the psychedelic folk rock! Okay, that last part isn’t true (to my knowledge). But the kid stopped hating reading. A genuine happy ending.
* Because picture books are usually read out loud by adults, they can have complex syntax and advanced vocabulary.
I figured out I wanted to write for kids when I was in college. At school I studied literature, particularly poetry, particularly difficult poetry, particularly medieval Scandinavian court poetry. I was interested in why people create and consume literature that is intentionally hard to understand, and whether there was some other purpose, a higher purpose, than elite group formation—whether it was possible to derive pleasure and discover beauty from the act of decoding a difficult artwork.
On my summers off I was a camp counselor.
It was a sports-themed summer camp for children aged four to six in Berkeley, California. I was always in charge of the four-year-olds because they required the most attention and nobody else wanted to deal with them. But I loved them. We were a good match: Four-year-olds don’t really play sports, and neither do I.*
* I know what you’re thinking: “The kid who wore a sailor suit and snuck into people’s closets looking for secret doors to magical realms didn’t grow up to be a star athlete?!”
A typical morning would go like this: The soccer coach would demonstrate to everyone how to dribble a soccer ball around some cones. The first kid up would immediately trip over the ball, knock over a cone, and begin crying. The soccer coach would blow his whistle and rush over. After unsuccessfully attempting to comfort the kid—“It’s okay, don’t give up, the important thing is to keep trying”—the coach would throw up his hands and tell the kid to go rest under a nearby shady tree, which was where I was already sitting. (It got hot in the summer.) Before long I’d be joined by a bunch of kids under the tree—sweaty, exhausted four-year-olds who’d just had their dreams of being professional soccer players destroyed. And I told them stories.
The first stories I told to children were made up on the spot and followed a pattern: On Friday, after an exhausting week at work sitting under trees while kids learned sports, I went home to relax. No sooner had I started to draw a bath than the phone rang. It was the queen of England. Someone had stolen the crown jewels, and she needed me to get them back. So of course I turned off the bath and headed out for an adventure, traveling the globe, wrestling jaguars, jumping off exploding ships, and eventually retrieving the queen’s jewels with just enough time to make it back to camp on Monday. I broke each story up into little episodes, each ending with a cliff-hanger, designed to fill the minutes between activities or entertain my campers during snack.
I didn’t want to tell the truth. And I think I understood on some deep level that the kids didn’t want me to either.
Then something strange happened. Kids started coming up to me—campers I didn’t know, who belonged to other counselors’ groups—and saying, “Hey, you’re Mac Barnett, right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you the guy who spies for the queen of England?”
And I would answer automatically, “Yes.”
And the group of kids who would gather to hear my stories grew.
I don’t know why I didn’t tell those kids, “Oh, no, I’m not really a spy. That’s just a story I tell.” Honestly, it never even occurred to me. I didn’t want to tell the truth. And I think I understood on some deep level that the kids didn’t want me to either. We were entering into the bargain all fiction writers make with their readers: The writer says, “I am going to tell you a lie.” And the reader says, “Okay, I will believe it.” Samuel Coleridge, the English Romantic poet and critic, called this contract “that willing suspension of disbelief.” Kids just call it make-believe.
I remember this one camper I had, a girl named Riley. Every day her mom would pack fresh fruit in Riley’s lunch, and every day Riley would throw the fruit away, in the ivy next to our lunch spot, and eat her pudding. After watching Riley do this a couple of times, I realized that it was literally my job to tell her not to. So the next day, as Riley headed over to the ivy, melon in hand, I intervened.
“Riley,” I said, “don’t throw your melon in the ivy.”
And I was pleased with myself for doing my job.
“Why not?” Riley said.
But I hadn’t expected this.
After thinking for a few seconds, I said, “Because if you throw your melon in the ivy, the seeds are going to get everywhere, and pretty soon our whole camp will be taken over by melons.”
* Unfortunately, for the next five years, until I could finally write full time, all my jobs involved being an authority figure for children. I faked it, sometimes badly.
It was probably at that moment that I decided I did not want to be an authority figure for children but just wanted to tell them stories.*
Riley just shook her head. “That’s not going to happen!”
And I thought, “Oh yeah?”
So on Friday, the last day of camp, I woke up early, which was a tremendous sacrifice for me, and I went to the grocery store, and I bought the biggest melon I could find. And that morning I crept over to the lunch area and hid the giant melon in the ivy.
And at lunchtime I said, real nonchalant, “Hey, Riley. Why don’t you take a look in the ivy and see what happened with all that fruit you threw away?”
And Riley gave me a look, and I gave Riley the same look back, and then she headed over to the ivy. She trudged around, looking down for a few seconds, and then she stopped. Her eyes got huge. And then she bent down and picked up the melon and lifted it aloft.
“Look!” she said, and all the kids rushed over.
It was a real commotion.
“Wow, Riley, that’s so cool!”
“Amazing!”
“Riley, you did it!”
(Clearly, this fiction I’d created would, if anything, lead to more kids throwing their fresh fruit in the ivy. Already I was uninterested in teaching lessons with my stories.)
And then there was a pause, and one kid said, “Hey, why is there a supermarket sticker on this melon?”
And all the children looked at me, skeptically.
And again I thought for a few seconds, and then I said, “That’s also why I’m always telling you guys to throw your stickers in the trash can: Because when you litter, it ruins the beauty of nature.”
And all the kids nodded and agreed that was indeed a good explanation.
The rest of the day, wherever we went, Riley proudly carried her melon, which was bigger than her head, cradled in front of her like some precious and magical object. Which it was! It’s very hard to put into words, exactly: Riley knew that she hadn’t really grown a gigantic melon in three days. But she also knew that she had. She was making believe. We all were—Riley’s belief was so strong that by the end of the day she’d made me make believe too.
Make believe. What a wonderful phrase for the active commitment we make to fiction. It’s most commonly used to describe the way kids play. A kind of wholehearted pretending in which a new world is simply spoken into existence: “Let’s play house. I’ll be the mom and you be the dad and Jeff is our dog. The table is our house and that rug is our giant swimming pool. We run a hot dog stand. These forks are hot dogs.” And just like that, it’s true. Identities change. Objects transform. The room rearranges. Reality is altered simply because everyone agrees to make themselves believe it is so.
Fiction is a kind of game, and reading is a way of playing. Each story comes with its own set of rules. Some of those rules are inherited from genre or the novelistic tradition. Others are local to the story. “In this story, animals can talk but no one can do magic.” “In this story, people do magic but animals can’t talk.” “In this story, aliens live undetected among us.” “In this story, the French Revolution never happened.” “In this story, everything that happens is something that could happen in the real world, but you have access to the main character’s thoughts.” “This story is told in unattributed dialogue—the whole thing is people talking, and to understand what’s going on, you have to figure out who’s saying what.” The reader must learn the rules and agree to them in order to play the game.
Kids can exist in this in-between place full of uncertainty and porousness and ambiguity and all kinds of liminal stuff that dead dull finished grown-ups find difficult to endure.
When we read, we make believe. We aren’t duped or ensorcelled. Deep down we decide. We make ourselves believe. We know the characters in stories aren’t real, but our feelings for them are. We know the things in the stories never happened, but we can’t wait to learn what happens next. It’s make-believe when adults take a photo in front of 221B Baker Street, the London address of Sherlock Holmes, which is marked by a plaque, installed in 1990, between 237 and 241. These people don’t care that Sherlock Holmes is a fake detective or that (and I’ve double-checked my math on this) 221 is not a number between 237 and 241. They’re making believe. So are the people who travel to Dublin on June 16 to follow the path through the city that Leopold Bloom takes in Ulysses. So is the reader who says, about the characters in a favorite series, “I feel like these people are my friends,” or the one who finishes a long novel and keeps saying sadly, “I’m just going to miss living in that world.”
So when adults read, we make believe too. It’s just that kids are much better at it. For one thing, they’re more adept at learning new rules—and not just because it’s the way they play. It’s the way kids live. When you’re a child, every room you enter and every encounter you have is governed by a new and unspoken system of protocols that you must quickly divine. Mess up, and the results are disastrous: a tongue-lashing from Mom, or no dessert, or a week without video games. Dinner at home runs on one set of rules, dinner at a restaurant runs on another, and dinner at home with your mom’s new boyfriend runs on a different set altogether. You’ll be telling a story that would be perfectly fine to tell in the first two circumstances when you notice that your mother is glaring at you, horrified and furious: “We don’t tell that story in front of Kevin!” And in that moment you learn how to have dinner with Kevin—and a little bit about your mom and that story too. That’s what literary fiction is: It’s dinner with Kevin.
Children are perceptive, flexible, and open-minded. They have to be. Childhood is a long series of experiments—testing out hypotheses and making adjustments. It seems only right that so much of the best children’s literature is experimental too. Kids read without tightly held notions of what a story can or should be. An unconventional structure or new approach bothers them not a whit. It’s an adult who is much more likely to be bothered. Adults, when we come into contact with something we don’t understand, tend to push it away. Difficult art can make us feel stupid. Literature can be a challenge to our dearly prized sense of mastery, the stability intrinsic to the very concept of being a grown-up. “Grown,” past participle: We have grown up. We are finished growing.
But kids are proudly unfinished. And when they encounter a story that makes demands of the reader—a story that requires thought and feeling and imagination in order to be fully understood—kids do what they do so well, so many times each day: They bravely work to comprehend the new.
When children read, they’re aided not just by their flexible mind, but also by the power of their imagination. They’re capable of a wholehearted spiritual commitment to fiction that most adults find difficult to muster. E. B. White, the essayist and critic who also wrote some of the most beloved American children’s books, put it this way: “Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe. They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is as nothing to a child.”*
* White wasn’t condemning all librarians. At the time he was in a quarrel with a particular librarian, Anne Carroll Moore, the influential head of children’s services at the New York Public Library. Moore hated White’s book Stuart Little, in which a mouse is born to a human woman, and which ends abruptly and ambiguously, with the little mouse’s future very much up to the reader. Moore thought it was the product of a “sick mind” and had no business being read by children. White, obviously, disagreed and bit back in a 1966 New York Times piece titled “The Librarian Said It Was Bad for Children”: “I detected in Miss Moore’s letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature— rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis. And this I was not sure of.” Time has proved White right as far as Stuart Little, today widely regarded as a classic. But the contest over the “rules governing the writing of juvenile literature,” the battle between inflexible orthodoxy and explosive innovation, still rages.
While I’m loath to mess with White’s metaphor, I wonder if it isn’t actually the case that kids are able to stand astride the fence that separates reality from make-believe, to exist in both worlds simultaneously. Obviously, a springbok is much too small to do that. Maybe a giraffe? No, we should stick to antelope. How tall is a gnu? Children stand astride the fence like giant elands. Okay, new metaphor.
The child who makes believe straddles the threshold of a secret door, with one foot in reality and one foot in fiction. Kids can exist in this in-between place full of uncertainty and porousness and ambiguity and all kinds of liminal stuff that dead dull finished grown-ups find difficult to endure.
And it’s only in this in-between place—when we let go of our priors, loosen our grasp on reality—that a person can encounter the new. We say that we “lose ourselves in a good book” because the self must be shed before we can change. The sublimity of a sentence or a picture, the thrill of a plot, the intimacy of communing with a character—the beauty of a good story and the truth it contains can shock us into surrendering our certainties. And in that gloriously unsettled moment, our sense of the possible is enlarged. Every story is a secret door, an invitation to imagine another world and, by believing so, make it real.
When I saw Riley carrying that melon all those years ago, I realized that children were ideal readers, at least for the kinds of stories that I wanted to tell. The curiosity, sensitivity, and imagination of children will always demand new and ambitious fictions. Kids have made me a better writer, but they’ve also made me a better reader. The genius of children is a challenge to all grown-ups, if we can humble ourselves, to let kids teach us how to read: to marvel at the possibilities of language, to blur the boundaries of ourselves, and to be changed for a moment or forever. May we always be unfinished.
Copyright © 2026 by Mac Barnett. Published 2026 by Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
Mac Barnett is the ninth U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, appointed by the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader. He’s a New York Times-bestselling author of stories for children and the writer, with Jon Klassen, of Looking at Picture Books, a newsletter for adults about how picture books work. Mac’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than five million copies worldwide. Mac’s books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Awards, three E.B. White Read Aloud Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award,Germany’s Jugendliteraturpreis, China’s Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award, The Netherlands’ Silver Griffel, and Italy’s Premio Orbil.
Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
