Following his 2020 foray into middle grade fiction, The Silver Arrow, novelist and journalist Lev Grossman returns to the world of children’s literature with his first picture book, The God of Sleep, illustrated by Huynh Kim Liên. In this tale told in rhyming verse, the god of the sun searches the realm of the gods, depicted in dreamy, dusky watercolors, for the missing god of sleep, so that the rest of the pantheon can get to bed. PW spoke with Grossman about the allure of depicting gods, the challenges of pivoting to the picture book form as a novelist, and writing poetry for children.
Where did the impetus for writing your first picture book come from?
I’ve only ever had two ideas for books—two good ideas—come out of dreams. I feel like I have a lot of ideas in dreams, and almost all of them are bad. One of them turned into The Magicians and the other one was The God of Sleep. I had a dream where I was reading Where Is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox, which I’ve read many times to my kids, but in the dream it wasn’t about sheep anymore; it was about gods. I woke up and it seemed like a matter of national security that I immediately write it. It even had the line in it, “The god of gold is gleaming,” which amazingly I cut many times, but it kept worming its way back in. So that one comes straight from my unconscious.
Gods—and godhood—are a recurring theme in your work, and there are many who appear here. What do you think draws you to write about divine beings, and are there any who you wanted to fit into this book, but just didn’t make the cut?
I’ve been a huge fan of mythology my whole life and it comes up in my work a lot. I’m sure my therapist would probably have a good answer for what I find so appealing about them. I think it’s something about that combination of being a mighty elevated being, but then still possessing foibles. What I find funny about The God of Sleep is the idea that there are no humans around as the sun god is sort of wandering through the realm of the gods, and we see them doing what they do on a daily basis. This is like a day at the office for the gods. The god of the ocean has to get his laps in every day, and this is him taking care of it. He’s not smiting mortals, he’s not overthrowing an almighty thunder god, he’s just doing this thing that he does every day. I found that very funny, and so I wanted all the gods to be sort of surprised in the middle of their daily routines.
There were many gods that fell on the cutting room floor, generally because I couldn’t think of a good rhyme for them. I’m going back to the very earliest draft of this story, of which I have about 30.... There was a god of storms, and a god of love was in there. Gosh, I hope it’s a big success so I can do a sequel because there are some real gems here. [Laughs.] “The god of storms was roaring and the god of love was adoring,” and then it rhymed with snoring. I don’t know what happened to that stanza, it was a good one. There was a god of babies.... I don’t know what the god of babies gets up to during the day.
You’ve worked on inherently collaborative projects before, including graphic novels and screenplays, but your first picture book must have been a new experience. How did you find the process of working with illustrator Huynh Kim Liên and what is the most unexpected thing she contributed to the book?
I actually found it challenging. My training as a writer is as a novelist, and being a novelist doesn’t prepare you well for collaboration because it’s just words and you’re the one calling all the shots. Of course, when I was writing the book I had very particular images in my head. I had to discover again what I find when I dabble in screenwriting, which is that it’s not a solo performance; it’s a duet. You welcome in, and are delightfully surprised by, other people’s ideas. Theres always a moment when you balk, and you want to demand total control, but then you give it up and super cool things happen. On the theme of control, late in the book, the god of sleep has to go to the bathroom before she goes to bed. Originally, that did not appear as an image in the book and I insisted that the god of sleep be shown on the toilet. So, if anyone is offended by that, that is completely my fault.
I had no idea what the sun god looked like; she’s much cuter than I imagined. It’s easy to write something and tell someone to draw it, but I didn’t know what pretzel whales looked like and now I know. She [Huynh Kim Liên] also does a wonderful thing on the final spread where each of the gods from the rest of the book are asleep in a pile. My experience reading this book to kids is that’s their favorite page because they can go back through and find all the gods from the rest of the book, and that was completely her. The endpapers also are entirely hers. It’s so much prettier than I ever imagined, and so much of the look and feel of it came from her.
Do you make a distinction between a rhyming picture book and a poem, and if so, where would you place The God of Sleep?
That’s a dangerous question for me. My father [Allen Grossman] was a poet. In fact, I think the last interview he gave was to PW when his last book was published. I always swore up and down that I would never write poetry. That was my dad’s thing and I would have my thing. And now I’ve crossed a line into writing a rhyming children’s book, which I do think of as poetry. I have a really guilty vice, which is my love of light verse. I’m a big fan of Edward Lear and Ogden Nash and Updike’s light verse. Writing it is obviously one of those things that’s much harder than it looks. It’s quite a bit like doing a crossword or one of those fiendish New York Times word games that I’m addicted to. Instinctively, going in, I think that you want all the rhymes to be very natural and perfect and just to line up precisely, but I quickly learned that it’s much funnier when about every four or five rhymes you force a rhyme so that the reader can tell you didn’t really have one and you had to make do. It’s good for the child to know that you’re working hard and all the stuff doesn’t just happen by itself.
I’d like to make a distinction between a rhyming picture book and a poem, but I can’t because I don’t think there is any. It’s very funny to think that I’m now going to publish a poem, which I swore never to do. I guess there’s only so long you can run until poetry catches up to you.
The God of Sleep by Lev Grossman, illus. by Huỳnh Kim Liên. Little, Brown, $18.99 Mar. 24 ISBN 978-0-3165-7096-1
