Illustration by Gérard DuBois

One favored story tells of a family moving into a lighthouse, of the birds that die flying into its beacon, of a buoy that turns out to be a floating mine. Alongside the through-line of gross mismanagement of public facilities is that of the father’s ongoing failure to meet his lighthouse goal: to write an epic novel of the sea. The tone of this illustrated story is comic, the color palette like taffy. It’s currently the most beloved read of my daughter, who is a toddler. When she sets it down, she turns to a pop-up book about a young sailor who is going to be eaten by his shipmates. She also loves the tragico-instructive tale “Should I Share My Ice Cream?,” in which, while the protagonist deliberates extensively about the ethical and gustatory implications of sharing, his beloved ice cream melts, unnoticed. Read children’s books enough times, and they start to seem like Shakespeare. Who is Corduroy if not a modern Miranda, full of wonder? What does the boy in “Snowy Day” learn if not that our world is but an insubstantial pageant? The Cat in the Hat is Falstaff, and Max, that wild thing on the heath, longs, Lear-like, for the kingdom of real love that he failed to recognize.

Or not. My daughter and I don’t read her books in quite the same way. “Where is ‘luckily’?” she asks. If I often experience her books as mock-epic, she sees language poetry. She doesn’t read for what happens next, I think, even as she has taken on her preschool teacher’s lilting “What’s going to happen?” before turning a page. What happens next is often just another random animal at the zoo. Some of the books have plots, but she reads them more like eternal landscapes. In that sense, nothing is happening, and she reads for that nothing, I think. I don’t really know my daughter’s heart; she doesn’t, either. Last night, in her sleep, she called out, “I don’t want a balloon!” What happens next?

“Remember when we used to read that book?” my daughter asked yesterday. She was talking about “Moby-Dick.” I mean, “Moby-Dick” for kids—it’s “Moby-Dick” in ten words. I mean, I guess that’s what she was talking about. It’s hard to tell if she’s just miming something I forgot I said to her. Remember? Is she nostalgic, at two and a half, for way back when?

My memory of my childhood home is that the main source of reading material was the inspirational quotes on the Celestial Seasonings tea boxes. Seven words of Emily Dickinson. Twelve words of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Were there really so few books? I ask my mom. She says yes, very few books: “I only read you books that I thought were not boring. That was hard to find. One I remember was ‘No Room for the Baker.’ ” I remember it! It’s about a baker who eventually has so many pets in his house that he has nowhere to sleep. I recall a story that my father told me: my mother for a time worked a night-shift job selling solar panelling—I have no idea why one sells solar panels at night—and so she took naps during the day in a closet, hoping to sleep undisturbed by me and my brother.

Having a child is like rereading your own childhood. I have long been attached to the story that my parents were both—and I basically admired this—indifferent to child culture: openly bored by piano recitals, graduations, children’s books. But the story that the story tells has recently shifted for me. I see how indifference to child culture was in no way indifference to children.

One idea of what children’s literature might be is whatever children read. In that sense, I read a lot as a child. And I realize that I associate almost all of what I read with my mother. The mysterious “Banacol” stickers on the apples she peeled for me, the Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookies tin, mailings from Ed McMahon, deputized to me, which might make us millions, my parents’ odd names on checks that had pale mountain ranges in the background, mountain ranges that I had been invited to select myself, from the sheet of so many options. It’s mostly a clatter of carbohydrates and junk mail, but all those words were so haunted—remain so haunted—by a sense of well-being, meaning, and light. My heart still lifts when I see language that recalls the covers of my mother’s textbooks: Basic basic, Fortran.

My daughter’s favorite book, the lighthouse story set among the pale Moomins, is in one sense a story of post-Second World War Finland, but it’s also a story of someone falling in love with the home he had all along, the one that had before seemed so insufficient. Moominpappa gives up on his epic novel of the sea. He writes, with pride, “How I miss my own secure verandah.” ♦