What was the genesis for Bubble Trouble?
It wasn’t so much the possibility of happenings as the sound of the initial words…”bubble trouble,” an echoing phrase, certainly suggested trouble of a sort, and I began to think of the sort of trouble a large bubble might cause. But, underlying the possible events was the necessity of a sort of rhythm and sound. From where do you draw your ideas? I respond to certain tricks of language…rhymes, echoes, tongue-twisterish possibilities. And certain real-life experiences can be commanding. I wrote the book Memory (S & S, 1988) at a time when I was looking after my old aunt, who was losing her memory to a macabre extent. I certainly used our rather surreal experiences together in the book, but I invented things too. You spent years writing your books before they were ever published. It took a long time before I was able to make a living as a writer, and this is generally true unless one has great good luck with an early book. I worked as a librarian when the children were small, and wr
