The only places I’ve ever heard the names Deirdre and Daphne are in middle-grade fiction (at least until Frasier was on TV every day). As such, I never knew how to pronounce them and spent my childhood thinking it was “DEE-dree” and “dah-FEEN.” (The other word that I remember most prominently mispronouncing was “diabetes,” which I assumed was “DIE-uh-bates.”) I don’t know what my trouble with multisyllabic d-words was. And there were SO many girls and women in my middle school and YA books named Deirdre and Daphne!
When I was in my 20s I sometimes wished someone would hire me to pontificate about middle grade and young adult fiction. I guess I’d never heard of something called a blog? Now I could even have a podcast! I have not only a huge collection of paperbacks but also highly specific opinions and FEELINGS about all of them.
As a child I thought there must be something about “having three names” that made you more likely to become an author. Before you write me off as a bit dense, these were three-named authors (most important were Zilpha Keatley Snyder and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor) whose “middle” names you would never mistake for middle names. Now I realize, duh, those are probably maiden names, which I didn’t have much experience with as a child–my mom kept her last name, and most of my friends’ moms either did the same or took a married name; there was the rare case of hyphenation, but no one I can recall with three unlinked names.
(Virginia Euwer Wolff, I assumed, went with three names so no one thought she was trying to be mistaken for Virginia Woolf.)
Zilpha Keatley Snyder is still my favorite author of “serious” middle grade fiction, and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor still wins my “comic” middle grade fiction award.
Other important categories, topics, and points to ponder re: middle grade fiction: the power of a series, my sizable collection of “children in the performing arts” literature, why Judy Blume’s writing for children is so superior to her writing for adults, and the surprising volume of REALLY dark–but kind of stealthily so–material (I’m thinking, here, of Louis Sachar and Marilyn Sachs in particular).
