Bloody and Awesome: A Profile of Adam Gidwitz

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When children’s book author Adam Gidwitz started middle school, back in Baltimore a few decades ago, he fell in with the cool kids—and that was maybe where the trouble began. “There were two kids in particular that I thought were really smart and really funny, and to be honest, they probably were,” he recalled last month at Anaïs, a wine bar in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. “Like, they ended up having a rock band that became kind of famous after we graduated from high school. It’s not around anymore, but it was very successful. Very successful. I was not wrong when I thought they were cool—they were legitimately cool—but they also weren’t very nice.”

Their not-niceness took the form of games of hide-and-seek where they would intentionally fail to seek the young Gidwitz, or they would trick him into pretending he knew things—people, references—that they had just made up, then call him on it. But Gidwitz was a follower, a hanger-on, so he put up with it. Until one day, when he was sporting a new Stüssy T-shirt at school, one of the cool kids called him a poser, because he wasn’t a skateboarder.

“And then somehow, through the magic of cool kids, he got the entire class to start chanting ‘Poser! Poser!’” Gidwitz said. “I don't know how it's possible. It feels like a dream—like, like, unrealistic—but very clearly in my mind, that is exactly what happened. And it was probably the moment when it broke for me.”

Gidwitz gave up on the cool kids. But that’s when things actually got worse. His new gang of friends was not cool, or smart or funny. Instead, they were bored. And in their eighth-grade boredom, they started stealing booze from their parents’ liquor cabinets and sneaking out late at night. Gidwitz and another kid began shoplifting, and when that wasn’t thrilling enough, they broke into cars, testing doors to see if they were open but also trying, unsuccessfully, to cut through the roof off a rag-top convertible with the corkscrew of a Swiss Army knife. They took cameras, videocameras, golf clubs, even an answering machine, he explained.

Still, they had lines they would not cross. When Gidwitz’s friend suggested they pee in one car’s gas tank, Gidwitz said no. “I was like, ‘No, dude, that’s gonna, like, ruin their day tomorrow,’” he said, “as if, like, everything we were doing wasn’t ruining their day.”

They did not pee in the gas tank, thanks to Gidwitz. Now he was the one with authority, the cool kid leading the rest into iniquity.

“In the end, after it all blew up, these guys all blamed me as the ringleader for all of this kind of, like, hooliganish behavior,” he said. “And I'm sure, to some degree, they were right, because I was, like, intensely bored with my life. I was just like, my brain was not at all stimulated, and I was angry, and I don't know what was going on, but I was, I'm sure I was leading them.”

How Gidwitz responded to getting caught—by his mother, who discovered him out on Cold Spring Lane late one night, who grounded him “forever,” and to whom, after he’d spent a week tossing and turning and suffering with guilt, he finally confessed the extent of his crimes—is arguably the reason I’m writing about him today. Because today Gidwitz is one of the premier writers of middle-grade children’s literature, and I don’t use the word “literature” lightly. His work is equal parts smart and sensitive, rooted in scholarship and wildly creative, easy to parse but formally innovative. My kids love it, and so do I. Over the years, I’ve often wondered why no one has written a full-fledged profile of the guy, but now, since he has a new book coming out in February—Max in the Land of Lies, the sequel to 2024’s Max in the House of Spies—I figured I’d do it myself.

Gidwitz, now 42, is best known for his reinventions of the classic Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, beginning in 2010 with A Tale Dark & Grimm, the first volume of a trilogy that includes In a Glass Grimmly and The Grimm Conclusion and that spawned both a podcast, Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest, and a Netflix series, also called A Tale Dark & Grimm. All share a common, de-Disneyfied approach: They resuscitate the cruel, violent, weird, and often disgusting details of the original fairy tales—eyes pecked out, heads cut off, children murdered, often by their parents or step-parents, and sent to Hell with hardly a thought—but somehow make them not just palatable but freaking hilarious to 8-to-12-year-olds.

He achieves this partly through craft, partly through spirit. His work is full of authorial asides and intrusions—whole paragraphs where he directly addresses his audience, calling attention to the strange and disturbing nature of the tales, and often reassuring readers (especially younger readers) that while things may look dire for the princesses, princes, and peasants, and while there is not necessarily an easy, miraculous happy ending on the way, stories have a way of working themselves out, if not for the best then for the good enough. Here’s typical aside:

If Gidwitz sounds like a teacher running a story circle for grade-schoolers, it’s because he is. Or was. After graduating from Columbia University, where he studied English literature and read the Harry Potter and Golden Compass books for fun, he got a job as an associate teacher at St. Ann’s, a famously liberal and creative school in Brooklyn whose alumni include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lena Dunham, and Beastie Boy Mike D.

“I wasn’t great at controlling my class,” he explained. “We would get all excited together, and then I could not get them back, which is an important teacher skill.”

The answer, discovered in his second year at St. Ann’s, was storytelling: He told the kids tales from his life—stories about playing with G.I. Joes or averaging six fouls per game on his high-school basketball team, not about the drinking, sneaking out, and burglary—and they loved it. Gidwitz became known for his prowess, and storytime evolved into a school play: “a retelling of The Sword in the Stone,” he said, “that I had essentially just plagiarized from the Disney movie.” Still, it was enough to catch the attention of one student’s mother, a literary agent, who praised Gidwitz’s work and eventually invited him to submit to her.

Naturally, as one does, Gidwitz immediately quit his job—absolutely delighting his then girlfriend, now wife, the historian Lauren Mancia—and devoted himself to completing a 400-page literary novel about ancient Egypt. “Essentially, I thought it needed to sound like Johnny Tremaine,” he said, “so that’s how I wrote it.” The agent’s response was classic: “If you wanted to start on a new project, I wouldn't blame you,” he said, “which very clearly meant Throw it in the trash can. I was very devastated. I remember it was right before Thanksgiving that next year, and I was like, I didn’t feel thankful for anything.”

Instead, he went back to tutoring and picking up substitute teaching gigs at the school—and that was how he was one day asked to once again read a story to a group of second graders. Casting about for inspiration, he spotted his book of Grimm’s fairy tales, which he’d read in college and remembered for their weirdness.

“I looked at one called ‘Faithful Johannes,’” he said, “and in ‘Faithful Johannes,’ two children get their heads cut off by their parents. And I was like, Can I read this to children? Will I get fired? And I thought, Let’s find out. So I brought it in, read it to the kids, and they started to get nervous really quickly. So I started to, like, warn them when bad things were gonna happen, and I tried to make a lot of jokes to calm them down, and did all the things I do whenever I was telling a story to these kids, and by the end of the story, they were, you know, shrieking and screaming and all that. And this little girl comes up to me after I’ve told the story, and she sticks her finger in my face—I will never forget it—she sticks her finger in my face, and she says, ‘You should make that into a book.’”

So he did. Just before he was about to leave his apartment the very next day, he says, he stopped, turned around, and opened up his computer: “I wrote down the story exactly the way I told it to the kids, with all the jokes and all the warnings and everything right in that story. And I sent that to that same agent, and she called me after she read it, and she said, ‘This is pretty good.’”

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A Tale Dark & Grimm was released in November 2010, to not that many reviews (at least, not that many I could find). Kirkus called it (ahem) “satisfying enough to overcome an intrusive narrator,” and was slightly kinder to its sequels (“a creative romp through traditional and tradition-based story-scapes, compulsively readable and just as read-out-loudable“ and “entertaining story-mongering”). But really, the only review that mattered was the one my then-9-year-old daughter Sasha wrote for school: “bloody and awesome” was how she described it. And, said Gidwitz, it sold “well enough to attract attention and surprise at Penguin,” its publisher.

As bloody and awesome as the Grimm trilogy is, those are not Gidwitz’s only modes. The Inquisitor’s Tale (2016), set in France in the year 1242, follows the story of three children—a peasant girl who sees visions of the future, a mixed-race monk so strong he can tear the leg off a donkey (“you will be glad to know the donkey did not feel a thing”), and a Jewish boy who can heal the sick—plus their greyhound, who has recently returned from the dead, as they are all being pursued by the forces of the king, for reasons initially unclear. If that’s not enough, the story is told Canterbury Tales–style, by a group of travelers—a nun, a friar, a jongleur, a troubadour—gathered at an inn. Yes, there is magic, and plenty of Gidwitzian humor (a farting dragon!), but there’s a density of storytelling and an intricacy of detail that announce this as a different kind of work: one that blends the tales we tell ourselves, both true and false, with the very real realities of life in a particular place and time. (It was awarded a Newbery Honor.)

The follow-up to that was a series of six shorter, easier books written with collaborators: The Unicorn Rescue Society, about a secret organization dedicated to protecting mythological creatures, from the Jersey Devil to the Sasquatch to the Chupacabras. The chief antagonist: the industrialist Schmoke brothers. The Wall Street Journal did not like this one. Me, I thought they were fine, but written for a younger audience and therefore less complex than I, and my kids, look forward to¹.

The recent Max books, however, bring Gidwitz ever closer to contemporary reality: They’re about a 12-year-old Jewish Berliner, Max Bretzfeld, who flees Germany during World War II and winds up living with a posh, secular-Jewish family in London, where he is eventually recruited to become a spy himself. This being a Gidwitz book, Max is accompanied by a kobold and a dybbuk, who kvetch, complain, and crack wise throughout the journey (which eventually, minor spoiler alert, leads back to Berlin). Apart from the mythological ones, many of the characters are, or are based on, real personages from the era, like the brothers Ewen and Ivor Montagu, one a Navy intelligence officer, the other a filmmaker and Communist spy. As for the stakes, well, this is a Jewish kid in World War II, so they feel realer than ever². In these books, the narrator does not intervene reassuringly, and those who die do not come back.

What unites all of Gidwitz’s work is a unique sense of what it means to be a child—specifically one between the ages of 10 and 12 (with occasional forays into 9 and 13). This is a time when kids become aware of their own power: their intelligence, their physical abilities, their sense of what’s really going on around them. They are achieving a brand-new measure of independence—yet they still rely on adults for protection, for comfort, for role models. And in Gidwitz’s stories, just as in reality, they get confused. Parents love their kids but murder them; kids can see the future but can’t escape it.

I like to think Gidwitz remains in touch with this child’s sensibility because his own play time was so protected when he was young. “When I got home from school,” he said, “my mom insisted that I not do my homework, that I go and play for two or three hours, and then we had dinner, and then after dinner, I would do my homework, which meant my homework often didn’t get done.” And today, he said, his writing is an extension of that play time. “This morning, I was, like, in my little writing shed with my notebook, essentially like playing with G.I. Joes, but now asking myself much harder questions.” Once, he said, it was How do I get out of this situation with this cool kid who's so mean to me now? Now it’s Why does a nation commit itself to lies? Asking himself these “harder questions,” he said, “cultivates an ongoing sense of a little bit of innocence and openness that most adults don’t, I guess, have time to allow themselves to cultivate.”

Still, he also feels for the parents, who are almost as trapped as the kids. “I do think most adults have kids’ best interests at heart,” he said, “but they are too wrapped up in their own bullshit to do a good job of taking care of those children in many cases.”

Take the Roald Dahl book Matilda, he said: “What it makes it so powerful is that there is this little girl, Matilda, who is so smart, so special, and her parents can't see it, and she has to—she is able to demonstrate specialness beyond even her wildest dreams, and ultimately overcome these blind adults who don't see how special she is, and find one adult who does.”

It’s a struggle that Gidwitz remembers well. “My mom worshiped both my father and me, and I was always competing for oxygen,” he said. “And I think I always felt like no matter what I said, my dad would find some way to belittle it or put it down. He didn’t. He didn’t mean to. … But, like, my most vivid memories of being with my family, many of them are me taking a risk and trying to say something, and my dad stepping on it or putting it down or saying something even better. And so I think, like, one of my core pains is that feeling of lack of recognition and a desire to be recognized for what I do and like not to be recognized for what I don’t do—but just fairly. I didn’t want to beat my dad, I just wanted to share the stage.” So now, while Gidwitz’s readers may see kids getting their heads cut off, Gidwitz sees kids who are “not being valued the way they deserve to be valued.”

Kids, of course, don’t always make that easy. Gidwitz on his 8-year-old daughter: “There are some days where I'm the greatest thing ever invented, and she doesn't want to go to go to bed without talking to me. And then there are other days when I embarrass her and I couldn't be seen around school with her.” As of publication time, however, she still has her head.

What should Trying! do next? Tell me!

The Year of No Friends

I began this article with what I hoped might get your attention: This awesome children’s author spent middle school doing crime! But for me, that pales in comparison to what happened next: With eighth grade ending and high school about to begin, Gidwitz gave up on friendship entirely.

“I came to believe that I couldn’t be trusted to have friends,” he said. “Like, I was just making bad choices, and it was just leading me to misery.” Also, his parents had forbade him from hanging out with everyone he’d ever been friends with, so he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Still, when give the choice, he demurred. “A kid would, you know, sit at a lunch table and we’d have a nice time chatting or whatever,” he said, “and then it would be like, ‘You want to hang out after school or whatever?’ And I would say, ‘No, I’m okay.’”

Instead, he studied. At the Park School—the private Baltimore school that Gidwitz described as the quirky Jewish counterpart to the Gilman School, which Luigi Mangione attended—ninth grade was the first year for real letter grades, so Gidwitz focused. And when he focused, he discovered there were subjects he actually liked—such as English and history. “History had these amazing stories that were true,” he said, “and I could learn them and enjoy them and then, like, regurgitate them on a test with, like, a flare or an interpretation.”

He did well, and at the end of the year he signed up for tenth-grade AP history—a class he called “definitional” for his school—and found himself talking to another boy who’d done likewise. “He asked me if I wanted to come and play Axis and Allies, the board game, at his house with another guy. And that sounded good to me, so I said yes.” The year of no friends was over.

The first time Gidwitz told me this story, back before the pandemic, it stunned me, and I’m still in awe today. Kids and young teens are capable of a lot of incredible things, but social self-isolation is not one of them. Temptations abound; the rewards for endurance are distant and vague. Only a kid would say to themselves, “Okay, no friends for a year,” but it takes adult levels of commitment to make that a reality. Maybe even more than adult. I know I couldn’t do it.

“I think that pain was really intense,” Gidwitz explained. “I mean, I was, it was literally for the rest of the time I lived in that house, which is until sophomore year of college, I would feel sick when I looked out the window and saw Cold Spring Lane,” where his mother had discovered him that one late night, and where his downfall and rebirth had begun. To me, that sickness sounds like something from a novel—the way we exaggerate our feelings—but Gidwitz assured me, “This is not a metaphor. I felt like I wanted to vomit.”

And so maybe this is Gidwitz’s ongoing literary arc, to move from the metaphorical to the visceral, to a place where the actions, good or ill, intentional or accidental, have all-too-tangible consequences. His likely next project, he said, is “a book that scares me more than any other I’ve written so far.” It’s about his great-grandfather, Jake Gidwitz, who left Lithuania in the late 19th century to avoid conscription into the Russian army³, and established a new branch of the family in the United States. The story Adam had been told was that Jake arrived with just $5 to his name and turned it into a retail fortune, opening stores and paying back his investors.

“His credit was golden thereafter,” Gidwitz said, “and he was able to make enough money from the stores that he was able to give $1,000 to each of his three sons, which was a lot of money. And those three sons got together and they bought a small hand cream company that they turned into a hair care company called Helene Curtis, which became one of the biggest hair care companies in the country.” The money those early Gidwitzes made stuck around for generations, eventually enabling Adam to quit his job at St. Ann’s and pursue writing some 80 years later. As he put it, “I owe my career to Jake.”

Naturally, that was not the whole story. In the last few years, Gidwitz has gotten ahold of his great-grandfather’s memoir, which adds juicy details to the story—fistfights, a gunshot wound to the leg—but also makes it clear that Jake made a lot of his fortune off of Black sharecroppers in Leflore County, Mississippi, where Jake became the largest landowner and where 48 lynchings took place between 1877 and 1950. The heroic patriarch whose hard work enabled Gidwitz to become a writer was also a cotton planter in one of the poorest, most racist parts of the country. And if that wasn’t enough, Gidwitz showed me a tiny item that his friend’s wife, a historian, had dug up from an old newspaper: “Jake Gidwitz of Minter City killed a negro who assaulted him with a club.”

How do you turn this into a story that precocious sixth graders (and their dads) will want to read? And how do you make it entertaining and not just, as Gidwitz put it, “a mea culpa”? For one, Gidwitz is giving his fictionalized Jake a younger brother, whose point of view the novel will track all the way up to—but not including—the club assault.

“I want the main character not to know what happened either,” Gidwitz said, “and Jake not to really explain it to him. And then you're sort of left with this moral gray thing of like, so what do you do? You stick with your brother? Or do you strike out on your own and say forget this guy?”

As always with Gidwitz, and with life, these are hard questions to answer. In Gidwitz’s books, however, the children who face them often have mythological beings—from talking ravens to fire-breathing salamanders—to assist them, even if they must, in the end, answer the questions for themselves. Surely, too, there will be at least one for Jake’s brother; I don’t know what kind it will be—a golem, maybe, or something out of voodoo?—and I don’t want to ask Gidwitz for that kind of spoiler. But whichever one it is, I could use its help myself. I’ve got a lot of tough moral issues to confront these days. We all do. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. He also lucked into writing The Empire Strikes Back: So You Want to Be a Jedi?, a canonical Star Wars novel.

2. Gidwitz also has a way of introducing Jewish elements to his stories in a way where they’re essential but not overwhelming. The Inquisitor’s Tale revolves around the destruction of 20,000 Talmud copies (which actually happened), and the Max books are quite subtle in the way they talk not only about Max’s Jewishness but how it differs from that of his English hosts, the Montagus. This focus on Jewish issues has made Gidwitz’s in-person appearances somewhat complicated since the first Max book came out a year ago: One Upper East Side school canceled on him but didn’t explain why; at a school in Washington, D.C., he found himself speaking to a Jewish affinity group and having to answer really basic questions about what was happening not only in Gaza but on U.S. college campuses. “So these kids, like, they just need an adult to talk to them and tell them what's happening,” he said. And in suburban Chicago, Gidwitz appeared at a majority-Palestinian school where parents had worried about the “agenda” he might be promoting. The principal explained, Gidwitz told me, “that these families don't feel heard right now at all in the world, and so they need a way to express how they feel, and right now they're expressing it about your visit to me.” So Gidwitz showed up, accompanied by an armed security guard (the school’s, not his own), and talked about Max, and about fairy tales in general. “But they didn't like chant me down, nothing,” he said. One of the moms who was allowed to observe shook his hand afterward and said the talk was wonderful. “That was it,” said Gidwitz. “And that felt like what kids, what people, we needed to be doing, right? Not the canceling, but the ‘feel free to protest, but also listen.’”

3. Just like my great-grandfathers!

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