In mid-May, a small group of people sat tucked in the back of a Toronto pub, looking expectantly at the storyteller seated at the table. But Robert Munsch, one of the bestselling Canadian children’s authors of all time, is nothing at all like the wild, colourful man familiar to generations of kids. With his glass of milk and plate of cheese and cold cuts, he comes across as soft spoken and contemplative. He’s not a writer, he’s always careful to explain. He’s a storyteller, which requires wacky facial expressions and exaggerated gestures. But today, with this group of friends, old and new, he’s just “Bob.” Today he stutters more than usual, possibly because he’s still recovering from the stroke he had two years ago, possibly because he’s nervous about a revelation that will be made tonight in a television interview. Often, he loses his place mid-sentence. Sometimes he loses his train of thought entirely.
In the middle of lunch, his secret slips out. His daughter Julie had told me about the interview — “an important exposé,” she called it. I wanted to know what it would be about. “I was addicted to alcohol and cocaine,” Munsch says, then looks down with a forced smile. Everyone is quiet for a few moments. Someone tries to change the subject. Later he says, somewhat sadly, “There’s a way to kill the conversation.”
He hadn’t meant to tell the reporter, but it slipped out. Now, after a lifetime of gaining the trust and love of parents and kids everywhere, he feared the news could destroy him. More than anything, he feared losing the ability to help kids feel okay about themselves; he needed that to feel okay about himself. A man who had built his reputation on books that teach kids to accept themselves, no matter how flawed they may feel, was about to learn what that kind of honesty might mean for him.
His cellphone rings, and he pulls it out of his shoulder bag and answers it. It’s Julie, calling about tonight’s show, and clearly they’re both upset. “Julie, it’s not you,” he says softly. “Julie, I’m not going to do anything until it airs.” He stops to listen. “We’ll see how they play it,” he says finally, before hanging up.
A month earlier, in the basement of his suburban home in Guelph, Ontario, Munsch sat at his desk in the space that doubles as his office. On the walls hang brightly drawn pictures sent to him by children from all over the world. This is where he writes his books, but today the story is his own.
It begins in 1945, in Pittsburgh. He was the fourth of nine children born to Thomas John Munsch Jr., a lawyer, and Margaret McKeon, a housewife. The family lived on McDonald Avenue, in a huge barn house where all the neighbourhood kids would play, chaos stirring in every corner. He was an ordinary little kid, he says, “content with being a little kid.” But soon depression took over, though at the time he didn’t know what it was. He remembers standing in the bathroom one day in fifth grade, staring in the mirror at his ten-year-old self, and chanting the words “I’m not happy” over and over. He was tired of grown-ups telling him how happy children are supposed to be. He remembers walking home from school, climbing the hill to his front door. “I just can’t take another step,” he would think to himself. “It’s just too hard.”
His brothers and sisters say they remember him as a normal, active little boy. “None of us walked around saying, ‘Hey, Bob looks depressed,’” says his brother Nathan. Six years younger than Bob, he says of Bob’s childhood that he “respects his interpretation,” but that the rest of the family really didn’t know he was as unhappy as he now says he was. “On one level,” Nathan says, “I’ve at times been distressed because I feel like he inadvertently ends up portraying the family environment as oppressive.”
Nathan says he’s often surprised at his siblings’ and Bob’s contrasting interpretations of events, possibly owing to depression, which Nathan believes runs in the Munsch family. He thinks their father may have suffered from the illness but was never diagnosed or treated. “It just seemed that somebody at his age who had accomplished as much as he did, he should have enjoyed himself more,” says Nathan. “Whether that was clinical depression, I don’t know.” In past interviews, Munsch has said that his grandfather committed suicide.
Munsch met his wife, Ann, while working at a daycare in Boston in 1971 — “I liked that she liked walks,” he says — and their first date was a stroll around Walden Pond. “Afterwards, she confessed to me, ‘I thought you’d be a neat fling.’” He chuckles at this. “A neat fling,” he repeats. “A year later, we got married.” Quietly, he adds, “It’s a fairly regular story.”
The couple moved to Guelph a few years later, after Munsch accepted a job at the lab school in the University of Guelph’s family studies program. It was there that his storytelling talents began to impress his colleagues. His supervisors encouraged him to try his hand at writing, which he eventually did. His first story, Mud Puddle, was published by Annick Press in 1979.
Around that time, the Munsches decided to have their own children. The couple had, after all, devoted their lives to children, so when Ann became pregnant they were ecstatic. They drew pictures for each other of what the baby would look like, and passed notes like teenagers. The baby, a boy, would be named Sam, they agreed. “Until that time, I had this funny feeling you could just sashay your way around and get what you wanted,” Munsch tells me. “Then I discovered that we couldn’t.” Sam, and the year after, a girl named Gilly, were both stillborn.
The couple was devastated. Munsch, bipolar and unaware of it, did not know how to cope. He had begun drinking years before, which helped numb the depression. He would start, then stop, then relapse. His sleep apnea hadn’t yet been diagnosed, so he wasn’t sleeping either.
