“I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” The words came to him soon after Sam died. They comforted him, and he quietly began singing them to himself. It was a way to keep the babies alive, at least in his own head.

Sitting in front of an audience in Guelph five years later, he slowly started to make up a story. It wasn’t perfect yet, but the chorus was “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” It didn’t go over well, but he decided at that moment to write a book about it, and that the book would be the babies’ tombstone. He went backstage and began to cry. The story, Love You Forever, went on to sell 22 million copies in North America alone.

Though mortality may seem like an unusual subject for a children’s book, that very attribute — an honest discussion of real life with children — has become Munsch’s trademark. For example, the main character in Giant, or Waiting for the Thursday Boat is a giant named McKeon who is angry at God and threatens to pound him into applesauce. The book was banned in numerous schools after parents and teachers complained about the giant’s anger, and because in the book God is depicted as a little black girl. Another of his books, From Far Away, is based on the real story of Saoussan Askar, who was born in Beirut. It follows Saoussan as she moves to Canada, and feels ashamed at not knowing how to apologize in English to her teacher after peeing in the woman’s lap. Munsch kids are happy, sad, angry kids. They’re kids in wheelchairs, kids with bossy parents, and kids from all cultures and religions. After his own unhappy childhood, Munsch says he just wants to make kids feel like they’re okay, that life isn’t perfect and everybody has flaws.

It’s not just a one-way benefit. The act of performing, he says, is therapeutic. He likes touring, especially to far-off corners of the country, where he often stays with families of children who have written to him. Even in his off time, he’ll make surprise appearances at schools to hold impromptu storytelling sessions. It’s a way to get out of himself, and like a drug to him.

The interview shows Munsch sitting in his basement, speaking about the drugs and alcohol. He had meant only to speak about mental illness and about his books, but somehow he found himself talking about the cocaine and Narcotics Anonymous.

“I started drinking again and doing cocaine four years ago,” he told me that morning. He was off script again, so the pauses were longer, and the stuttering crept back into his speech. “That ended badly.” He had been an alcoholic previously, he said, before the kids, before joining Alcoholics Anonymous. He’d had relapses before but was sober almost fifteen years. Four years ago, someone offered him some homemade wine.

“I thought I could handle one glass.” But he couldn’t.

He only occasionally used cocaine, buying it in nearby cities like Hamilton and Toronto so his family and friends in Guelph wouldn’t find out. Each time, he said it would be the last. But a few weeks later, there he would be again. So he went back to AA, and joined Narcotics Anonymous. Pretty soon, he was hosting NA meetings in Guelph every morning. He told me he’s sober but not cured.

The scariest thing, he said, was telling his family. He had hidden it well: he wasn’t blowing all his money or staying high for days at a time. His wife understood his addiction, but telling his kids (now aged thirty-five, twenty-nine, and twenty-five) was hard, especially since he did it over Christmas dinner. Their first reaction was shock, which later turned into concern.

After the interview aired, the feedback was almost instantaneous. On Twitter, the response was divided: “I wish I could send The Paper Bag Princess to fight your demons for you,” one girl wrote. Others were less forgiving. “So Robert Munsch was a coke head… I’m looking forward to his new kids book: Why Daddy’s Nose Bleeds.” Still others are saddened by the news. One wrote, “I think my childhood is destroyed. Robert Munsch alcoholic/drug addict??” The following Monday, the newspapers all carried the story, and his publishers and the producers of his upcoming tour all voiced support. Munsch posted a note to parents on his website, where he explained his struggle with mental illness. At the end of the note, he wrote, “I hope that others will also understand. I hope that everyone will talk to their kids honestly, listen to them, and help them do their best with their own challenges.”

A month and a half later, in June, Munsch was keeping a low profile — “mainly taking it easy,” he said. For the most part, the feedback was positive. He received about 1,000 letters and emails, and only a few were critical. During his tour early last spring, several people came up to him after shows, quietly telling him, “I’m a friend of Bill” (code for “I’m a member of Narcotics Anonymous, too”). “All parents,” he joked. “No three-year-old crackheads.”

He was glad he came clean. Part of him wanted to share his story all along. “NA was a big part of my life, and I kept having to not mention it when I dealt with people,” he said. For a man who has made his living by teaching kids about honesty, it didn’t feel right not to live his own life in the way he wrote about. “It made me talk about my own life the same way I talked about things in books, not sugar-coating them.”