When Dementia Steals the Imagination of a Children’s Book Writer

After 50 years of publishing, Munsch told me, his ability to come up with new stories seems to have vanished. So, too, has all the time he used to spend with children, who in turn shaped the stories. Plots used to just appear to him, all the time and almost fully formed, as if they were limitless. But now they don’t. When, occasionally, Munsch thinks of an idea for a story, he waits for the narrative to reveal itself, and “nothing happens.” The story never comes.

It had happened in the usual, terrible way. Munsch started crashing his bicycle, so he stopped riding it. He stopped being able to fit his car into a parking spot, so he stopped driving. Instead, he took the bus or he walked, but then he started falling. In the years since his diagnosis, new symptoms have appeared. He has grown frail. He has trouble finding words; the other day, he couldn’t think of “dinosaur.” Or he finds the word but somehow can’t say it. He forgets that friends have come to visit.

Once a compulsive reader, Munsch can no longer make it through a book. The problem is not that he can’t remember what happened in the chapter before, but rather that the text itself — the perfectly ordinary prose — seems off. “It’s like when you taste an egg and it doesn’t taste right,” Munsch told me. Also, he’s often too tired to try. Too tired to go outside, even. “My life is shrinking that way.”

Munsch started writing — mostly poems, and mostly silly ones — seven decades ago, when he was a solitary child who tended toward melancholy. “I’m not happy,” he recalls saying, over and over, to his 10-year-old self in the mirror. He was born in Pittsburgh, to a Catholic family with nine children, and he was, he says, sort of lost in the mix of things. Later he would come to think that an unhappy childhood was “not necessarily a bad thing for a children’s writer.”

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