I wrote How to Make Friends With the Dark because I miss my mother and my sister. They have both been gone for several years, but everyday is still waking up without them and trying to go on. Every day is a new process of learning grief and its mysteries, the way the smell of a face cream can bring back years-old memories. The way a scene in a television show can bring back the sound of my sister's laughter, a memory that makes me happy and sad at the same time. Once, a friend who lost her mother when she was very young said she'd wished her mother had left her a letter telling her how to live without her, because years and years later, she still did not know how. I wrote How to Make Friends With the Dark as a kind of how-to about death and grief, a manual of the pain that can leave you breathless, a primer on the love that lives in your heart, as much as you might be hurting. And I wrote this book as a letter to kids like Thaddeus and Sarah and Len, kids without parents, kids just trying to survive in a world that sometimes doesn't seem to have room for them.
