by Connie Schultz
To this day, I channel my favorite childhood hero—a scrappy little girl who asked a lot of questions and always put bullies in their place.
Most kids lucky enough to grow up with books discover a character who inspires them.
When I was a kid, a lot of girls loved teenage sleuth Nancy Drew. She was popular, pretty, and the smartest person in any room. As a 9-year-old girl, I was none of these things, but I could have overlooked Nancy's perfection had she not been richer than every family on our block. Combined.
Nancy Drew? Please. I had more in common with Pebbles Flintstone. I yearned for a character whose fiery spirit would embolden mine. A girl who knew what it was like to be a working-class kid in small-town Ohio. A girl who, give or take a lost parent or two and her pet monkey, was my fictional twin.
Hello, Pippi Longstocking.
I met 9-year-old Pippi at my ninth birthday party. Mom plopped Astrid Lindgren's book on my lap and warned me to stay away from the other kids because I had chicken pox. Understand, this was my first party ever that included guests other than my siblings and the relatives on Dad's ever-changing "Allowed to Enter" list. There I was, sitting on the couch in the living room, watching everyone in the dining room gobble up my cake.
Years later, Mom claimed this moment launched my writing career, as my account of the experience grew more horrific with each passing day. By week two, I was an orphaned child holed up in a tree house, peering between the floorboards to see how happy children lived. On. My. Birthday.
"So much drama," my mother said, shaking her head.
"We write from our wounds," I said, pressing my palm to my chest. I was 32 at the time.
Pippi was my one true friend that day, and on many days to come. She was a mighty force of inappropriate behavior powered by good intentions. She was me, except that her mother was gone and her father was a buccaneer captain gallivanting on the high seas. She also didn't have to go to school. Minor details.
Pippi was poor but never impoverished, abandoned but never alone. Her pigtails were so tight they stood straight out from her freckled face. That was the hair I wanted to have, instead of the bouffant sprouting from my head. This was during Mom's perm phase. My sisters and I marched into the beauty shop as children and left looking like the shortest grandmothers in Ohio.
Pippi carried out my every desire. She peppered adults with any question she wanted to ask (the nerve!) and was to-the-bone loyal to her friends. What I most loved was her intolerance for bullies. She hurled them into trees and onto rooftops. With one arm. I still harbor that fantasy. Don't ask for names.
By the time I was a teen, I was keen on other scrappy girls of fiction—Scout Finch, for example, and Francie Nolan—but I never lost that kinship with Pippi. I still admire her sense of justice.
Over the years I've written about a lot of bullies. Restaurant managers who skim servers' tips. Men who mistake women for chattel. Prosecutors who send innocent men to jail. Each time, I pull up a chair and raise my fingers to the keyboard, and Pippi Longstocking starts to type.
Or so I want to believe.
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