'Do you know his address?' Oot asks, and it takes me a while to realize that he's returning to his previous line of questioning. I'm proud that my boy knows I write books. 'That means we know each other and do the same job,' I explain.

'What's a colleagues?' he asks, right on cue. That won't make any sense to my boy, but still, I try to be honest with him whenever I can. I'm painfully aware of the need for new friendship metrics, but I haven't managed to develop a good set yet. Then again, neither have any of the other authors I've met over the last few years. While I'm terribly fond of him, Neil Gaiman has never done any of these things. Then, if I wasn't home, they would let themselves in, eat out of my fridge, and start watching TV. A friend was someone who felt comfortable enough to come over to my house without calling first. Someone you could bum 10 dollars off of if you needed to. You see, for the majority of my life, a friend was someone who would, say, help me move a couch. My life has changed so much over the last five years, and my previously established metric for friendship doesn't work very well any more. If you meet someone and play with them, they're you're friend.

'Do you have his phone number?' he asked. The two of us were driving to a party together, a friend was having a bonfire and I was amazed that he was thinking about anything other than smores. 'Do you know the guy who wrote Coraline?' A day later, he excitedly told me all about the story, apparently forgetting I'd been in the car too.Īll of that was months ago. He paid attention, attention, asking for us to turn it back on after we stopped by the side of the road. But sometimes he gets a little scared.ĭespite my worries, he seemed to enjoy it. I wasn't sure he'd be able to get into it. My most recent experience of the book was listening to it with my little boy on a long car ride. Later, I listened to Gaiman's narration of the audiobook when I was sequestered in the north woods of Wisconsin in a desperate attempt to finish book two. I read it off the page when it first came out. I've read this book many different times in many different ways.

คอรัลไลน์ by Neil Gaiman