Nathalie Babbitt’s daughter, Lucy, wrote this afterword for the 50th anniversary edition of Tuck Everlasting.
If you’re lucky enough to be related to Natalie Babbitt, then you know how it goes.
You’re in conversation with someone new, and it happens to come up in polite conversation that your mother/wife/grandmother/mother-in-law/aunt was a writer of children’s books.
“Oh,” says the person with an indulgent smile, “what’s something she wrote?”
“Tuck Everlasting,” you say.
And then, without fail, one of two things will occur. The person will pretend to care and the conversation will move forward as if nothing significant was said. But more often than not, this other thing happens: The person startles. Their eyes widen. There’s usually a gasp—all of this followed, inevitably, with: “OH MY GOD!”
Or maybe: “That’s my favorite book!”
And not infrequently: “That story changed my life!” There never seems to be a middle ground. We family members all laugh about it. We’re all proud of it, proud of her, of what she accomplished, of how widely celebrated that one novel has become.
It didn’t start with any fanfare. I was fourteen when Tuck was first written; my brothers, Chris and Tom, a little older. We were busy with our own lives, and I’m sure we didn’t think too much about this new story our mother was writing. Not because we didn’t find it wonderful, but because we were used to her wonderful stories. This was just what she did. This was just normal. Didn’t all mothers scribble novels onto long yellow legal pads from the corner of the living room sofa? Didn’t all mothers hunch over drawing boards, pouring life onto thick white paper with meticulous strokes of ink and color? It wasn’t until later that we realized how lucky we were to have been nurtured in this creative environment. With their own writing and forays into theater as well, our artistic parents gave us full encouragement to develop our own love of the arts, with gifts of guitars for my brothers and as much time working at summer stock instead of summer jobs as I could wish for.
These were small enough things, perhaps, but as my mother’s life shows, the small and the powerful are not opposites. From a living room sofa came a story that would touch hearts across the globe. A girl from a poor family had within her, even as a child, the seed of literary greatness—though my mother would hate that I used the word greatness. She identified with Mae: “ ‘We’re plain as salt...’ ” And yet, even Tuck Everlasting embodies that same lovely paradox. The story explores a very primitive thought: “Would you want to live forever?” Yet, in her telling, this simplicity becomes incredibly profound.
Natural things, ordinary settings, were always extraordinary protagonists in my mother’s stories. She loved nature—from a distance. It was a quirk of hers. We all thought it was funny, how she delighted in living in a Cape Cod house where she could watch the ocean from her window—but actually go down to the beach? No, thank you!
She felt the same way about the woods, those woods, the ones that encircled the little house that became the inspiration for the Tucks’ cabin. It was a real place, and there really was a pond with a rowboat, like the one Pa took Winnie out in. My parents named this spot “Frogs’ Weep”—later, just “The Weep”—because of the constant din of amphibian mating calls that resonated across the water. The cabin sat in a rambling little town called Forestport Station at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, and my parents bought it as a kind of vacation getaway when I was little—my father enthusiastically; my mother, I know, reluctantly. For although the area was undeniably beautiful in its very rustic way, it was also, my mother thought, horribly secluded, and she found the acres and acres of towering pines oppressive.
Too much nature inflicting itself.
And yet it’s clear in her writing that the opposite was also true: that she deeply respected and admired the feral growths and rolling water around that cabin—how they went about their robust business of growing and flowing without any regard for people. She liked that about nature. Its independence from us. She loved listening to the birds and the frogs. She loved watching how the sky and the pond beneath it changed with the mercurial weather. She loved storms, and the smell of the wet earth afterward. And so, as my father happily foraged out into the wilderness around them, she just as happily remained on the porch, on a ramshackle sofa, taking all of it in, the seeds of her most famous story slowly taking root within her.
Tuck Everlasting had already established itself in the canon of children’s literature by the time I became an elementary teacher in the late ’90s. It was taught in a lot of school districts, including mine, usually in the sixth grade. I taught fourth and fifth grade, so it was understood I shouldn’t touch Tuck. But that just didn’t make sense to me. After all, I argued with myself, how often would these kids get to have a behind-the-scenes look at the writing of a classic novel?
So I did it anyway. And, as far as I know, no one ever complained.
In fact, my reading aloud of Tuck became a beloved part of my yearly calendar. Not just for me and the kids, but also for the other adults in the building who might happen to have a free moment to wander in and sit and just listen to the magic of my mother’s words.
I never “taught” Tuck, though. My mother actually hated the idea of having her book “taught,” feeling that books shouldn’t be turned into something kids had to work at. She wanted her stories enjoyed for what they were.
So every year we enjoyed Tuck Everlasting, delving into healthy debates about Winnie’s decision to help the Tucks—and her always-controversial choice to live a natural life without Jesse. My students were always divided, which lent itself to lively conversation. They also shared confusion about why Winnie wasn’t allowed to stay her real age of ten—often the age of the kids right in front of me—in the 2002 movie. “It changes everything!” they would say.
Some years my mother was able to come into my class and sit beside me with her readers at her feet. She loved talking to my kids. She respected them, and there were many times when she would tell about an earlier movie’s decision to have Pa kill the man in the yellow suit “because a woman would never do such a thing,” and then delight in the children’s outrage. They understood, as she did, that there can be nothing stronger than a mother’s instinct to protect a child—even a mother figure like Mae.
I loved having my mother there. But even when she wasn’t, Tuck had become such an innate part of me that I was able to bring its story—and the stories behind the story—to my students. And it’s a tribute to the respect the children had for the specialness of our reading it that they never spoiled the ending for their younger siblings when they came to my class.
Over those fifty years since Tuck Everlasting was first published, its wondrous essence has woven itself deep into the fabric of my family’s lives—not just my father and brothers, but our spouses, and children, and now a grandchild who may well encounter his great-grandmother’s story in school one day.
But of course, he will already know all about it.
My family has a tradition that started many years ago, which arose from the story itself. Almost always planned for that “first week of August... at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year...,” our far-flung clan comes together.
We lost my mother in 2016 to cancer but before that, even, to Alzheimer’s. Her sensibility diminished by the disease, those last few reunions were hard for her to be a part of, but when my father, with his rich voice, read aloud, as he always did, the prologue of Tuck Everlasting, her eyes would sharpen and she would smile and be herself again for a precious time.
We gather without her now, but we still gather, all of us. A simple thing. But oh, how profound it is, as Mae says, for us to “‘come home together so’s we can be a family again for a little while.’ ”
We call it “Tuck Week.”
Excerpted from Tuck Everlasting, 50th Anniversary Edition. Text copyright © 1975 by Natalie Babbitt. Afterword copyright © 2025 by Lucy Babbitt. Used with permission from Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
