Nancy Garden
A versatile writer, Nancy Garden has published books for children as well as for teens, nonfiction as well as fiction. But her novel Annie on My Mind, the story of two high school girls who fall in love with each other, has brought her more attention than she wanted when it was burned in front of the Kansas City School Board building in 1993 and banned from school library shelves in Olathe, Kansas, as well as other school districts. A group of high school students and their parents in Olathe had to sue the school board in federal district court in order to get the book back on the library shelves. Today the book is as controversial as ever, in spite of its being viewed by many as one of the most important books written for teens in the past forty years. In 2003 the American Library Association gave the Margaret A. Edwards Award to Nancy Garden for lifetime achievement.
In Remembrance: Nancy Garden
“Don't let ignorance win. Let love.”
“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?”
“And Annie showed me how ailanthus trees grow under subway and sewer gratings, stretching toward the sun, making shelter in the summer, she said, laughing, for the small dragons that live under the streets.”
“There’s a Greek legend—no, it’s in something Plato wrote—about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That’s why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male.”
“It's Annie and me they're all sitting around here like cardboard people judging; It's Annie and me. And what we did that they think is wrong, when you pare it all down, was fall in love.”
“Liza-don't let it make any difference. It won't, will it? With us, I mean.""Of course it won't," I told her. But I was wrong. Six months of not writing-that's a difference. And so I lied to Annie. On top of everything else, I lied to Annie, too.”
“I am happy, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I'm happy with Annie; she and my work are all I'll ever need; she's happy, too-we both were till this happened...”
“The 1st day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to do that forever.”
“She's a social worker, Karen," Mac said when I told the group. "She must know something about homosexuality.”
“It's raining, Annie.”
“The thing about mountains is that you have to keep on climbing them, and that it's always hard, but there's a view from top every time when you finally get there.”