On November 23, 1990, my parents took me out to our family’s usual pizza restaurant and broke the news to me gently: Roald Dahl, my favorite author, had died.
I immediately burst into tears, and, for days after, I was inconsolable. By the age of six, I’d already read his entire back catalog — Matilda, the last one I finished, had been my birthday present a few weeks before — and I understood well the implications of what I was being told. No more Roald Dahl meant the unthinkable: no more books by Roald Dahl. Until that point, I had simply assumed that Dahl would keep churning them out forever. Suddenly, it was over.
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