It seems last night that the stars and moon and somesuch aligned, and I actually watched something on TV.  The something ended up being a Philip Pullman documentary, which isn’t an entirely bad thing with which to break a television drought of many, many months.

One of the interesting things that Pullman brought up was the standard children’s literature device of having parents or guardians largely absent, whether through death or divorce or what could perhaps amount to sheer neglect.  I’m guilty of having used the same device in my in-progress young adult novel Vervante, in which I’ve shipped the protagonist’s parents, both diplomats, off to another city altogether.  The family of the other main character, however, features prominently, but that’s due to the fact that a large part of the book is about her relationship with her family, and as racism is a strong theme in the book, about her family against much of the rest of Vervante.  Dead Parents is a useful device in that it allows young protagonists to be able to legitimately solve their own problems and expand the sphere in which they have agency without having the safety net of the familial hand in the background.

But there’s a bit more to it than that, too, I think, in that it all relates to what is strictly necessary in a novel.  My novel Downtown only extremely obliquely references any of my characters’ families, as although they do exist (promise), their relevance to the plot is negligible.  Writing is as much about cutting out as it is putting in information, and there’s certainly a streamlining aspect involved here beyond the seemingly unsubtle Dead Parents standard.  I suppose the difference is that in children’s literature, the absence of a guardian needs to be overtly explained, whereas having an entire family MIA in other forms of literature is considered more a mark of the assiduous assessment of plot- and character-relevance than it is a device.