My relationship with my father ended when I was fourteen. He went to prison, and I finished ninth grade. I’ve spent many years searching for some version of my story, yet what seems a simple premise—“daughter carries on without father”—is not so simple to find in children’s literature. Unlike many children of incarcerated parents in children’s books, I didn’t miss my father, didn’t spend nights wishing he was home, didn’t hope for a reunion. There are some things you cannot come back from. However, rereading Paula Danziger’s Amber Brown series as an adult showed me I had already found the type of story I’d been looking for, at least a version of it.
In the first of Danziger’s nine Amber Brown books, Amber’s parents have recently divorced. Her father, Phil, has relocated to Paris for work, and according to Amber: “[she] never get[s] to see him and he hardly ever calls.” This first book accepts Amber as a Divorce Kid, and the main conflict isn’t the dissolution of her parents’ marriage or the absence of her father, but her best friend’s impending cross-country move. As a child reader, I found this refreshing. My parents separated before I finished kindergarten, so I was always a bit jaded toward Divorce Kid books. Though Amber does sometimes stray into Parent Trap-esque fantasies, she more often accepts the permanence of her parents’ split, even finding a friend in her mother’s long-term partner. Overall, I liked her life in New Jersey and understood things like afterschool care and splitting holidays more than I did Ramona’s family mealtimes and Harriet’s private education.
When I recently reread the Amber Brown series as an adult, I found a series reflecting a sort of parental reality that’s hard to find in children’s books. At his best, Amber’s father, Phil, is a sad and lonely man who consistently centers his own emotional needs. This is perhaps the only way he is reliable. We see this when he is still living abroad; at one point, he reveals he’s been doubting Amber’s chicken pox, assuming that she is lying to get out of visiting him; at another, he co-opts their scheduled phone time to discuss his dating life. The advent of shared custody heightens his behavior. Making plans for his first holiday season back in New Jersey, Phil protests when he hears that Amber has plans with her mother, complaining with a lack of self-awareness astonishing even for him that “she’s been able to be with you for all of the holidays since I left.” When Amber eventually chooses to spend Thanksgiving with her father—citing that her mother has her boyfriend and Amber is her “dad’s own family”—he is satisfied for the moment; a few beats later, he implies that her mother’s rash decision-making is what led to their divorce.
The most egregious example of his behavior occurs over the last two of the original books. After promising to involve Amber in his apartment search, Phil instead moves into a new apartment that he picks without her input and is later upset when Amber refers only to her mother’s house (the only place she has ever lived) as “home.” Then, when he feels his custody time is in danger, he threatens to “spend as much time and money legally as it takes to spend time with” Amber. Finally, on an evening that he promises to take Amber to the movies, he instead abandons her in the apartment she didn’t help choose so he can go on a date to the movies with a woman he met in the ice cream aisle of a grocery store. He comes back from his date at four in the morning and sleeps through the day as Amber wakes herself up, pours her own cereal, and spends the morning waiting before finally calling her mother to pick her up. Reading this as a child was difficult; as an adult, it felt like someone poured a bucket of water on my head.
I think when I was Amber’s age, I considered myself lucky. Unlike her father, mine did not mess around with custody deals, did not waltz in and out of my life with international moves, did not threaten me with stepsiblings from across an ocean. From my angle, the coparenting looked successful. But there were similar relational cracks—him telling me about a failed blind date because the woman was “too fat”; us pacing outside a Manhattan restaurant so he could catch another glimpse of our waitress; me returning from his home every weekend smelling of cigarettes. Then there were chasms—the arrest, the charges, the newspaper articles.
Then there was nothing.
Amber’s relationship with her father came to a sort of screeching crossroads in the last book penned by Danziger before her untimely death in 2004. Danziger’s death left the plot hanging in the still-raw weeks after Phil had abandoned Amber. The two of them meet at a diner, Amber angry her father broke another promise for a date with a stranger, her father angry that his daughter is expressing her anger. As Phil defends his choices, Amber lays it bare; if he continues this behavior, she would rather live without him. And that’s where it ends: with a father who has earned Amber’s grief and outrage, who has not yet put in the work, and who might be rightfully left behind.
The series is not about a father in prison, but it is about being let down—about having to face, at too young an age, the reality that one of your parents is going to let you down in big ways, might let you down in such a big way, in fact, that they cannot be in your life any longer. It’s about accepting that family can be defined unconventionally, that your mom can marry a man who won’t be a new father but will be someone who will move you out of every dorm room you ever live in. It’s about keeping deep connections of friendship even across time zones and about how, if you can’t be certain about who you are, you can at least know for certain who you are not. At its core, Amber Brown is about accepting the normal many kids are dealt.
In my project of rereading, I finally got around to the first Amber Brown book published after Danziger’s death, the reins taken up by Danziger’s close friends and writing partners Bruce Coville and Elizabeth Levy. Although their version of Amber’s father is still spiteful, he is portrayed to be working on his faults. We learn he has followed through on his word to see a counselor, and Amber is more comfortable expressing when he disappoints her. I cannot help but wonder if this is where their relationship would have really gone in Danziger’s hands. In many ways it feels as if she walked her readers to a canyon’s edge, and her friends, no doubt reeling through their own grief, stepped us backward into something more palatable. A father could have been lost to his daughter; a father manages to adjust his behavior before he must be lost.
Knowing now that this is how the series moves forward, I’m grateful my childhood reading of these books ended when Danziger died. Reading the original texts prepared me for my own relationship with my father to be open-ended, or at least it helped me understand that it was okay to set boundaries and to be unyielding in those boundaries, even as a child. I’m also grateful I didn’t read A Wrinkle in Time, my father’s favorite book (ironically about a missing father), until grad school. I worry I would have seen myself in Meg and about the rescue work I might have undertaken. And though my father surely saw himself in Mr. Murry, I could see him instead in Phil—a parent who can be present only if he does the work, a relationship that is worth abandoning if the work remains undone.
I didn’t pick up on this as a child, but Amber Brown also models healthy parental estrangement. The night Amber is abandoned by her father, she asks her teen babysitters (or “Ambersitters,” as she would tell you): “Do you think you are part of a normal family? Do you know normal families?” In this moment, we learn that the mother of one of the girls has abandoned her husband and their children to move abroad with another man. The babysitter is matter-of-fact in her explanation: “It’s not easy, but it’s the way it is … it’s the family I know, and I love them … well, all of them except for my mother.” To be given this beautiful permission, to be told a family is complete even when a parent is absent—this is a gift in a children’s book, and I was given it twice over: once as a child who didn’t know I would live through parental estrangement, and recently as an adult seeking solace from the fact that I did.
Abigail Spencer has held a variety of jobs and holds a handful of degrees. New England-based, she currently and happily works in the jewelry industry and spends her train commute reading suburban suspense fiction. Her other writing can be found in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.