I thought of Maurice Sendak almost immediately after the president's endorsement of marriage equality a week and a half ago, so soon after Sendak's death. And then I came across this Paris Review interview about his last book, Bumble-Ardy, and stopped short:
It’s a very strange book, in terms of my feelings for it. It came from a deep place. I was intensely involved in the vanity of the parents. I mean, how does the child live with that? I remember I once watched this baby whale separated from its mother. The baby whale is panicked and it looks for its mother among the other whales, and they know it’s not their baby. They turn away from it, and you’re left to wonder, How does the baby live, how does the baby feel? Can’t the others see that he’s one of them?
Bumble is an outcast. This was an experiment in what it’s like to feel … deeply rejected.
Bumble is a pig, Sendak's first pig character. But it's hard not to see the arc of a gay life in much harder times:
Bumble is battling with a basic sense of confusion—“I don’t know how old I am.” He gives up when his aunt says, “You’ve had your party. Never again!” He replies, “I promise, I swear, I won’t ever turn ten.” It’s my favorite line in the whole book. It’s both comical and terrifying. It’s this self-annihilating moment. There is a sense that he is frozen. He doesn’t progress. But, you see, Bumble is my less mature self. He is the little boy who wasn’t sure he’d live, let alone grow up.
But he did. He did.
The Dish 