'Love You Forever' started as a song.
“I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
as long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.”
I made that up after my wife and I had two still-born babies. The song was my song to my babies. For a long time I had it in my head and I couldn’t even sing it because every time I tried to sing it I cried. It was very strange having a song in my head that I couldn’t sing.
For a long time it was just a song but one day, while telling stories at a big theatre at the University of Guelph, it occurred to me that I might be able to make a story around the song.
Out popped 'Love You Forever', pretty much the way it is in the book. One day my publisher called up and said “This is very strange. What is going on? This is supposed to be a children’s book. What is going on? Grownups are buying it for grownups!” In fact, it turned out that parents buy it for grandparents and grandparents buy it for parents and kids buy it for everybody and everybody buys it for kids.
As a matter of fact, everybody buys it for everybody. That’s why it sells a lot of copies. I think it’s my best book. So far it has sold about 15,000,000 copies.
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