He stresses the new book is not a sequel but rather a companion. That advice gave Krosoczka the spark to start Sunshine. “Don’t write this memoir as if it’s the only chance you’ll ever have to write about your life.” “Look, if there were ever to be a second memoir, I think it would be about your time at this camp,” Krosoczka remembers Levithan telling him. He credits David Levithan, Scholastic v-p, publisher, and editorial director, with helping him find the right approach. It was among many “scenes and moments and misadventures of my teenage life” that didn’t fit the ultimate through line, he adds. “Initially, it was an unruly, 100-page chapter that took an early draft of Hey, Kiddo on a complete detour,” he recalls. In Hey, Kiddo, Krosoczka included a one-page mention of his profound experience at Camp Sunshine, which made him wonder whether he had siblings and prompted him to write a letter to his estranged father, but the whole story never made it into that book. “It was very important for me to expand upon how working at that camp and being in service to others changed the trajectory of my life.” Sunshine “covers one week in my senior year of high school in which I and some of my classmates volunteered at a camp for children with life-threatening illnesses like cancer,” Krosoczka says.
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