My mother died of a fatal heroin overdose while I was working on rewriting the book. Even though I’m on the side of the teenage narrator, I’ve come to learn that life is never black and white but a series of varying tones of grey.
While Hey, Kiddo is told from the perspective of my teenage self, I was able to write my birth parents with more sympathy than I would have been able to 20 years ago. But then as my kids grew, I also had the epiphany of how difficult it must have been for both of my birth parents to have missed those experiences with me. When I became a parent myself, it was a bit of a Pandora’s Box of emotions as I saw the world through my baby’s eyes and wondered how my father could have abandoned me when I was so helpless. So what made her that way? She wouldn’t have wanted to leave this baby to fill her veins with poison. My mother was a drug addict, but in her heart of hearts, she never wanted to be. But more time away from my coming-of-age experiences gave me profound insights on the macro-view of it all. There were the heroes and the villains, it was all very clear-cut. Jarrett Krosoczka: When I initially thought about putting the events of my upbringing down on paper, everything was still black and white for me. How much has the scope of the story changed since you first envisioned it? Did you choose to reflect your mother’s passing in the book? Paste: You’ve said in interviews that Hey, Kiddo has been in the works one way or another for almost 20 years. Hey, Kiddo Front Cover Art by Jarrett Krosoczka Paste also spoke with Krosoczka over email to find out more about the deeply heartfelt memoir. Paste is proud to exclusively reveal the stepback cover for Hey, Kiddo, which features a teen Krosoczka on the front cover and his childhood self behind the flap. 9, 2018, Scholastic’s Graphix imprint will publish Hey, Kiddo, Krosoczka’s memoir about his childhood and teen years, a period of time in which art became a lifeline and a way to process his mother’s battles and the absence of his birth father.
Krosoczka first spoke publicly about his mother’s addiction to heroin and his childhood growing up with his grandparents in a widely shared 2012 TED Talk. Like an estimated eight million children in the United States, Krosoczka is also the child of a parent who struggled with addiction, which claimed his mother’s life last summer. Jarrett Krosoczka is a New York Times bestselling cartoonist, best known for his Lunch Lady series of graphic novels, picture books like Punk Farm and the latest installments of the Star Wars Jedi Academy books first created by Jeffrey Brown.
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