Maurice Sendak: A miserable wild thing

last updated 8 January 2015

Maurice Sendak is a grumpy old man, said Tim Teeman in the London Times. The author of the famed children’s book Where the Wild Things Are is now 83, lives alone in rural Connecticut, and walks with a stick. “It’s for hitting people,” he says. His partner of 50 years, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, died of cancer in 2007. “I dream of him constantly. I’m always feeling that I didn’t do enough for him.” After four years of living alone, he longs for someone to make love to. “My body so much wants that comfort, but as you get older and older, you realize it’s not acceptable. You learn to live with it.”

Sendak still writes and keeps himself occupied tutoring summer students. “I don’t know how to tell them the truth: It’s a waste of time. Publishing is vulgar and cheap, and they won’t make a living.” He rarely feels happy. “Who’s happy? What does that mean? I’ve nothing to be happy about. The whole world stinks: Everything is decaying. The lack of culture depresses me most.” Sendak claims that he’s looking forward to his death. “It’s time to go, it’s time to get out—it really is,” he says. “I will be nothing and nowhere, and that will be such a relief. To be something and somewhere is very tiring; the good times are so few.”