A life might go like this. An infant begins to learn the difference between itself and everything else. A child is encouraged to make friends, and the child does. The child invents elaborate worlds with the friend, bringing the friend to family meals and family trips. In adolescence, the youth tries to shrug off the family and repopulate their world with new friends at each new school. But then, growing up translates to giving up. The young adult is supposed to disengage from friendship and fantasy to find a partner — a mythical other person who might heal all this tearing away from the world, to make up for all the friends who now come second, or, at minimum, to help them split the rent. And maybe they don’t end up completing each other, so they have a child. The adult flings their self aside. The world is the infant again, only it is the adult who might struggle more with the difference between themself and their child, especially as the child grows older, has their own friends, builds their own world. And when the adult is finally old, they might find themselves a child again, needing to be fed and wiped and soothed, staring down a huge unknown alone.
This is the life offered by the nuclear family, which promises a stable foundation but is more likely the source of profound instability and destruction. We are taught that we reach maturity when our dreams don’t match up with our realities and when we temper our desires. Imagining that things could be different — that life could be full of enchanted and animate creatures, expanding past the limits of the family home — is the mark of juvenilia and naivete.
So is it any wonder that so many of our most beloved children’s books are written by queer authors, who so often build their worlds around friendship rather than mommy and daddy?
Maurice Sendak knew where the wild things were but didn’t say so publicly until his parents were dead. Edward Gorey acknowledged that “les boys” claimed him as their own, though he demurred on the subject of his own sexuality. Ann M. Martin, author of The Baby-Sitters Club series, discreetly came out at age 61 when she mentioned a former partner named Laura in a magazine article. Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy, was a lesbian. Tomie dePaola, the author of Strega Nona, was gay. Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, had bisexual relationships, and Bruce Coville, who wrote the My Teacher Is an Alien series, identifies as bisexual. Arnold Lobel, the gay author of the incredibly gay Frog and Toad Are Friends, died in 1987 from complications from AIDS. So did James Marshall, the author of the George and Martha books and the illustrator of my personal favorite, Miss Nelson Is Missing. The latter series was written by Harry Allard, who was also gay. And Ursula Nordstrom (what a name for a lesbian!) published Sendak and Fitzhugh and Brown and Lobel under the motto “good books for bad children.”
And are the books themselves queer? You bet. I maintain that it is queer to make a magical amount of spaghetti for your friends and then blow kisses at the pot when the pasta is al dente. It is queer to call out sick and then show up to work as your drag persona, Miss Viola Swamp. It is queer to imbue each beloved treasure in your bedroom with sentience as you wish it good night; it is queer to address the moon.
Imagination is a solitary pursuit that soars when shared
Or at the very least, it’s imaginative. It is imaginative to look at the world and see an entirely different set of possibilities from what’s on offer, particularly from your parents. Queer adults understand the need for fantasy that takes you out of the world because the world they were born into might not have been the one they needed. They had to figure out how to make it work.
But it isn’t only children who need that sort of thing. Adults need to learn about their child selves, need to learn emotional intelligence in community with others.
Which brings us to Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, those hippo-ish creatures beloved by the world and translated into over 50 languages; writer of 12 literary novels and story collections; political cartoonist and fresco painter; and iconic anti-fascist lesbian. We are in the midst of a Toveaissance: The Moomins are celebrating their eightieth anniversary, her murals and oil paintings are currently on exhibition in Helsinki, an adaptation of The Summer Book starring Glenn Close is due out this year, and more of her adult writing is forthcoming in English. There was also a künstlerroman-style biopic in 2020, Tove. The Janssonasseur never goes hungry, as Jansson herself would advise: “Do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent — lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die,” she wrote in her novel Fair Play. The enduring appeal of her work is captured in this warning to adults and children alike to cultivate an openness to the world as a lifelong practice.
Jansson was born into a Swedish-speaking family in Finland in 1914, at a time when there was a right-wing Finnish nationalist movement. Her mother was a suffragette, a Girl Scouts founder, and one of the few women in the Artists’ Union; her father was a volunteer in the Finnish Civil War on the side of the winning White Guards, against the Bolsheviks and the Finnish Reds. Jansson was close with her mother and fought with her father, who was anti-Red and antisemitic. Her parents were her inspiration not to marry; she remarked in a 1941 letter to a friend, “I don’t have time to admire and console…I would either be a bad painter or a bad wife. And I don’t want to give birth to children who will be killed in the coming war.”
Throughout her childhood, Jansson drew cartoons inspired by classic childhood figures such as Death and Immanuel Kant. In fact, she first doodled a Moomin in an attempt to draw “the ugliest creature imaginable” after fighting with her brother about the philosopher. This proto-Moomin also appeared in her political cartoons for Garm magazine, where she started working in 1935, at age 21.
Garm was opposed both to fascist agitation from the various Finland-for-the-Finns parties and to the Soviets, who either wanted to liberate the Red Finns or annex the whole country, depending on who you ask. (In World War II, Finland maintained its post-civil war independence by fighting against the Soviets with the Nazis, and then against the Nazis to expel them from Lapland.) Jansson’s illustrations mocked Stalin, Hitler, and militarism in general. Most famously, in response to the 1938 Munich Conference, where Neville Chamberlain handed over Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, she portrayed Baby Hitler crying for more cake (“mer kaka!”).
Politically, Jansson was not allied to any particular party or system. She was anti-fascist and anti-racist and anti-war; she was for independence and peace and pleasure and togetherness. In a letter, Jansson wrote, “It was the curse of the world, these restrictive boundaries, this racial hatred, this linguistic baiting, this petty ‘you-can’t-play-in-our-yard’, this ludicrous labelling.”
Jansson wrote the first Moomin book in the late bleak years of World War II. The Moomins and the Great Flood was published in 1945 and introduces Moominmamma and her son, Moomintroll, searching the forest for the lost Moominpappa, who has seemingly wandered away from his family. Along the way, they encounter new creatures, both terrifying and delightful, and finally find Moominpappa up a tree, trapped by flood waters. He had been building a new house for his family and whoever else needed shelter.
Moomin world is cozy, wistful, frightful, funny, charming. The creatures are emotional and open to adventure. Other than the Moomins themselves — dreamy and devoted to one another, even if their desires have them wandering off from time to time — there is the pedantic Hemulen, mischievous Little My, swooning Snorkmaiden, the inconsolable Tofle. The Moomin family sprawls throughout the valley, where home and family are capacious categories. Anyone who encounters the Moomins is effectively part of their home, and they expect the rest of the world to meet them in kind. In Moomin on the Riviera, the family goes south for spring, where beach season has already begun. They are dismayed to find that the orange trees are out of reach, behind a wall marked PRIVATE. They find a grand hotel with a WELCOME sign, and marvel at how lovely it is that the porters allow them to stay in their luxurious home.
In The Conscientious Moomins, a member of The League of Conscience and Duty pays a visit to Moominvalley to exhort everyone to live a “life of industry and privation.” Aghast that the Moomins do not work, the visitor explains that even though they earn no money because they need very little, “As soon as you earn some you will need it!” The Moomins start waking up early because it is virtuous — then fall asleep after breakfast. They go about finding jobs and reading how-to books on improving their personalities. Moominpappa is the first to return to dissipation when an old friend, Wimsy, comes by, asking if Moominpappa remembers, “the good old days? Our bohemian life?” Moominpappa demurs, “Yes, but…one’s duty to society.” Wimsy counters, “Remember when we knocked off the policeman’s helmet…Away with this bourgeois mentality! Let’s play cards!” Moomintroll, meanwhile, finds his dream job picking seashells but loses all the joy in it when he finds he has to collect as many as he can rather than luxuriating in choosing the most precious ones. Ultimately, the Moomins decide their true duty is to give their jobs away to the people who really need them. They have everything they need, together. (In particular, they have an excess of jam, which they decide to let ferment into wine.)
This attitude of having enough runs somewhat counter to the huge merchandising arm of Moomin Characters, Ltd. “We’re selling rights, not producing goods,” explains Sophia Jansson, creative director and chairman of the Moominboard and also Tove’s niece and inspiration for the character Sophia in The Summer Book. While the Finnish company, founded by Tove and her brother Lars in the 1950s, is still relatively small and family-run, their brand is carried across the world by more than 800 licensees. On the Moomin website, you can shop through at least 40 different categories of items, from bucket hats to actual buckets.
Jansson died in 2001, leaving behind eight Moomin novels, many comics (her brother eventually took over the creative production of the comics in 1959), and global adaptations including ballet, opera, television specials, and movies. As delightful as the Moomins are, the prelude to the series, The Moomins and the Great Flood, is a story of environmental disaster, family separation, and homelessness. Indeed, many of the early Moomin stories are about finding comfort and community amid crisis: Comet in Moominland, Moomintroll and the End of the World. In honor of their eightieth anniversary and in the spirit of shoring up against eschatological catastrophe, Moomin Characters is donating 100,000 euros to the Finnish Red Cross Youth Shelters. Various Moomin licensees, meanwhile, will be donating part of their proceeds to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Perusing the site, I noticed, to my surprise, that there was a contact person for licensing in “Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank,” so I wrote to ask if there were or had ever been any licenses in Palestine. A spokesperson for the brand wrote to me and said, “Prior to the war, we had signed a few licensing contracts with an Israeli company. When the war started escalating, we made a decision to disallow any new agreements in Israel. One of the contracts from before the war is still valid but will not be renewed. We do not approve of any of the atrocities taking place in the region. Not the ones committed by Israeli troops or Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran.” I was pleased to hear it, though I want to believe Jansson herself would have had something stronger to say about the mutilation and slaughter of Palestinian children.
The ethos of the Moominvalley is emotional independence and practical interdependence. Many Moominvalley creatures come and go, guided by their own needs and desires. Snufkin, an itinerant harmonica player, fisher, and philosopher, can’t be tied down by people, places, or things but returns to Moominvalley each spring to see his friend Moomin. Too-ticky, deep yet pragmatic, is a source of comfort to Moomin when he accidentally wakes up too early during his hibernation in Moominland Midwinter. She teaches him how to fend for himself, how to ice fish; about snow, about the Lady of the Cold, and about the Groke, a lonesome creature who seeks out warmth and light but extinguishes them when she gets too close. Finally, as spring comes and the ice melts, Moomin asks Too-ticky why she never told him the sun would return. “One has to discover everything for one’s self,” Too-ticky explains, “and get over it all alone.”
Jansson modeled Too-ticky, in her Breton shirt and bobble hat, on her partner of 45 years, fellow artist Tuulikki Pietilä. In postwar Europe, if an artist desired romance balanced with solitude, one could do no better than homosexuality. After Jansson left her male fiancé and before she made the move to full-time lesbianism, she told her friends that the “happiest and most genuine solution for me will be to go over to the spook side.” “Spook,” or ghost, was slang for lesbian; in other words, those presences that some people refuse to acknowledge but are nonetheless discomfited by. Her parents knew but would not talk about it directly, which pained Jansson.
Jansson and Pietilä’s work and living spaces were down the hall from each other in the same apartment building. Jansson depicts a similar couple in 1982’s Fair Play, Mari and Jonna, whose living arrangements make it possible for the two most important things, “work, and then love,” to flourish: “They never asked, ‘Were you able to work today?’ Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected — those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.” As fellow iconic lesbian writer Ali Smith notes in her introduction to Fair Play, the novel quietly dramatizes “the revolutionary freedom that comes with such love.” Indeed, it takes a revolutionary sensibility, a willingness to shrug off the demands of family tradition and self-abnegation, to sustain such a love.
“One has to discover everything for one’s self,” Too-ticky explains, “and get over it all alone.”
In the last chapter of Fair Play, Mari notices something subtle is off about Jonna: “No irritation, no depression, no pregnant silences, but Mari knew that Jonna was brooding about something she didn’t want to talk about.” Mari has been busy during the day working on an illustration project, but their shared evening life of art appreciation has become a smooth surface when usually, there are splashes of irritation or rapture. Eventually, the truth comes out: Jonna has been awarded a year-long artist’s studio in Paris. Mari has fleeting ideas of joining her when she realizes what Jonna needs is to work well, in peace, alone. Jonna says she should probably turn it down, but no, Mari says, she needs her own time for her illustration, partially to encourage Jonna to go and partially because it is true. Theirs is such a secure attachment perhaps because they make space for smaller emotions to play.
For Jansson and Pietilä, work was an act of imagination: a cottage in a rocky outcropping, a net pulled up from the depths of the sea, a doll-sized troll house, a Super 8 film from a road trip across the United States. Imagination is a solitary pursuit that soars when shared, like children left alone to play together. I know a lot of childless queer couples who live this way, enjoying a practical yet enchanted daily life (and, to be fair, I know plenty of queer couples proving that we too can live conventional, upstanding, and depressing lives). I think it’s possible for straight couples, with and without children, to achieve love like this, but they have to be cunning. They’ve been offered a clear path, marked by generations before them, to slog down until senescence.
Whatever Jansson’s mother did or did not discuss with her daughter about her alternative lifestyle, she did eventually come around enough to accompany Jansson and Pietilä to the island where they built their summer home.
Klovharun, a rocky and uninhabited island in the Finnish archipelago, became the couple’s refuge. The island encircles many of Jansson’s preoccupations: solitude and contemplation; leisure and welcoming guests or other representatives of the unknown; and labor, both physical and creative. Jansson and Pietilä collaborated both on building their island home and on a book about it, Notes from an Island. (It’s also the unnamed setting of Jansson’s The Summer Book, based on the relationship between her elderly mother and young niece.) They summered there — and I do not use the verb “summer” to indicate leisure — for 26 years until, in their late seventies, the island became too harsh for the couple. “There came a summer when we suddenly had a hard time pulling up the nets. Our domain had become unmanageable and treacherous. We were more surprised than frightened. Maybe we weren’t really old enough yet, but to be on the safe side I used rocks and mortar to build steps in a couple of steep places, and Tooti put up some rope rails and grab bars here and there, and we went on as usual but ate less fish.” Finally, “something unforgivable happened,” Jansson writes. “I grew afraid of the ocean. Big waves no longer meant adventure, just anxiety and worry.”
In giving up their beloved island, they were melancholy yet unsentimental. They wrote notes explaining the quirks of the house, and then Jansson set out on a new story, goaded by Pietilä, about a storm and a shipwreck. They arrived at a particular knowledge: Know when it’s time to ask for help and leave the world a bit more livable than you found it.
Jansson’s interests as a writer and artist spanned the length of a life and the width of the globe. In the 1970s, Jansson and Pietilä road-tripped through the United States, where they encountered a unique phenomenon: the Floridian retirement home. In Sun City, newly reissued from NYRB Classics, the old age home is a dead end. Like Jansson’s other kinds of communities, both imagined and lived, the senior home is a sort of nontraditional form of communal living but bitterly, artificially so. (The oranges are definitely marked PRIVATE.)
The plot of Sun City rolls toward big events that are inevitable letdowns, like a certain kind of life itself. Everyone gets ready for the Spring Cotillion, where Mrs. Rubinstein once again comes in first at the Cavalcade of Hats — but then, the mayor drops dead in the middle of the dance! Miss Peabody cannot take the sight of his body lying on the floor. Thompson, who smells like garlic, asks Peabody if she really cared about the mayor, and she says, “‘No! Not about him, not about anybody! But people’s lives are so sad!” Thompson calls bullshit: “If you stop and think about it, you’ll discover you don’t feel sorry for anyone in the world, but you don’t dare stop and think.” To paraphrase Too-ticky, these people haven’t understood anything and mostly can’t get over it, but either way, they’re all alone. There is no enchantment here, only empty belief in the way things have been and must be. There is no thinking, no creation, only fussing and waiting.
The same sentiment is echoed later by Mrs. Rubinstein: “Most people simply mess around. They absolutely dabble. They live out of habit. They fuss with a lot of small things to distract their minds.” She asks Mrs. Morris what she does with her time, if she has “the courage to do nothing at all.” Mrs. Morris thinks that sounds “a little extreme,” and then fixes her hair and goes for a sit on the veranda. Mrs. Rubinstein wonders if “these ladies don’t know what they want after such long lives…and that they don’t have the slightest idea what it’s all supposed to mean.” Hannah Higgins agrees.
This particular exchange occurs after Mrs. Rubinstein is asked to give Higgins and Morris “a discreet warning” to not dance together at the next cotillion, lest they aggravate the more conservative members of the Senior Club. (Mrs. Rubinstein thinks this is absurd, but she isn’t afraid to be the messenger for the spineless retirement home director.) Even in 1970s Florida, one simply isn’t to say gay.
The horror vacui Jansson locates in the Floridian old age home is that the old people have retired from life. They live together yet talk past one another, no longer able to learn from one another. Even so, they still have inner lives of reflection and regret.
In the Moomin world, or in Jansson’s island writing, individuals are self-sufficient, but they aren’t individualists. All ages of creatures can learn from one another. Consider this moment from The Summer Book:
“When are you going to die?” the child asked.
And Grandmother answered, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.”
“Why?” her grandchild asked.
She didn’t answer. She walked out on the rock and on towards the ravine.
“We’re not allowed out there!” Sophia screamed.
“I know,” the old woman answered disdainfully. “Your father won’t let either one of us go out to the ravine, but we’re going anyway, because your father is asleep and he won’t know.”
This is how the child learns how to dive. Refreshingly, Jansson’s work is never about fetishizing the wonder of children or the wisdom of old age. It has something to do with being alive the whole time.
Natalie Adler is an editor at Lux. Her first novel, Waiting on a Friend, is forthcoming from Hogarth in 2026.
