Jeff Kinney Talks About Diary of a Wimpy Kid

A podcast interview with Jeff Kinney on The Growing Readers Podcast, a production of The Children’s Book Review.

Dive into the uproarious world of Jeff Kinney, the creative force behind the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, in this upbeat podcast episode!

Kinney spills the beans on how his bestselling idea sprouted from a simple journal meant to keep him on the work grind. With a staggering 275 million copies sold worldwide, the series has become a literary sensation, garnishing Kinney with a slew of well-deserved awards. Beyond the numbers, Kinney shares his aspirations for his books—shaping reading habits for kids and influencing the industry’s humor landscape. Get ready to laugh, be inspired, and join the Wimpy Kid revolution in this delightful exploration of literary magic!

Jeff Kinney Talks About:

• How his college comic strip, Igdoof, garnered attention but fell short of syndication due to skill gaps and contracting challenges.
• The idea for Diary of a Wimpy Kid stemmed from his accountability journal, featuring text and illustrations resembling the book’s style.
• Initially envisioning one big humor book for adults, Kinney eventually landed a multi-book deal for kids.
• The excitement of becoming a New York Times bestseller and how the sustained success of the series unfolds.
• He hopes the books instill a reading pattern in kids and influence humor in the entertainment industry.
• Diversity and support for librarians, the importance of representation, and the vulnerability of librarians in the face of book banning.
• Encouragement for kids to read about diverse experiences for empathy and character richness.
• And, of course, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: No Brainer!

Listen to the Interview

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Read the Interview

Bianca Schulze

Hi, Jeff. Welcome to the Growing Readers podcast.

Jeff Kinney

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Bianca Schulze

Oh, my gosh, it’s an absolute pleasure. I have so many questions and directions we could go in today, so it almost felt impossible to decide where to start. So, I will just come at you with a multilayered question here. So, I know that you didn’t grow up wanting to be a children’s book author. Your dream was to become a newspaper cartoonist. So, I want to know, what about being a newspaper cartoonist excited you as a kid? And did you always love to read, write, and draw, or was there a specific comic strip that caught your attention as a child that kind of made you want to go down that path?

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, great question. When I was growing up in Fort Washington, Maryland, which is right outside of Washington, DC, our newspaper was the Washington Post. And so, every day that I went downstairs to eat my breakfast, eat my cereal, my father had already opened the newspaper to the comic section. And so that was always greeting me growing up. I also love to read comic books, but very specifically, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books that were written by Carl Barks. Those were the only ones that I really read. And so those two things had a big influence on me. Charles Schultz’s Peanuts and Bill Watterson’s Calvin Hobbs. Gary Larson’s The Far Side. “Berke” Breathed’s Bloom County. Those were the newspaper comics that I loved the most. And then, of course, I loved Carl Barks’s Duck Stories. So those things had a big influence on me, and they made me want to become a cartoonist myself.

Bianca Schulze

I love that. I have really vivid memories of my dad reading the newspaper. I would hear him laughing and have to come running to see which comic it was. I feel we missed that a little bit by not getting newspaper deliveries. We read all our newspapers online right now. We have The New York Times subscription, so sitting down and opening the newspaper—I feel my kids have missed that a little bit.

Jeff Kinney

Yeah. And it’s sad. Of course, there are so many things that have changed for the better in our world, but there are a lot of things that we’ve really lost. Something like record stores, for example. It’s like, yes, you can get your music right now at the touch of a finger, but it was better to go into a record store and to talk to the clerk and to run your hands through the LPs and look at the great artwork and listen to the music on the overhead speakers. Like, all these things have gone away for the most part, and we miss those things.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we miss them so much that one of our kiddos got a record player for Christmas last year, and we have a record store in Boulder, Colorado, that we love to go visit for the records.

Jeff Kinney

Nice.

Bianca Schulze

So, you attended the University of Maryland in the early 1990s and ran a comic strip in the campus newspaper. And it has such a cool name. That’s fun to say. I want to make sure I pronounce it right as Igdoof that’s right.

Jeff Kinney

Igdoof is right.

Bianca Schulze

Perfect. And so, I think that’s what solidified your interest in being a cartoonist. So, I would love for you to tell me about that experience and your efforts to get your comic strip syndicated after college.

Jeff Kinney

Sure. Well, it has a sad ending. I will give you a spoiler. But I didn’t become a syndicated newspaper cartoonist, but I had every feeling that I would. So, I started my comic Igdoof at Villanova, where I went for one year, and then I brought it with me to the University of Maryland. And we had a great newspaper called The Diamondback, which was a daily and I believe the circulation must have been about 30,000 daily at its height. And it really felt like everybody read The Diamondback every day. So, it was a big part of the lifeblood of our campus. If you went into the dining hall, everybody always had the Diamondback spread out before them. So, I wanted to be a part of that. Doing comics was a huge distraction for me because I was a computer science major and I basically failed out of my major because I was more interested in doing a comic every day. And I did that for two and a half years, I think it was, and I got a lot of attention. The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post wrote articles about this comic strip and how it was going to become the next big thing in comics. And, of course, I believed that and thought that when I stepped out into the real world, I’d become a real-life cartoonist. But it didn’t happen for me. It was a combination of things, mostly that I didn’t have the skills to be a professional artist, and then newspapers were starting to contract and so the opportunities were becoming less and less. I wasn’t able to land that. So, I tried for about three years, didn’t get any kind of encouragement, and decided to go in a different direction and worked on Diary of a Wimpy Kid for eight years before I showed it to anyone. But my failure to become a newspaper cartoonist eventually turned into success on the printed page.

Bianca Schulze

I also love what you said in there that you really believed that you could do it, that you could be a comic strip creator. Obviously, having that self-belief to keep going is so important. Where do you think you got that level of self-belief from? Did it come from the people that were believing in you from the outside? Was it something intrinsic within you? Where did that self-belief come from?

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, I got a lot of validation from the readers of the Diamondback. I could see people laughing at my strip and reading in the dining hall. And I also got other forms of validation along the way. And I didn’t always hit it out of the park, and sometimes my jokes didn’t land, but I knew that generally speaking, I was a pretty good joke writer. Again, I wasn’t a good artist, and I don’t think that I ever could have achieved what Berke Breathed has achieved or Bill Waterson has achieved. Like, I just didn’t have that technique. I’m not a fine artist. So, when I came up with the idea for Greg Heffley and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, I had to sort of really embrace my limitations as an artist and draw as a middle school kid. So that’s where I was able to be successful, is to kind of stop striving for this adult expression, artistic expression, and embrace something that was a little bit simpler.

Bianca Schulze

That’s so cool. So, in our house, we have the Calvin and Hobbes collections. My kids love all the Garfield books. And so, my youngest is eight, and he’s thrived on Captain Underpants and Dog Man. His go-to books right now are Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Jeff Kinney

Oh, cool.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. Every night, when we fill out his school journal, and we have to say, I’m like, what are you reading today? For 30 minutes? And he’s like, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. So, my next question, I had to have him ask it. He had to leave for school, so I recorded his question. So, I’m going to play it for you. Yeah, give me 1 second.

Jeff Kinney

Hi, I’m Kai Schulze, and I’d like to know where you got the idea for Diary of Wimpy Kids. That’s a great question. Where I got the idea from? At the time that I was working on my newspaper comic submissions, I was keeping a journal to kind of keep myself held to account. I was trying to make sure that I really was doing the work every day instead of playing video games and things like that. So, I kept this journal, and my journal looked a lot like the Diary of Wimpy Kid books. It was text and illustrations, and if you opened up one of my journal pages, you would say, wow, that looks really familiar. That’s how I got the idea for a different form of cartooning. I call it long-form cartooning. And luckily, my journals gave me the very idea I needed to become a successful writer.

Bianca Schulze

So, you worked on the Diary for Wimpy Kid ideas for, you said, was it eight years?

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, it was about eight- or nine-years total. That’s right.

Bianca Schulze

Okay. Before it became the book series, I believe you were publishing it online in daily installments on funbrain.com.

Jeff Kinney

That’s right.

Bianca Schulze

Were you hoping by posting it there that you would get a book deal, or what was your thinking in that sort of era when you were just creating the stories?

Jeff Kinney

That was just a way to make myself do the work. Funbrain. I worked for the company that owned Funbrain, and I just saw it as an opportunity to force myself to work every day. And I got a lot of validation from that because we had a huge audience. And I think that by the time I was finished writing my book online, I had accrued something like 20 million unique readers. So, it was a great way to get my work in front of people to see what was working to get some validation. And so that was a huge step for me in my path to becoming an author.

Bianca Schulze

Well, and so I know that your first book deal wasn’t just for one book. It was like a multi-book deal, I have to imagine. I mean, I guess it’s every author’s dream to get the multi-book deal, but were you just going for, like, a one-book deal, and it happened to end up being a multi-book deal, or was that your angle the whole time you wanted the multi-book deal?

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, it’s kind of a funny story, is that when I wrote Diary of a Movie Kid, I imagined it as just one big book. So, I thought that it would be a minimum of 700 pages long, like this brick. That’s what I wanted to do. And I also thought that it would be in the humor section of the bookstore, not the kids section. So, I thought that it would attract a grown-up audience. So, my publisher told me that they said that I’d actually not written a book for adults who like humor, but actually, a series for kids, which was a little bit mind-blowing because I had never thought of it as a kid’s book, believe it or not. And I also never thought of it as a series. So, my publisher when they told me that, I really had to think about it because this was not what I had planned. That being said, of course, I’m thrilled that the books were published for kids, but at that moment of getting that multi-book contract, it was cool, but I had a lot of dissonance because it wasn’t a part of my plan. But of course, that’s very exciting to say; hey, I’d like to get my book published, and for them to say, how about three? And I will say, the advances were pretty low, so it wasn’t life-changing money. But of course, I was an unproven author, so that sometimes it’s what you get, right?

Bianca Schulze

Exactly. Well, now you had the multi book deal, and the first Diary of Your Wimpy Kid book came out in 2007, and it ended up as an instant bestseller. So, what were you thinking at this point when it was just successful right out of the gate?

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, that was really super exciting. And I remember my wife and I, we lived in a really tiny house, and I remember us just sort of jumping up and down the bed because it was so exciting. And it was funny because my books landed number seven on The New York Times list, and then it went to number eight and then number nine. And I was like, okay, well, here it goes, and it’s going to go off the list. But at my high school reunion or whatever, I can always say I was a New York Times bestselling author. So, it was really fantastic. And I had no idea that it would sort of rebound and climb up the list and then eventually get to number one. So that’s been pretty wild. In fact, it’s been sustained since the book came out in 2007. I think it’s only been off the list for maybe about three or four weeks in total in the past 16 years. So, it’s a real privilege to have that kind of longevity. And I really pinch myself every day about it.

Bianca Schulze

That is just so incredible. I think you’ve even maybe surpassed the time that Harry Potter has been on the list, either in the series bestseller or it’s really close. Anyway.

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, it’s funny because that’s a little bit of— I think I’ve been on the series list one more week than Harry Potter, which is hilarious because the reason the series list was created was because the Harry Potter books were Hogging all of the fiction slots. So other authors were having trouble breaking into the fiction list, and so they created this new list, which, well, they created a bunch of new lists, including the series list. So even after she had been on The New York Times list for weeks and weeks and years and years, they reset her to zero when she got on the series list. And so even though it looks like I’ve been on longer, the truth is that she’s been on longer by a factor of years.

Bianca Schulze

I love it. Well, I feel as though you’re going to have to stick with me here because I just want listeners to really get the full idea of how popular this series is, even though I’m sure they all know and beyond the fact that there’s Disney movies and we see Greg hovering over New York City on Thanksgiving Day. But after just one— I’m going to read this from your wimpykid.com website. But—

After just one year, more than 100,000 copies were in print in the United States alone.

With each subsequent book in print, numbers continue to grow both in the US. And abroad. And there are now more than 275,000,000 copies of the series in print worldwide. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series has been a permanent fixture on the USA Today Wall Street Journal and publishes weekly bestseller lists. As we just said, the series has remained on the New York Times bestseller list. Since the publication of the first book, for more than 775 weeks total. (That could be a little higher right now) and more than 350 weeks on the series list. And the books are currently available in 84 editions in 69 languages. And since its initial publication in 2007, the series has won many regional and national awards around the globe, including two Children’s Choice Book Awards and six Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards for favorite book. And you’ve also been named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in the mean.

That is just so incredible. So, here’s what I want to ask you because you said just a moment ago that when you first started out, you didn’t necessarily intend Diary of a Wimpy Kid for Kids. So, I want to know what impact you hope Diary of a Wimpy Kid has had on all readers and what impact you hope will continue to be on readers as you progress with the series.

Jeff Kinney

I’m really hoping that when kids read my books that, it creates a pattern of reading for them that might extend through their lifetimes. I think that when a kid reads a book and gets to the end, it creates a feeling of satisfaction and closure. And I would like to hope that kids will remember what that feels like, even if they move away from reading, but that later on in their life that, they’ll pick up a book and remember the simple joy of just finishing a book. And I’m also really hopeful that my books have an influence on humor in general in the entertainment industry. I’m excited to hear about a kid who writes a book or becomes a writer for a television show that was influenced by my books because that will be really interesting to see what somebody else brings to the table. So that’s something I haven’t gotten to experience yet, is seeing those readers turn into writers. But I’m excited to see that.

Bianca Schulze

And then back to also the fact that you were writing for a more adult audience originally. Now that you know this series is just beloved by so many kids, what is your driving force as you continue on writing the books? What really motivates you to just to keep going? Because 18 books is a lot of books to stick with the same characters. What keeps you motivated for the kids?

Jeff Kinney

Usually, it’s the small stories. Last year, I was in Spain, and I ran into a teenager who was, I think she must have been 1920, maybe 21 years old, and she said that every year she and her friend they get the new Wimpy Kid book, and they take turns reading it to one another on Christmas Eve. And that’s their tradition. And I always remind myself, I say, that’s why I’m writing. Even if the lights go down on me, it’s still important to write the book for that kind of a reason. I’ve made money writing these books, of course, and I’ve had a lot of success. But it’s really motivating to me for those people who really enjoy the books and for whom they’re still special. Those are the people that keep me motivated to keep going.

Bianca Schulze

I love it. Well, thank you. Please do keep going.

Jeff Kinney

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Bianca Schulze

Well, on top of creating books for kids, you created Poptropica, which was named one of the Times 50 Best Websites. And you, along with your wife and your two sons, own a bookstore in Plainville, Massachusetts, which is an unlikely story. And you also go on multistate book tours with international visits with each new book release. So, what’s one thing that you do every day that you think would be the most surprising or the most relatable to listeners?

Jeff Kinney

I don’t do this every day, but I often go to McDonald’s, and I go on my scooter and then, like, sit in the parking lot next to the dumpster and eat my chicken nuggets and listen to MSNBC on my phone while I’m also reading the news. I need all that stimulation. McDonald’s plus news plus listening to it and reading and all that right next to the dumpster so that when I’m done, I can throw my stuff right in the bin. So that’s a pretty good slice of life for me.

Bianca Schulze

Oh, my gosh. This is hilarious. So, I’m a closet McDonald’s fan. My husband makes far too much fun of me, but my lucky number is seven. So, I like to order the number seven, which is a cheeseburger meal.

Jeff Kinney

Right. Do you have any special— it’s like, okay, no pickles or any special part of your order?

Bianca Schulze

No, I’m just a straight-up; give me the number seven with a Diet Coke.

Jeff Kinney

Okay. There we go. I think the Diet Coke is a hilarious button to the whole order after you get McDonald’s, but I also want to be healthy, so a Diet Coke, please.

Bianca Schulze

Exactly. It was like when I order a coffee with non-fat milk or a mocha, and then they’re like, do you want the whipped cream? And I’m like, yes, of course, I want the whipped cream.

Jeff Kinney

Doesn’t that feel like a criminal, though? It feels, like, so gluttonous. It’s like, do you want the whipped cream on top of that? It’s like I feel ashamed, but, yes, I would, like, know.

Bianca Schulze

Yes, I would like lots.

Jeff Kinney

You know what they call it in if you order, sorry. A Coke. In the UK, oftentimes, the people I travel with they say, I’d like a Coke full fat. And I think that’s hilarious to say, full fat. But it really is a thing.

Bianca Schulze

I don’t know. So, because I’m Australian, so a lot of British stuff kind of overlays, but that definitely is not an Australian thing. I’ve never heard that.

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, the default, like, you can’t even. I tried to recently order a regular Coke at McDonald’s through the Kiosk thing, and I couldn’t. It was only diet only diet sodas. I don’t know if it was just that McDonald’s or if that’s, like, a thing, but if you want full fat, you got to say the words.

Bianca Schulze

Wow. All right, well, good tip. I hope to visit McDonald’s in the UK so I can order a full-fat Coca-Cola. All right, well, so I want to know: before I started The Children’s Book Review and The Growing Readers Podcast, I was a children’s bookseller in Washington, DC. In a small independent bookstore that is no longer there. And so, I want to know what running your bookstore is like. An unlikely story with your family?

Jeff Kinney

It’s probably less hands-on than it sounds, actually. My kids have both worked here as booksellers, but I have never stood behind the counter and sold a book. I am more of a bookstore owner, very involved at that level. But then also, I play host to the authors who come through here. So pretty much you name it, I’ve interviewed them on stage. We get people from Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, John Grisham, Matthew McConaughey, etc. Sometimes, they’re virtual; sometimes, they’re in person. But we’ve had quite a number of authors in the past eight years, and so that’s where I really intersect with the bookstore.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, that’s fantastic. I actually follow an unlikely story on Instagram, and I love seeing the little clips of authors that you’ve hosted there. And I’ve never been to your bookstore because I think I’ve only been to Massachusetts once a long time ago, but it just looks like the ideal. I just love bookstores.

Jeff Kinney

That’s cool. Yeah. What’s been really cool is that I’ve gotten to go to so many bookstores. In fact, I wonder who has been to more bookstores than me because I do tour a lot, but I got to kind of take the best of the ones that we visited. In fact, the Tattered cover is a great one out there in Colorado that had an influence on our bookstore, and we just tried to take the best of the places we’ve visited and put those elements into our bookstore.

Bianca Schulze

Okay, so then I have to ask this, since the owner of the bookstore, and maybe you’re not hand selling the books, but I’m sure that you’re going to know an answer to this. So, what are some of your favorite books and the booksellers in your store by other authors and illustrators that you guys just always have to keep on the shelves?

Jeff Kinney

Well, that’s a great question. Well, the Big Nate books have been really popular here. Dog Man, of course, which you mentioned before. Anything by Tui Sutherland is really popular. Dan Santat won the National Book Award for his book, which is called A First Time for Everything.

Bianca Schulze

He was actually on the podcast talking about A First Time for Everything earlier this year.

Jeff Kinney

Yeah. And the Babysitter Club books do really well. Of course, anything that’s hot anywhere else is hot here. Spare by Prince Harry. And those types of books, the Britney Spears books, etc., are popular everywhere and are popular here. And you can always feel the effects of something that’s got national attention when you walk through our bookstore.

Bianca Schulze

Awesome. Well, I also know that you’ve been using your voice to bring attention to book banning and highlighting the importance of diversity in reading and giving back to librarians. Sort of the little essence of that shows up in your latest Diary of Wimpy Kid: No Brainer.

Jeff Kinney

Just a bit. Yeah.

Bianca Schulze

I read that you donated or will be donating $100,000 to libraries and that you made some surprise visits to libraries along your latest book tour. So, just on those sorts of bigger topics, and I feel like each one of those, like book banning and the importance of diversity and just how wonderful librarians are, are episodes each on their own. But just in a nutshell, just tell me more about your feelings of giving back and just making sure that just the world in general that we live in is diverse, accepting, and inclusive.

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, that is a big question. What’s been becoming more obvious to me is that librarians are really on the front line of the culture wars and their jobs. They’re very vulnerable because sometimes a district will say that a certain book is inappropriate, and the librarians have to make a choice: do I keep my job or do I put this book on the shelves which I think is appropriate? The overall effect of book banning tends to be that you’re removing books that are by nonwhite people or people who live a little bit differently. And the effect of that is erasure because kids really need to see themselves positively represented in books. They need to see their own experience reflected back to them. It’s important for kids’ mental health and also, it’s important for us as a society to reflect the diversity of the nation that we’re living in. So, on my book tour, we decided to celebrate librarians, and we kind of created a game show format and they could win money for their library, which was fun, but the key to it was celebrating librarians who are in a kind of a crisis right now. I think that they need to be celebrated, uplifted, supported by authors, by everybody in society, really, because if we’re marching towards this world where we’re going to have a few number of people determine what everybody else can read, that’s not a good place to be. So that’s why I’ve gotten a little bit more outspoken, and I think that going into this year especially, I’ll use my voice more.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you for obviously taking your level of success that you’ve had as being a children’s book creator and doing your part to use your voice. I think that’s so wonderful that you are doing that. So, thank you.

Jeff Kinney

Thank you. I appreciate that. And I think that I’m not doing enough, and I’m planning on ramping that up.

Bianca Schulze

Awesome. Okay, well, obviously, we can’t end our chat because we haven’t really taken a deeper dive into the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid: No Brainer. So why don’t you just share a few thoughts that you have about writing it? You can share what made you tell this specific story. Feel free to maybe share a highlight from the book tour, like maybe something a kid shared with you about No Brainer. That would be amazing.

Jeff Kinney

Yeah. No brainers. I realized that I’ve kind of moved away from the school setting in my books. My last book was about a rock and roll band, and the one before that was about sports, and the one before that was vacation. So, it’s been a while since I really spent a book in school, and so I decided to really fully embrace that and to really just write about school. And so, in a way, I made the school the main character of the book. And what I was sort of surprised by was that the book ended up becoming really a satire and kind of a commentary on the education system and the unfortunate and unintentional hilarity of adults trying to do the right thing and things coming out a little bit upside down. So, this book touches on topics like book banning, budget cuts, underperformance on standardized test scores, and all these other things that aren’t typical Wimpy Kid fair. But I thought it was fun to really send up the education system tonally. It feels a little bit different than most Wimpy Kid books, but I think it stands on its own, it stands on its merits, and it’s one of my favorites of the Wimpy Kid books, actually. And what’s funny is I don’t actually get a ton of feedback from kids just because of the nature of touring, especially the way that I tour now where I kind of do a show on a stage, and I’m not really meeting a lot of kids face to face. So that might surprise you that for most of my books, I don’t get almost any feedback directly from kids. So, I just have to hope that I’ve done a good job and hope that they keep reading.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, well, I can tell you that the kids love it. If you were, you’d be getting some amazing feedback. And I also have to say that after reading No Brainer, I just think that these books work on such a great level. The humor is so kid-friendly, but it also really resonates with the grown-up readers as well. So, I just highly recommend that.

Jeff Kinney

Thank you.

Bianca Schulze

Any adults who have kids that are reading these books, and you want to know what they’re about, pick it up and read it because it’s funny. It goes back to what we talked about right at the beginning, where the little comic strips and those little pockets of humor, I mean, adults need to not lose touch with that.

Jeff Kinney

Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. That’s very encouraging.

Bianca Schulze

Well, as we get closer to the end of our chat, I have to ask you, is there a question that you wished you’d get asked in an interview but that you’ve never been asked?

Jeff Kinney

I don’t think so. I like it when people are frank and they ask me questions about things that they really want to know about because a lot of times when kids ask a question, they’re really asking a question they think that adults want to be asked. So, I think it’s sometimes hilarious when people ask questions that they’re actually curious about. And even you, at the beginning of the interview, were asking about what that was like in those early days. I don’t often get asked questions like that, so it’s fun. I’m happy to answer just about any question. And if you had an oddball one that you weren’t sure if you should ask, feel free to fire away.

Bianca Schulze

I don’t have an oddball. I’m sure the minute that we go our separate ways today, something will pop in. I’ll be like, I should have asked Jeff that question. All right, well, then let me ask you this. What is the one most important point that you would love Growing Readers listeners to take away from our discussion today? If, just out of everything we spoke about, they took away one thing, what would you want that to be?

Jeff Kinney

I’d love for kids to give books a chance that have characters that don’t look like them, that didn’t grow up like them, that have a funny-sounding name. I’d love for kids to expose themselves to more. I think it’s just really important for us to have empathy for one another to understand one another. And there’s nothing better than a book to deliver that kind of experience. So, when you read about somebody who didn’t share the same experience you had growing up, that’s what really makes you a more interesting and fuller person. So that’s what I ask kids to do. Pick up a book about somebody or by somebody who’s not like you because you’ll become a better person for having read it.

Bianca Schulze

Yes, I love that. Well, Jeff, on that note, thank you so much for writing the kind of books that kids just gobble up like cookies because I think it’s so important that we have kids that read for pleasure. So, to piggyback on what you said, yes, please read books that are about people who are different from us and have different experiences. This is how we get curious about the world. But it’s also great to have a book that just is easy to read. It makes you laugh, and I mean, kids just love rereading your books, too. They’ll read it ten times over and over. So, thank you for writing those books.

Jeff Kinney

Thank you.

Bianca Schulze

Thank you so much for just giving us your time today and for being on the show.

Jeff Kinney

Well, thank you. And thank you for giving authors like me a platform. It’s really lovely. And thank you very much. Hope I get to meet you in person one of these days.

Bianca Schulze

That would be great. And ideally, I would like that to be an unlikely story.

Jeff Kinney

There we go. Come on out. All right, thanks. All right, bye.

About the Book

Publisher’s Book Summary: In No Brainer, book 18 of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series from #1 international bestselling author Jeff Kinney, it’s up to Greg to save his crumbling school before it’s shuttered for good.

Up until now, middle school hasn’t exactly been a joyride for Greg Heffley. So when the town threatens to close the crumbling building, he’s not too broken up about it.

But when Greg realizes this means he’s going to be sent to a different school than his best friend, Rowley Jefferson, he changes his tune. Can Greg and his classmates save their school before it’s shuttered for good? Or is this the start of a whole new chapter for Greg?

Buy the Book

Show Notes

Resources:

Jeff Kinney is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and the Awesome Friendly Kid series. He is a six–time Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award winner for Favorite Book and has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. He spent his childhood in the Washington, DC, area and moved to New England, where he and his wife own a bookstore named An Unlikely Story.

For more information, visit ⁠⁠https://wimpykid.com/⁠⁠.

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