With two successes under her belt, DiCamillo left her job as a sales clerk in a children's bookshop and determined to devote herself full time to her writing. "I just want to tell more stories," the author told Elizabeth Kennedy on the online
Children's Books. A Florida Upbringing
Born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1964, DiCamillo is the daughter of an orthodontist father and a mother who was a schoolteacher. As the author once noted, "I was a sickly child. My body happily played host to all of the usual childhood maladies--mumps and measles, chickenpox twice, and ear infections--plus a few exotic extras: inexplicable skin diseases, chronic pinkeye, and, most dreaded of all, pneumonia, recurring every winter for the first five years of my life. I mention this because, at the time, it seemed like such a senseless and unfair kind of thing to me, to be sick so often, to miss so much school, to be inside scratching or sneezing or coughing when everybody else was outside playing. Now, looking back, I can see all that illness for what it was: a gift that shaped me and made me what I am. I was alone a lot. I learned to rely on my imagination for entertainment.
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