Known for her offbeat titles as much as for her snappy one-liner dialogue, Danziger lives well from the sale of her books and is as popular in England--where she resides part of the year--as she is in the United States. Danziger makes frequent visits to schools on both sides of the Atlantic, and is also a regular guest on BBC television shows for children.
A Difficult Childhood
Such success was not a foregone conclusion for Danziger as a child. She did not do exceptionally well in school, and her father went out of his way to make her feel inadequate intellectually. "I grew up in a family which would nowadays be called dysfunctional," she told Chris Powling in a Books for Keeps interview. "My parents really cared about their kids ... which makes it even sadder, I suppose. My father was a very angry man. He never hit my younger brother and me but was emotionally abusive." Early on, Danziger developed a sense of humor to help her get through life. She also determined that she wanted to be a writer and started, as she told Marguerite Feitlowitz in Authors and Artists for Young Adults, "mentally recording a lot of information and observations."
In high school Danziger wrote what she called "offbeat features for the school newspaper and a column in the town newspaper." This writing and publishing did a lot to bolster her self-esteem: "Someone was noticing that I wasn't a total idiot," she told Feitlowitz.
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