In the Shadow of the Baby Sitters Club

Children’s author Ann M. Martin created a massively successful, generation-shaping series. Now she’s been tasked with rebooting another.

- Alexis Swerdloff

THE FIRST THING I NOTICE when I enter Ann M. Martin’s Greenwich Village apartment is a large photograph of a happy-looking mutt. “That’s Sadie,” Martin tells me of her beloved golden-retriever mix. “She lived to be a very old lady.” The painfully shy 61-year-old children’s book titan is leading me through the front hall and explains that her pet was the reason she stopped living in Manhattan full time in 1998. “Sadie was just beside herself in the city,” Martin says softly. “Everything scared her.” (Martin grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and went to Smith, so her voice has a slight Waspy affect.) The two decamped to Martin’s house in Shokan, a hamlet just outside Woodstock, and now she comes to the city about once a month: “I feel a bit like a tourist whenever I’m here,” she says as we take a seat in the living room. “Every now and then, I’ll go out looking for a restaurant I liked and it’s gone.”

Martin is wearing a pink knit polo under which an undershirt daintily peeks out just below her collarbone. Her sandy-gray shoulder length hair matches the sandy-gray living room: Years of direct sunlight have given the couch, chairs, and carpet a somewhat faded quality. Martin tells me that though she likes her “aloneness” upstate, she’s been taking in foster kittens through the ASPCA. “I’ve probably fostered hundreds of cats,” she says. “Right now I have five kittens, and their default setting is making the tiniest little hisses you can imagine,” she says. “Taking care of them is like my version of babysitting.”

And suddenly that word jolts me into remembering why I’m here: The demure woman sitting across from me is the almost-mythical author whose name my friends and I would utter excitedly in between mouthfuls of our Lunchables ham-and-cracker sandwiches.