The Lone Ranger Lied: Tonto Wasn't Real

Whenever Hadley Irwin speaks to school children or to adults, for that matter, someone always asks, “Did the things in the book really happen to you? Are the characters in your books real people?” Writing is full of bits and pieces of the past, but what goes on paper is an amalgam of thousands of things, consciously and unconsciously remembered—experiences, overheard conversations, stories, imagined events. For a child, at least this writer as a child, all things had equal validity; all were equally true, even though she finally learned that growing up was a mixture of reality and myth.