Marilla, Haymitch and Me: On my disinterest in following beloved middle-aged characters back to adolescence.

I reread Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maude Montgomery this week — partly because I needed something new to listen to while I did a bunch of gardening and housework and the audiobook was included in my Audible subscription, and partly because I’ve been reading a properly scary horror novel and I needed something lovely and life-affirming to balance out my severe case of jibblies — and I was reminded that, for all my love of open-hearted, chatterbox Anne Shirley, it is with Marilla Cuthbert whom my heart resides.

Marilla Cuthbert is your favourite grump’s favourite grump. We meet her at an age undefined, except that it is at least above fifty. Her hair is greying and she favours severely practical gowns which mirror her severely practical personality. She values blunt honesty, short sentences, a love of the Lord (but don’t be too flashy or loud about it), and economy in all things—including affection, and yet is rarely stingy in kindness. She suffers regular migraines and is interested in politics, though engaging with it too openly is one of the many pleasures she denies herself. But like many a beloved grump, Marilla is fiercely loyal and cares deeply for the few people who manage to get past her tough exterior. She’s a fascinating character, well-developed and real, and we get to see a surprising amount of her interiority for a children’s novel.

Sometime during this reread, a memory of a Twitter (RIP) interaction came back to me. It must have been in 2020, during my first time reading the book. I had just shared my love of Marilla Cuthbert publicly for the first time, and it was met by a well-intended and completely inoffensive suggestion that I look into an unofficial prequel published just a few years earlier: Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy. The synopsis suggests that it uses the few details about Marilla’s early life provided in Anne of Green Gables to construct a childhood and young adulthood for her. I possibly promised to look into it (which I clearly did not do, because I’d never read the synopsis until now) and forgot the interaction entirely until this week. But the memory of it wasn’t just triggered by the rediscovery of my dear Marilla, but by two other recent occurrences.

The first being that, for the past past couple of weeks, nearly every one of my reader friends has been reading Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins’ fifth Hunger Games instalment (and second prequel).

The second is that I turned thirty-eight. But we’ll get back to that.

Sunrise on the Reaping follows another notorious grump back into their youth. When we first meet Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games, he’s a mess. Forty years old, prematurely aged and permanently drunk. He’s callous and crude, but as our protagonist (a sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who is much less charming than Anne Shirley, but no less loveable or persistent) forces her way further beneath his skin, we come to see that he is also clever, wryly funny, and deeply traumatised. Not just from his own time in the titular hunger games, but from two decades of caring too much about the yearly pair of local children placed under his (almost sole) care to train for the games, all of whom he has had to watch die. But over the course of the trilogy, and through Katniss’s eyes, we see Haymitch find a ragged sort of hope again. We watch him come back to life, or at least, find something left in the world to live for. We see a rebellion that he has helped shape take hold, and we see him continue to live in the new world that emerges from it. It’s difficult: the demons and the trauma persist, but we see him try, and keep trying.

And while I don’t deny that Haymitch and Marilla have lived rich lives nor judge anyone who wants to spend a great deal more time with them, when I think of following Haymitch or Marilla back into their childhoods I can’t help but flinch.

To be clear, I’m not opposed to prequels as a general rule. I’ve enjoyed a few, including Suzanne Collins’s other prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. But I suppose what I’m reacting to here is a combination of two factors:

1. Perceived Superfluity

Marilla and Haymitch are fully-formed, nuanced characters already. They live and breathe as complete people, and in both cases the defining moments of their youth (or at least, the ones expanded upon in their respective prequel novels) are already told in the course of their existing story. Marilla tells Anne about her ill-fated romance with Gilbert’s father, and Katniss watches a supercut of footage of Haymitch’s time in the hunger games.

…I feel weird. It seems like some major invasion of Haymitch’s privacy. I don’t know why it should, since the whole thing was public. But it does.

Haymitch is not a real person. He doesn’t have privacy to be breached by me, but still, I don’t need the nine-and-a-half pages Collins wrote on Haymitch’s (particularly bloodthirsty) hunger games to be blown out to over five-hundred to empathise with him as a forty-year-old alcoholic with PTSD and depression. I can draw enough from that succinct summary and from the fresh trauma Katniss is working her way through to fill in any gaps. I really don’t need to see that man’s family and girlfriend murdered to find the Capitol any more repulsive or draw any more lines between Collins’ dystopia and the world we live in. I don’t need to see Marilla’s heartbreak to feel any differently about her as a gruff spinster. LM Montgomery and Suzanne Collins gave me everything I needed, and to follow these complex and original portrayals with teenagers Frankensteined together from the crumbs of pre-existing canon, doomed to exist entirely within the context of their future selves, just seems like a huge fucking bummer.

2. Personal Offence On Behalf Of The Middle-Aged

Back to the turning thirty-eight thing. I’ve felt the approach of middle-age for some time now (which is not a way of saying perimenopause is upon me—I think—although the absolute bastard that is Meta’s algorithm sure seems convinced that it is) and have been jokingly referring to myself as such for at least a couple years, but at thirty-eight, I think it’s officially official. No, don’t cry for me. I am, statistically, in the middle stretch of my life, which will hopefully extend into my sixties if we’re working on a thirds-based model, and I’m more than fine with it. Even when the most powerful people in the world seem to take the fact that they exist on the only known celestial body in the universe to support complex and intelligent life as some sort of challenge, every year on this magical rock is a gift, and I like being thirty-nearly-forty a whole lot more than I liked any part of my twenties, and all the parts of my teens that didn’t involve not having to pay for my own stuff.

With the onset of middle-age, I have found myself thusly less interested in stories about the very young and more interested in stories about people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties (and above, though at that point in media they mostly seem to solve mysteries and/or die, but do send me recs for anything that doesn’t fit that bill that you think is interesting).

Marilla and Haymitch are not the protagonists of their stories, and, while I am very aware that because one exists in a children’s story and the other in one for teenagers any books following them would therefore have to be in the same format, the idea that for either of them to become one they must slough off all of their years of experience and return to the (benevolent) ignorance and freshness of adolescence makes me feel so sad.

So while the rest of my book reading circles follow Haymitch back to his bloody adolescence, and though one one random, kind twitter-user urged me to relax into Marilla’s early days, I’ll be staying where I am, keeping them in my mind and admiring them as the societally over-the-hill creatures we are.

ANCILLARY THOUGHTS AND FOOTNOTES:

• The Anne of Green Gables audiobook is narrated by Rachel McAdams in a wonderful use of her skills (but with a few moments of Mean Girl resurgence thanks to Diana absolutely excommunicating that one girl over stealing her milk bottle spot one time).

• Re: my use of Audible, my local library system (I love and appreciate the library, to be clear) does not have much in the way of an audiobook selection, so while I’m not a fan of Amazon’s anything, they are my current best option for book listening.

• The horror book that drove me to Anne is Bat Eater (and other names for Cora Zeng) by Kylie Lee Baker. It is excellent, and also very violent and gory and scary and sad. It’s a book I want to recommend to everyone, but cannot in good conscience because of the intensity level. But if horror is your thing and/or you have a strong stomach, consider checking it out.

• The Ballads of Songbirds and Snakes, following elderly villain President Snow back to his school days was, funnily enough, an inverse of the situation spoken about above. I was, then and now, the only person I know who was even remotely interested in seeing Snow’s history, and one of the few who liked the book (despite quite a few flaws, including a pretty steep drop in the quality of the writing and the reveal of Collins’ unfortunate fondness for dropping as many pieces of foreshadowing to Katniss and the 74th hunger games as possible, thus turning Katniss from a random kid who just so happened to be the final spark needed to ignite the rebellion into President Snow’s personal worst nightmare). Having written this little piece now, though, I wonder if I’m more open to Snow’s backstory because we see so little of it in The Hunger Games. He’s an enigma, compelling but sparingly drawn, and with much of his perceived charisma and complexity coming from his on-screen counterpart. The incandescent Donald Sutherland passionately pursued the role of Snow, and was such a get that the role was expanded with original scenes — none of which added to his backstory, but to his present state of power and control. There was very little to contradict with Snow. He was a blank, charming, murderous slate, and like Collins, I find something quite interesting in the idea of following the story of an ambitious young man who is given such a frank insight into the evils of the society he aspires to rise in, along with every possible chance to do the right thing, and chooses money, power and pain anyway. It’s not an enjoyable story, for sure, and delivered with very little subtlety, but it compelled me. But maybe I’ll feel differently about it when I’m closer to Snow’s age. Check back in 40 years, won’t you?

  That said, for all I found Ballad interesting, I didn’t find it at all necessary. Like too many prequels, it exists entirely within the context of The Hunger Games but adds little to the experience of reading them (besides retrospectively added easter eggs, curios, and occasional continuity confusion/contradiction). While I’ve reread and enjoyed The Hunger Games quite a few times (I think last year or the year before might have been the most recent occasion), the compulsion to revisit Ballad has never yet come over me.

• I still read (and enjoy!) at least a few YA and childrens’ book per year despite having no children in my life to read them to, and all of my published books to date have been written with older children and teenagers in mind. They’re a great group of people and a wonderful audience, and I hope nothing in this piece implies otherwise.

• If you are the twitter user who kindly suggested Marilla’s prequel, please don’t feel bad for sending me a relevant suggestion you thought I might like. I have enjoyed writing this blog post enormously, so in that way you have very much contributed to me having a good time.
  

This piece was originally posted to my Patreon and Substack on April 5, 2025