Trucky Roads Take Me Home: A Talk with Lulu Miller About Some Serious Truck-Related Fare

I have this thing where, given the large number of the children’s books I read in a given year, I find myself wanting to sing many of their titles to pre-existing songs. For example, I have already started humming the following:

• Title: Heatwave by Lauren Redniss. Song: Heat Wave, sung by Martha and the Vandellas
• Title: Kadooboo! by Shruthi Rao, ill. Darshika Varma. Song: Shipoopi from The Music Man
• Title: K Is In Trouble by Gary Clement. Song: C Is for Cookie, sung by Cookie Monster
• Title: The Night Librarian by Christopher Lincoln. Song: Night Fever, sung by the Bee Gees.
• Title: If I Were a Fungus by Gaia Stella, translated by Nanette McGuinness. Song: If I Was a Carpenter sung by Gordon Lightfoot (alternate tune: If I Were a Rich Man).

That’s just a sample. I may have a problem.

Little wonder, then, that when I encountered Trucky Roads by Lulu Miller, illustrated by Hui Skipp, I wanted to sing its title to Country Roads by John Denver. Yet that laid back, country-inspired song is entirely the wrong vibe for this vibrant book (which just so happens to be out today!). Think more along the lines of Richard Scarry meets Peter Max, and you’ll begin to get a sense of this thoroughly 21st century truck book.

Now if the name “Lulu Miller” is raising small red flags in your brain but you can’t remember why, perhaps you, like myself, are a fan of a certain podcast going by the name of Radiolab. I’ve been listening to it for at least a decade and in the last few years it has sported two hosts, one of whom is the aforementioned Ms. Miller. She’s also been the host of the podcast Invisibilia and she created the fun adult title Why Fish Don’t Exist back in 2021. Now she’s working with that same publisher (Simon & Schuster) and bringing us a picture book about trucks. Beautiful, glorious, mildly perturbing, incredibly colorful and NEVER boring, trucks. Here is an inadequately rough outline of the book itself:

“The city is a busy place and home to many kinds of trucks in this rollicking picture book about all the trucks on the road—big, small, real and imagined!

Trucky Roads sees all kinds of trucks, and when he imagines the kinds of trucks that could be, there is no stopping him. From a cloud roller to a comet mixer, the sky is the limit when you dream!”

And since I seem to be incapable of talking to anyone who doesn’t have at least some kind of connection to my current home of Evanston, Illinois, I find that Lulu Miller kind of, sort of, lives here. She’s even going to have a release party here (but you’ll have to go to the end of this post for more details).

I had a notion to ask Ms. Miller a question or two about her book. She, in turn, had a notion to answer my questions. Nice when things turn out like that:

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Betsy Bird: Lulu! Most marvelous to meet you, particularly since it seems we share an Evanstonian connection in some way. Give me the 411 on how TRUCKY ROADS came to be. And when I ask that I mean both the book and the man.

Lulu Miller: I remember the moment he was “born!” One day my wife Grace asked our son Jude who his favorite person in the world was, kind of smiling at him and hoping he’d say her (kids, we call this “fishing”). And, after thinking for just a moment, Jude replied, “Trucky Roads!” We had never heard of Trucky Roads and figured he was a cartoon character or something. But we looked everywhere and could find no record of him. Jude, a big truck lover, had made him up. I knew right then “Trucky Roads” needed to exist.

For Christmas that year, I drew Jude a little picture book about Trucky Roads–my bad drawings on stapled-together paper. The tiny, scrappy book, weirdly, stood the test of time in our house. Both of our sons would ask for it for bedtime (not all the time, but sometimes!). After a few years of it getting stained and ripped and worn, it finally occurred to me to see if someone would actually want to publish it. The wonderful editor Paula Wiseman at Simon & Schuster said yes and had the wisdom to pair the story with illustrator Hui Skipp – who is all joy, genius, and play. And that’s how Trucky came into being! I really see the book as something that was made by Jude, me and Hui all together–with big help from Paula. 

BB: We can’t really talk about truck books for kids without invoking the one, the only, the great Richard Scarry at some point. How much did Mr. Scarry play a role in the creation of TRUCKY?

Lulu: Somehow, I didn’t grow up on Scarry. So his work was missing from my mind and visual lexicon for most of my life. But a couple years ago, my friend Kate Samwoth (an incredible illustrator who illustrated my book for adults, Why Fish Don’t Exist) sent us a big book of collected Scarry stories. The boys loved flipping through the pictures of cranes and diggers dotted with all the little creatures inside. Seeing their rapture must have informed the structure of Trucky Roads, which is essentially a catalog of trucks spinning off into increasingly imaginary ones. But the book that really inspired it is Road Builders by B.G. Hennessy with illustrations by Simms Taback. A friend gave it to us when Jude was born and, wow, has it stood the test of time! It is easily the most-loved book in our house. The boys always request it; they seem to enjoy the pleasure of naming the trucks, the intricacy of detail on the trucks (down to the gauges and gears and bumper stickers and mud splatters). With Trucky Roads, I wanted to tap into the joy of categorizing and listing things, but also bust it up a little, put a little spin on it.

BB: And did you get some kid input on some of the different kinds of trucks in this book?

Lulu: If you look hard in the book, you may find a potty-related vehicle in the book. Let’s just say my sons gave some expert advising on that one.

BB: Ah yes. Story check out. I’m also fond of the clueless adults that sometimes show up in the book asking questions. After all, there is nothing a kid loves more than correcting or educating someone older than themselves. Were the little verbal asides that show up on some of these pages an element of the book from the start or did you add it in later?

Lulu: The verbal asides were there from the beginning. In the first version (the book I made for my kids for Christmas) the clueless adults were photo cut-outs of my wife Grace and I. (see sample photo)

BB: I love it when my interviewees come with visual aids. Of course part of the fun of writing a picture book is seeing the artist you get paired alongside. In your case you’ve the inimitable Hui Skipp. Hui had to turn each one of your trucks into something real on the page. A tall order! It’s hard to compare the book you once envisioned in your head with the one you have at the end of the day, but tell us a little bit about how you felt when you first encountered Hui’s art.

Lulu: Ecstatic? Euphoric? Like the ideas had found their home. It was the most amazing process to watch her bring them to life. Her sense of color and pattern–I feel like she’s keyed into the sliver of the cosmos where I want to live. 

BB: Your previous book Why Fish Don’t Exist taps into your love of science. Many is the science writer (Sy Montgomery, for example) who has written both for adults and for kids in this area. And you are, I should note, also the host of Radiolab’s podcast for kids, Terrestrials. Do you have any interest in possibly writing a science-related book for kids someday, or would you say that TRUCKY was a one off?

Lulu: Oh, goodness, I would love to! I’ve got ideas and even some drafts for children’s books about nocturnal animals, spheres (and why the universe seems to crave a sphere, from electrons to dew drops to planets), and one about a kid who tries to touch the horizon (spoiler, she can’t), along with too many others to bore you with here. But they’re all in that very messy and who knows if they’d actually be fun for a kid state. So we’ll see. I’d love to. Hang tight and cross your fingers for me 🙂 

BB: Will do! Finally, what else do you have going on in your life these days?

Lulu: Well, the big one is I’m pregnant, with baby #3 due in just a few weeks. So that’s big. I’m big. And we’re all pretty excited to become a chaos cluster of five.

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Man. That is cool. The whole book is cool, honestly.

Now as I mentioned before, you have a chance to see Lulu Miller live and in person, particularly if you live in the Chicago area, at our local children’s bookstore Booked. Check it out:

I knew I couldn’t be the only one making John Denver references in her head.

Special thanks to Lulu for talking with me today about her latest. As I mentioned before, Trucky Roads releases today so find it wherever good books for kids are sold.

Filed under: Interviews