I had wanted to become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me that I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad Are Friends: it wasn’t a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know, like why Toad was the way he was—why Toad was essentially unwell, and why Frog helped Toad, whether he really wanted Toad to get better, or whether he benefited in
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