semanticals: where the wild things came from

“The monsters were based on relatives.  They came from Europe, and they came on weekends to eat, and my mom had to cook.  Three aunts and three uncles who spoke no English, practically.  They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do.  And I knew that my mother’s cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother.  We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that.  We couldn’t taste any worse than what she was preparing.  So that’s who the Wild Things are.  They’re foreigners, lost in America, without a language.  And children who are petrified of them, and don’t understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate.”

                           -Maurice Sendak, on the creation of his Wild Things