#balzer bray

By K-Fai Steele

A Normal Pig is a picture book about a pig named Pip. Pip considers herself to be a “pretty normal pig” who “does normal stuff.” But when a new pig shows up at her school and makes fun of Pip’s lunch, her identity—and sense of normalcy—is turned upside down.

A Normal Pig is somewhat autobiographical: I grew up in a town with little diversity and my parents are of different ethnicities. If physically standing out wasn’t enough, no one else had the same seemingly unpronounceable names as me and my brothers, and I have yet to meet another person who shares any of our names. There was little else I wanted as a kid than to pass as normal; I wanted a normal name, a normal house, and normal parents who had normal
well-paying jobs and drove nice normal cars. I internalized and accepted that I was not typical, a reality that was reinforced regularly by my school and my community.

One specific thing that I wanted to show Pip experiencing in A Normal Pig are microaggressions; the subtle, and often unintended ways that people who don’t fit into a community’s dominant paradigm are discriminated against. In Pip’s world she experiences microaggressions when her classmate loudly makes fun of her “weird” food, and later when her band teacher asks if her mom is her babysitter. These small comments reinforce stereotypes and have cumulative
effect; they identify someone as an outsider and tell them in many different ways that they don’t belong.

MakingA Normal Pig gave me the opportunity as an author-illustrator to directly challenge and dissect the concept of normal. I write in order to understand, and much of my process in making this picture book involved asking questions like: what is normal? Who gets to decide what normal means? Being one of the “only ones” in your community can be a deeply lonely and fraught experience; you may spend a lot of your energy coping, and you may lack the tools to challenge systems. My writing process started with reflecting on my own childhood experiences, then talking to friends and colleagues who had similar experiences and learning and reading a lot about people’s everyday experiences with discrimination, from critical race theory to short stories. The exciting thing is that I now get the opportunity to contribute back.

I think there’s a correlation between the immediacy of the themes in A Normal Pig to my drawing style and line (I used watercolor and ink). I’ve been told that my line carries boldness, humor, and sincerity. I use humor in visual and written storytelling as a tool to describe character responses to traumatic experiences, because that’s how I’ve personally processed similar experiences: they can be sad, funny, and awkward all at once.

I hope that many things about A Normal Pig resonate with readers! And specifically, I hope that readers use Pip’s story to question the very concept of the term “normal” and how that term can be used to include or exclude or split the world up into binaries that are deeply unnecessary and limited in regard to the richness of individual experience. Questioning things and getting opportunities to see the world from a different perspective can give you freedom and power, and that’s where we find Pip—and her friends—at the end of A Normal Pig: “weirdly enough, feeling pretty normal.”

K-Fai Steele is an author-illustrator who grew up in a house built in the 1700s with a printing press her father bought from a magician. She is currently a Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library and is the 2019 James Marshall Fellow at the University of Connecticut. A Normal Pig is her author-illustrator debut with Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins Childrens. K-Fai lives in San Francisco.