Raquel Jaramillo’s debut novel, Wonder, written under the pen name R.J. Palacio, was born out of a rather embarrassing incident. The author was out with her two sons, sitting in front of an ice cream store. Her oldest had just finished fifth grade, and her youngest was still in a stroller. They spotted a girl whose face had been deformed by a medical condition.
“It was just one of those terrible moments when my kids didn’t react the way I would’ve wanted them to react,” Jaramillo tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “In order to spare this little girl’s feelings, I ended up just kind of running away from the scene.”
She felt terrible about the incident, and replayed it over and over in her mind. That night, she began writing a story about a fifth-grade boy nicknamed Auggie who struggles to feel ordinary with everyone constantly staring at him.
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