The #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeff Kinney will visit Decatur on Friday, Oct. 24 to celebrate his 20th book in the series “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” with an interactive, game show event called The Partypooper Show.
Kinney is on tour promoting his latest book, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Partypooper,” about 12-year-old Greg Heffley, a sixth grade boy who gets bad grades, plays too many video games, and loves junk food. Greg is expecting an epic party when he realizes his family has completely forgotten it is his birthday.
The “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series has sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. Kinney is a six-time Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice award winner and has been named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Rough Draft asked Kinney about his inspiration for the 20th book in his series, known by the black-and-white stick-figure drawing on the cover.
“I’m sort of sworn to secrecy on this details, but one year my family forgot my birthday, just like Greg’s family forgets his. So definitely I am milking that experience and turning it into a book,” Kinney said.
Before launching the book, the author asked young readers if they were familiar with the term party pooper; after all, it became popular in the 1940s.
“They were able to describe the term back to me, but we decided to make it one word, because I was like, ‘You know what? Even though party pooper is two words, I just can’t have the word ‘poop’ on its own line.’ So I just blended them together,” Kinney laughed.
Middle schoolers have their own language and style, something Kinney has picked up on after so many years of writing about the age group.
“Last night in the show, we added a joke with ‘six- seven,’ and it was like setting off a bomb in the room. Honestly, as soon as we said it, the kids went nuts,” Kinney said. “So we know how to speak the language for sure.”
“Six-seven” originated from a song by Skrilla and meme about Charlotte Hornets basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is six-foot-seven-inches tall. Along with many other phrases, “six-seven” has been adopted by Generation Alpha as part of their “brain-rot” culture and slang.
Graphic novels and hybrids like “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” are wildly popular with kids in second grade and up. At his bookstore in Massachusetts, Kinney noted that children’s middle grade fiction is struggling, but graphic novels are popular.
“Kids are growing up in a very visual world. There’s an expectation of something visual in almost everything they do. Sometimes it’s a little bit harder to get them to read books with just text. That’s why I think you need these bridge books to help ease them into prose,” he said.
Kinney has been to the metro Atlanta area “lots of times” prior to this tour, but “Partypooper” is the biggest event yet. The sold out show is being held in conjunction with Little Shop of Stories, a beloved children’s bookstore on Decatur Square.
The “Partypooper” tour from left from Wrentham, MA, and is headed to Fayetteville, AK in an oversized, customized van Kinney calls The Wimpy Wagon. His tour will continue abroad in the United Kingdom, Germany, Turkey, Italy and Croatia. He joked that he speaks the language in at least one of those countries.
After the tour, Kinney will return to his book shop which he described as a “magical place” with reclaimed wood, books dangling from the ceiling, and the warm glow of Edison bulbs.
“I’ve been to lots and lots of bookstores, and we tried to capture the best of each one and put it into our bookstore,” he said. “The magic is in the architecture, and the design, and the selection of the books.”