How do you explain to a child that someone they love might forget their name, their face, or even the stories they once shared?

In These Long-Loved Things, acclaimed singer-songwriter and children’s author Josh Pyke turns personal grief into a powerful story of memory, love, and connection. Drawing from the experience of his own mother’s long journey with Alzheimer’s, Josh captures the complexity of loss through the eyes of a child, offering comfort, understanding, and hope to readers of all ages.

In this moving interview, Josh reflects on the poetic heart of the book, how his background in songwriting shaped the story’s emotional rhythm, and why creating meaningful stories for children feels like “fighting the good fight.”

These Long-Loved Things explores memory, love, and loss in such a gentle and poetic way. What inspired you to write this story, and why was it important for you to share this experience through a child’s perspective?

The inspiration for this story was from my own experience with my Mum. She developed Alzheimers disease over a long period, about 12 years. Her slow decline and eventual passing away just last year in 2024 was the most confusing and confronting thing I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to express some thoughts and epiphanies I’d had during that time in a way that my own kids could understand. My kids never got to know their grandma in the way that I’d known her, so I wanted to kind of explain how there was still a connection, and how shared memories, generational memories are part of our stories as family.

The line “Once a memory is made, it remains. Even when it is forgotten” is especially powerful. Can you tell us more about how that idea shaped the heart of the story?

This is very much the crux of the story. Again, it’s about how memories get shared and passed around between people, especially multi-generational families, and are able to live on. My mum had forgotten everything by the time she passed. She didn’t know me, or my kids, but I was careful to pass on the memories I have of experiences I’d had with her, to my own kids, so that we were all sharing this collective history. In a way that kept alive the version of my mum that I knew as a kid, whilst we cared for the version of my mum that was suffering the illness.

As a songwriter, your lyrics often evoke emotion and imagery – and this book feels like a song in its own right. How does your music background influence the way you write for children, particularly in books like this?

I think having written songs that lean heavily on metaphor and imagery was a pretty great training ground for writing kids books. Kids imaginations are so vivid and untethered to conventional thinking. I love tapping back into that way of thinking when I’m writing songs or books. Also, “show don’t tell” is a big thing in songwriting. You want the listener to fill in the gaps with their own interpretation and imagination, and similarly, I want the illustrator to have heaps of room for their illustrations to tell at least half the story. 

This story touches on the realities of Alzheimer’s in a way that is deeply compassionate yet accessible for young readers. What were some of the challenges in finding the right tone to help families and classrooms talk about such a complex subject?

I just approached it the same way I approached telling my own kids about their Grandma. They were very young when she started to display symptoms of her illness, so we had to navigate that in real time over about 12 years. We had to explain it to them in terms they understood when Mum couldn’t remember their names, (or mine), and when she lost her ability to speak. Our language and detail in explaining difficult or confronting things is always more poetic and metaphorical when explaining things to kids, so I just followed my nose when writing the book, collating all the things I’d told my own kids during that very difficult period. 

Ronojoy Ghosh’s illustrations add another emotional layer to the book. What was your collaboration like, and how did his visuals bring new meaning or perspective to your words?

Ronojoy and I had already worked on Family Tree together, and so I inherently trusted him from the outset. I truly believe that an illustrator brings more than half of what is communicated in a kids book, and so I was keen to allow him the creative freedom to express his own interpretation of my words. Everyone brings their own lived experiences into creative work, and seeing what Ronojoy came up with allowed me to kind of process my own words in a different way too, which was really powerful for me.  

You have a strong connection to creative advocacy and literacy, including your role as an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. What continues to draw you to children’s literature, and what impact do you hope your stories have on young readers and their families?

My dear friend Justine Clarke once said that working in Kids entertainment, (books, music etc) is “fighting the good fight”, and that really stuck with me. There’s so much cynicism in the general music industry, and social media and AI is reshaping how and what we consume our art and culture. Writing kids books that have authentic and meaningful stories, with illustrations done by real people, feels like a little tiny protest against those more corporate and influences in some way! When parents, teachers and of course kids enjoy one of my books, it just feels like I’ve contributed to the good fight, and if that inspires a conversation around a dinner table, or snuggled up at night for reading time, then I feel very proud of that.