Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Are They Dead Yet? by Sam Roberts, which was published on August 11, 2026, by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.
