Everything you want to know about Jeff Kinney, the wildly successful author of the children's book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid, can be summed up in one simple fact.
He lives in Plainville, USA.
In Toronto for the first time on a big, fancy tour for the third book in the series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw, he looks like an ad for an unscented bar of white soap. Clean-cut and with the demeanour of a kindly pastor, he wears a blue shirt and Dad jeans - buckled at the waist and slightly baggy, they are not cool.
In conversation, the 37-year-old says "thank you" a lot, especially after you comment on how interesting it is that he worries about the fame and money that has come his way since the first book made its debut in 2007.
And he often stops himself partway through a rambling sentence to apologize for its lack of clarity. "Here, let me try to give you a better quote," he says, before he sits a little taller in his chair and pauses, thinking up a good, succinct remark. "I'm afraid because I feel that if I become dependent on the Wimpy Kid enterprise, I will make bad decisions, and I just don't want to be ashamed of anything with this brand," he pronounces. "The idea of milking it for all it's worth is just not appealing to me."
This is why he has kept his full-time day job as design director of an Internet publishing company that produces the popular children's sites PopTropica.com and FunBrain.com. "It also keeps me grounded," he adds.
His income from the books, which chronicle in words and cartoons the life of Greg Heffley, an ordinary 12 year-old boy, outnumbers his regular salary "by leaps and bounds," he acknowledges. The first two have sold a reported 10 million copies in 29 languages. "I worry about [money] all the time. ... You have to figure out who will benefit. You have to make decisions that you don't have to make when you are struggling to get by."
He likes living off the radar in Plainville, Mass. (population 8,000), where he and his wife of nine years and their two sons, aged three and six, reside in a "modest" house.
"I'm just ordinary there, part of the community. No one cares about the books. And our kids are too young to care. My wife is not stricken by any of this [success], either." Mr. Kinney, a practising Catholic, says he has "never been money hungry." With the proceeds from the books and a Wimpy Kid movie (due out next summer), "we want to do good," he says. Does he mean give it to charity? He nods. "Whether it means giving it to people who are struggling ..." he says, then cuts himself off. "Maybe I shouldn't say anything," he explains, blushing slightly.
The role of author in the public realm is not a comfortable one, he blurts in the next breath. "I'm not used to this. It's weird that you're even interviewing me. I mean, I am grateful, but it feels like a hobby, like an alter ego, being an author."
His route to success was one of chance and persistence. At the University of Maryland in the early nineties, he developed a comic strip called Igdoof in the campus newspaper. But he couldn't get published when he graduated. "I endured years of rejection letters."
He worked in a series of jobs, including newspaper layout editor, production manager and webmaster, and when his first marriage ended in divorce after three years, he began keeping a diary of his life "as a way of shaming myself to work on my cartoons. But it didn't really work. My journals were records of my TV watching and video-game playing."
