If You Give a Narratologist a Muffin: Storying the Object-Oriented Associative Impulse

ABSTRACT Object-oriented narratives in children’s books serve as resources that can prefigure and manage psychological development, including those trajectories considered neurodivergent. Drawing on new object philosophy (as anchored in narrative theory); cognitive literary studies; and child developmental psychology, the article traces what we might call the object-oriented associative impulse: the iterative drive to repurpose objects and deploy them as prompts for new contexts of play and new narrative frames in turn. This article involves some selective autoethnography in terms of my own experience in raising a child on a divergent developmental trajectory. The article grounds observations in readings of Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Moose a Muffin (1991), with reference to other books in that same series, such as If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985) and If You Give a Pig a Pancake (1998)—all illustrated by Felicia Bond. These books, the article suggests, not only provide a rich narrative understanding for a specific expression of cognitive difference but also more generally contribute to the vital project of storying ADHD itself.