The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books

How a best-selling series gave young readers a new sense of agency.
Illustration of a fantasy realm.
The eighties book craze gave young readers the opportunity to inhabit bolder versions of themselves, or diverging selves that followed many different paths at once.Illustration by Tim Goschnick

CHOICES

You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them?

This was the late eighties in Los Angeles. You binged on these books, pulling tattered sun-bleached copies from your bookshelf: four, five, six in the course of a single afternoon. All over the country, all over the world, other kids were pulling these books from their bookshelves, too. The series has sold more than two hundred and seventy million copies since its launch, in 1979. It’s the fourth-best-selling children’s-book series of all time. Its popularity peaked in the eighties, but the franchise still sells about a million books a year.

In “The Cave of Time,” the first book in the series, you discover a time-travelling cave whose tunnels carry you to Colonial Massachusetts, where you become a soap-maker’s apprentice; or to the Titanic, where your attempts to warn the captain are futile; or even to a version of the year 2022 that does not look much like our version of 2022 (more bike trails). The stated desire of your character (to return to your own time) is at odds with the actual desire of a reader (to have as many adventures as possible). You want to die in the jaws of a T. rex, or change the course of history by eating a sandwich. The warning at the beginning of the book tells you, “Remember—you cannot go back!” But of course you can go back, and you will. After the first few books, the warnings stop saying “You cannot go back!” They understand that going back is the point—not the making but the re-making of choices, the revocability of it all. In childhood, you get to take things back. It’s a small compensation for having very little power in the first place.

Choose books invited kids to exercise some agency, as they rattled around in these cages of limited possibility: millions of seven-year-olds who would someday become thirty-five-year-olds remembering with an aching nostalgia this early sense of freedom; this faith that, after every death, there would always be a do-over.

If you want to read about how these books came to be, continue to TWO DADS.

If you want to read more about the pleasures of dying, skip to RISK.

TWO DADS

The story of Choose Your Own Adventure is largely the tale of two men: Edward Packard, a lawyer who came up with the concept while telling bedtime stories to his two daughters (who sometimes wanted the protagonist to do different things), and R. A. (Ray) Montgomery, an independent publisher who put out Packard’s first book, in 1976, after all the big houses had rejected it. Each of them eventually went on to write nearly sixty titles in the series. During the next three decades, Packard and Montgomery (who died in 2014) weathered an evolving, sometimes fractious relationship. Each, at various points, pursued publishing ventures without the other. But together they were responsible for many of the most beloved titles in the series: Packard’s “The Cave of Time,” “Your Code Name Is Jonah,” “Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?,” and “The Mystery of Chimney Rock”; Montgomery’s “Journey Under the Sea,” “The Lost Jewels of Nabooti,” “Mystery of the Maya,” and “Prisoner of the Ant People.”

Both men went through divorces shortly before the series started gaining momentum, and ended up writing many of their books as single fathers. Their children remember helping their fathers invent and flesh out new scenarios: Packard’s daughter Andrea suggested the idea of a time-travelling cave; Montgomery’s sons, Anson and Ramsey, suggested cars (the Saab 900 Turbo, the Lancia Stratos) for “The Race Forever.” Packard paid his children thirty-five cents an hour to read his manuscripts and offer feedback: Which parts were boring? Which choices would kids enjoy? (Andrea, Anson, and Ramsey ended up writing for the franchise, publishing their first Choose books during college.)

Andrea recalls that time with her father felt even more precious after her parents divorced. (They split up when she was seven.) He would take her on weekend outings that emphasized experiment and tactile experience—encountering the world in concrete, physical ways—and Andrea sees the Choose books as another manifestation of this ethos: a way of encouraging kids to experience the world through exploration and curiosity. Andrea can still remember looking at her father’s diagrams for the books: the forking branches spidering across taped-together paper charts. To her, “those charts felt like houses of possibility.”

If you want to read more about how Packard arrived at the original idea, continue to THE STORYTELLER.

If you want to learn how Montgomery helped turn the concept into a phenomenon, skip to THE SCENARIO BUILDER.

THE STORYTELLER

When his daughters were young, Packard told them bedtime stories about a boy named Pete, a literary alter ego of Andrea’s. (Pete was also the name of a friend she had a crush on, but she thinks the character’s creation had more to do with her suspicion that boys had more freedom in the world.) At key junctures in the story, Packard would ask his daughters what they thought Pete should do next, and when they gave different answers he’d play out both possibilities. Packard remembers this innovation as a function of necessity—“If I’d been a better storyteller, we never would have gotten the form. . . . I’d get stumped, and ask the girls what should happen next”—but Andrea recalls it as an instance of his generosity. He wanted to give each girl her own ending, just as he was always meticulously fair in his distribution of snacks, compliments, and attention.

Andrea remembers bedtime stories with her dad as sacred—this was the time the kids got to be with him, after his long days working at a law firm in Manhattan and his lengthy train commutes back to their home, in suburban Connecticut. Eventually, Packard began using these commutes to turn his bedtime stories into his first book, “Sugarcane Island,” a story full of branching paths recounting Pete’s adventures on a remote island. Working on the manuscript offered Packard an escape from a law career he found largely unsatisfying. In 1969, Packard signed a contract with an agent, who submitted “Sugarcane Island” to various New York publishers and accumulated a stack of rejections. One editor thought it was more of a game than a book. Another said, “It’s hard enough to get children to read, and you’re just making it harder, with all these choices.”

If you want to read how Montgomery eventually gave these books a home, read THE SCENARIO BUILDER.

If you’re curious to meet the ninety-one-year-old Packard in person, turn to MEETING.

THE SCENARIO BUILDER

On a Vermont ski vacation in 1975, years after getting rejected by every editor who read “Sugarcane Island,” Packard stumbled across a magazine article about a small publisher called Vermont Crossroads, run by a husband-and-wife team: Ray Montgomery and Constance Cappel. They were looking for inventive children’s literature. When he sent them “Sugarcane Island,” they were immediately excited by the concept. One of Montgomery’s jobs had been consulting as a scenario builder for the Peace Corps and for Con Edison, writing elaborate second-person roles for participants: “You are a construction worker in your mid-thirties. . . . Oil shortages worry you, but you believe a lot of it is bluff.” Packard’s book reminded him of those scenarios: their immersive perspectives, decision junctures, and forking paths.

Despite the couple’s enthusiasm, Vermont Crossroads didn’t have many resources to devote to promotion. Packard had to pitch in to help with the publishing costs. Montgomery Xeroxed sixty copies and gave them to a local teacher to pass out to her students as a kind of juvenile focus group. Asked if they found the book interesting, fifty-nine said yes—and the one who called it “boring” reported having read it nine times. When asked if they would give the book as a gift, only four students said no (one of whom explained, “I’d keep it”). Another student said, “In other books if you’re in a jungle and a snake was next to you, you would have to go away or stay still but in this book you can do both.”

“Sorry if there’s sand back there. I went to the beach once ten years ago.”
Cartoon by Asher Perlman

“Sugarcane Island” went on to become one of Vermont Crossroads’s most successful books, selling more than five thousand copies, but both Packard and Montgomery believed that the idea had the potential to break out on a much larger scale. That’s when things got a bit messy, both personally and professionally. Montgomery and his wife separated (as Packard tells it, “she got the house, he got ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ ”); and both men tried (separately) to take the Choose Your Own Adventure concept to larger publishers. First, Packard signed a deal with J. B. Lippincott & Co., an imprint of Harper, and published two Choose books. His pitch for a third was rejected. Packard says that Montgomery, “miffed” that Packard had left Vermont Crossroads, approached Bantam, then part of Bertelsmann, with the concept on his own. Montgomery got a contract for six books. As Packard tells it, Bantam “wouldn’t sign the deal” without Packard’s involvement; as Montgomery’s widow, Shannon Gilligan, tells it, Montgomery’s sense of fairness, as well as a feeling that six books in a year was too much for one writer, inspired him to get Packard involved. However it happened, they eventually split the deal.

Andrea helped her father come up with the idea for “The Cave of Time” during a road trip. They were in his orange Volkswagen Squareback—with a stick holding up one window, and no seat belts in the back—going to see his mother on the North Fork of Long Island. Packard told his daughters and their younger brother that he had a contract with Bantam and he needed ideas. Andrea had recently gone spelunking at summer camp, crawling into a small cave beneath the main cave, farther than anyone else, and felt torn between exploring more—had anyone ever seen these tunnels?—and returning to safety. When she suggested the idea to her father—a cave whose deepest tunnels transported you through time—he said, “Great idea! Get started!,” and handed her a yellow composition pad. “The Cave of Time” credits Andrea with “concept, title, and editorial assistance,” and she has always received a percentage of the royalties.

If you’re curious about the appeal of heading deeper into the cave, skip to RISK.

If you want to watch these books turn into a phenomenon, continue to HEYDAY.

HEYDAY

At Bantam, Choose Your Own Adventure finally found the huge readership its creators always believed it could entice. A 1981 feature in the Times described a fourth-grade classroom with seven students all making different choices in “The Cave of Time.” Soon afterward, Packard was interviewed by Bryant Gumbel on the “Today” show. (He’d been hoping for Jane Pauley, whom he had a crush on.) At some point in the early eighties, Bantam decided that it wanted twelve books a year, so it got six from Packard and six from Montgomery.

The Choose franchise hit a generational sweet spot, alongside the rise of Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. Back then, it was these text-based experiences which could most powerfully deliver the possibilities of interactive narrative.

The form wasn’t entirely new: the ancient tradition of oral storytelling often involves interaction between audience and storyteller, and (more recently) postmodern literature had begun exploring the possibilities of multiple simultaneous story lines. Robert Coover’s 1969 short story “The Babysitter” imagines a single ordinary night following a series of (increasingly disturbing) paths; John Fowles’s novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” published the same year, offers three endings for the same story. Some three decades earlier, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) imagines the unfinished novel of a Chinese civil servant in which all the possible outcomes of an event occur, rather than just one. But it was a largely forgotten novel called “Consider the Consequences,” published in 1930, that most closely anticipated the Choose Your Own Adventure form. Written by two middle-aged friends, Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins, it invited the reader to make choices about the romantic life of a young woman and her two suitors, leading to forty-three alternative endings. The opening page offers a disclaimer: “Life is not a continuous line from the cradle to the grave. Rather, it is many short lines, each ending in a choice and branching right and left to other choices, like a bunch of seaweed.”

As the Choose books grew more successful, Packard developed a spinoff series that, he says, made Montgomery want a spinoff series of his own, amplifying tensions already created by their separate overtures to larger publishers. Montgomery did persuade Bantam to create a pair of computer games for the Atari platform based on Choose books, and that’s how he ended up meeting and marrying Gilligan, who was hired to develop them.

Both Montgomery and Packard found themselves in artistic disagreements with Bantam. Packard, having originally devised these stories for his daughters, wanted to make the protagonists gender-neutral, but the publisher wanted them to be boys. Montgomery agreed with Packard. Bantam believed that, while girls would gladly read stories about boys, boys didn’t want to read stories about girls.

As writers, Packard and Montgomery had palpably different styles that seemed to espouse opposite philosophies about chaos and order. While Packard was invested in constructing logical cause-and-effect correlations between choices and their outcomes, aspiring to decisions that rewarded an analytic approach, Montgomery’s books read more like fever dreams, absurd and off the wall, featuring a well-organized ant bureaucracy, a planet full of babies morphing rapidly into liver-spotted elders, and plenty of stoned-in-a-dorm-room epiphanies: “You are and you have been a part of everything, always. The beginning is the end.” That ending, of course, is just another beginning—inviting you to flip back to the first page and start again.

If you want to read more about being a part of everything, continue to YOU.

If you want to read more about the allure of resurrection, skip to RISK.

YOU

You didn’t necessarily identify with the unnamed “you” who starred in each book. It was more that each protagonist offered you an alternative to yourself, or forty alternatives to yourself. The second person was less like a mirror and more like a costume. Reading these books wasn’t about the pleasure of “relatability” but about something opposite—the pleasures of distortion, recklessness, and multiplicity. Every protagonist contained multitudes, a set of contradictory impulses that didn’t have to cohere: The self who explores the haunted house and the one who stays behind. The self who confronts the ghost and the one who runs away. The self who helps the mother in trouble—or the cousin, or the hiker—and the one who mumbles some apology and moves on, to continue searching for the yeti, or the family crest. The self who burns the vampires alive and the one who accepts their decadent pastries. (Word to the wise: never accept a vampire’s pastries.)

When you read these books as a child, your process was always the same: you started by following your intuitions, trying to approximate what you would actually do in these far-fetched situations, and—once you’d reached that first ending, the one you probably deserved—you let yourself try anything you wanted. You let yourself make reckless choices that ran counter to your intuitions in every imaginable way. It was like wearing brave-person drag. You let yourself rummage through the rest of the book to find every single ending, the same way you’d rummage through a bag of chips (if your nutritionist mother let you eat chips) to find every single shard.

The books vary widely in the types of choices they offer. Although many of them (especially early books like “The Cave of Time”) feature the kinds of concrete choices that role-play writers call “which-way choices”—left or right, up or down—the more compelling choices are grounded in emotional priorities, or ethical commitments: Do you betray the secret of the whales, or protect them? Are you ready to spend your whole life cloistered in the paradise of Shangri-la, or do you crave the freedom of a life beyond its boundaries? Many choices map familiar childhood dilemmas—whether to trust authority figures, whether to share secrets, even whom to sit next to at lunch—onto wacky, outrageous landscapes.

In “Inside UFO 54-40,” for example, after your Concorde flight gets intercepted by aliens called the UT-Y, who are collecting specimens for their interplanetary zoo, you find yourself imprisoned in the chamber of Earth people. Do you speak to the dark-haired young woman or the wise-looking old man? And, when you finally gain the audience of the aliens, what do you tell them in order to make them set you free? Children already spend much of their lives puzzling out what to tell various authority figures—parents, teachers, babysitters—in order to get what they want in return: knowledge, attention, affection, agency. In one plotline, the UT-Y masters challenge you to say something that will surprise them: a moment that winks at you, reminding you that the books, even as they seem to offer you choices, already know all the choices you could possibly make. As the book continues, you find yourself repeatedly disappointed by the “happy” scenarios where you make it back to Earth. You want to see the interplanetary zoo!

The forking paths of a Choose book propose a conception of character that differs from that of traditional novels. If a character is defined by the choices she makes, then perhaps these books have no true central character. This main character makes all the choices, effectively nullifying her own identity. If you make every choice, you are no one. But if you understand character a bit differently—as a range of possibilities, rather than as a series of inevitable decisions—then the protagonists of Choose books are truer, fuller expressions of identity than characters whose novels allow them only one plotline. Each of these protagonists contains an array of potential destinies, rather than just one. Each holds the shadow selves of other lives she could have led.

If you want to read about the pleasure of killing these shadow selves, continue to RISK.

If you’d rather hear Packard talk about his own regrettable choices, skip to IMPULSES.

RISK

The warning at the beginning of every Choose Your Own Adventure is also a promise: “You are responsible because you choose! . . . Think carefully before you make a move! One mistake may be your last.” It’s not just saying, You are in control, but also You will find yourself in pleasurable danger.

You love the dangerous women in these books. You love the power-hungry vampire countess. You love the beautiful Italian secret agent with a long, sharp nose who double-crosses you on Cape Cod. You adore the villainous gem dealer with cat’s-eye glasses and a pond of pet piranhas. You love these evil women because they do the opposite of pleasing everyone. They offer another way to be a woman, another way to be alive. You don’t mind if they kill you. You love endings where you die.

“Every kid gets a laurel wreath? This is why Rome is falling.”
Cartoon by Trevor Spaulding

The deaths in these books are intoxicating because they are never final. No matter how the story ends—you are sliced in half by a portal that sends your torso to the future and your legs to the past; you are paralyzed by a pair of good-looking vampires as they waltz through the baggage car of a Transylvanian train; you learn that you exist only in the dreams of an unconscious middle-aged man, and will stop existing if he ever wakes up—you can always go back and make another set of choices. The fact of multiple endings offers a sense of freedom and safety at once, reconciling two conflicting desires of childhood: autonomy and protection.

The eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke, in his theory of the sublime, observed the appeal of regarding danger from a position of safety, arguing that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” It’s the thrill of watching a powerful waterfall from a sturdy boulder, or reading about your own death in a book that will let you resurrect yourself.

If you’re tired of meditations on selfhood and sublimity, skip to meeting Packard in MEETING.

If you want to read about what happens when books and readers break the rules, proceed to CHEATING (or maybe you already have).

CHEATING

No Choose Your Own Adventure breaks the rules more seductively than “Inside UFO 54-40,” which opens with a special warning: “While you are on board UFO 54-40, you may hear about Ultima, the planet of paradise, and you may wonder if one of your adventures will lead you there. . . . No one can get there by making choices or following instructions!”

As it turns out, you can reach Ultima only by cheating, flipping through the pages until you spot an illustration, on page 102, that looks suspiciously like paradise: gleaming buildings encircled by spiral staircases, pillars, and crescents, a glowing circus tent that radiates beams of light. It’s Ultima! “You did not make a choice, or follow any directions, but now, somehow, you are descending from space—approaching a great, glistening sphere.” Your alien hosts welcome you. They tell you that no one gets here by following directions. It feels like grace, as if the book were not just forgiving but rewarding what you always considered to be cheating: flipping through the pages to find the endings you wanted, then reverse-engineering the choices that would get you there. The book seemed to be saying: You understand the spirit of these books better than the readers who play by the rules. I will reward your cheating with paradise.

Anson Montgomery, who still writes and publishes Choose books, sometimes gets letters from young readers confessing their cheating habits: scanning ahead for desirable endings, backtracking to redo choices. Their confessions carry top notes of guilt, he says, but he suspects that, beneath this anxiety, they actually relish their transgressions. They enjoy a reading experience that gives them something to confess. A former reader tells you about keeping one finger marking the page at every crucial choice point to which he might need to return, until all his fingers were slotted into the book—as if he were playing it like a wind instrument.

Anson believes that frustration is also part of the appeal of these books: “As a kid, you might not know it, but you also want frustration.” You don’t want to get the most triumphant ending right away. It’s most satisfying to reach Ultima after you’ve been frustrated, over and over, by following the rules.

The most explicitly metafictional of all the Choose books is Packard’s “Hyperspace,” which reads like a book that has grown tired of following the rules. Published in 1983, it begins when your mad-scientist neighbor invites you to help him explore hyperspace, a realm that makes it possible to visit alternate universes and which eventually delivers you to the fifth dimension—a barren landscape of red clay hills, where you meet an ordinary-seeming guy in jeans who “looks a bit older than your father.” He turns out to be the author of the book: Packard himself. He’s sick of staying on the sidelines. “Since you’re the author,” you tell him, “you ought to be able to tell me how to get out of hyperspace and back to my own universe!” He doesn’t tell you. When the ground starts shaking beneath your feet, and cracks start splitting the ground open, he says there is a choice coming up: Do you decide to jump into a big crack, or try to keep from falling in? But, when you beg him to tell you the right decision, he falls into a huge crack before he can answer.

The author has appeared, but he’s not omnipotent. He’s not even omniscient. And before too long he’s dead. Or else he’s back in another dimension—the authorial realm outside the text, from which he came. Packard’s brief entry into the story dramatizes the limits of his power more than it flexes his reach. When you finally make it to the sixth dimension, you find nothing except this disclaimer: “[Unfortunately, the author of this book, Edward Packard, never made it to the sixth dimension. For that reason he is unable to describe it.]”

If you want to meet Packard in this universe, continue to MEETING.

If you want to cheat and skip straight to Ultima, then skip to ULTIMA.

MEETING

When you are planning a trip to meet the ninety-one-year-old creator of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, every choice starts to feel pivotal: If you fly to Packard’s home in Colorado, turn to page 62; if you meet him at his summer rental in the Hamptons, turn to page 87; if you start with questions about early publishing rejections, turn to page 35; if you jump straight into questions about how divorce shaped his ideas about decision-making, get right back on the jitney and head home.

You end up spending a humid July day with Packard near East Hampton. Packard grew up on Long Island during the Great Depression, a childhood he has recounted in a self-published memoir, “It’s a Miracle It Wasn’t Worse,” which recalls “kindly old ladies with cider mills at the end of one’s street [and] mussel shells . . . shaped like little boats . . . we set them out like a little fleet.” Now the Hamptons are the Hamptons. You take a Thursday-morning jitney into four hours of traffic—“Thursday is the new Friday,” Andrea remarks—and get off in the impossibly posh village of East Hampton. Chanel and Balenciaga sit across the street from the Monogram Shop. It’s hard to find a sandwich for less than twenty dollars.

Father and daughter drive you back to a small wooden house near the placid blue expanse of Gardiners Bay; the air is thick with salt, sweet with cut grass. Packard’s son-in-law is clearing some surprisingly large spiders out of an old kayak. Packard is here for a month with his longtime partner, Sara Compton, a former “Sesame Street” writer (she and her son Spencer co-wrote Choose Your Own Adventure No. 114, “Daredevil Park”), and shifting installments of children and grandchildren. Over Greek salad, strong coffee, and chopped pineapple, one grandson tells you that he was “a pretty risk-averse kid,” so he would always start a Choose book by making a set of conservative choices; then he’d go back and make far riskier choices, to see where they took him. He got to be a version of himself he recognized, and then a version of himself he didn’t recognize at all.

After lunch, Packard informs you that he has assembled a set of papers—plot graphs, old covers, rejection letters from publishers—that will help him tell you the story of the Choose series. He also has more to say about his enduring obsession with decision-making.

If you want to examine Packard’s papers, continue to ARCHIVES.

If you’d rather ask Packard more about his obsession with decisions, turn to IMPULSES.

ARCHIVES

At a glass patio table overlooking the bay, Packard shows you one of his plot charts: a graph that looks like a family tree. He explains the code: At every forking choice, he writes the decision above the line, the outcome below. A straight line means that the narration continues without a choice. A big black dot signifies an ending. Arrows show choices circling back. Asterisks indicate positive endings. In a 1984 pamphlet titled “How to Write a Book Like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book,” meant for young fans who wanted to create their own, Packard wrote, “Once you’ve outlined your book, your book will practically write itself! Well, not quite. But you’ll get a real feeling that you’re going to do it.”

On a faded Xerox copy of the 1981 Times article that helped make the series famous, you notice a note that Packard scribbled in the margins, next to a quote from an editor at Bantam about appreciating the randomness of the outcomes. “Not so,” Packard wrote, “a weird remark.” Randomness was never part of his compositional strategy. “My philosophy was that it should be like life,” he tells you. Smart decisions were more likely to result in a better outcome but wouldn’t always guarantee it. Virtuous choices didn’t always pay off. Packard wanted to imbue the books with moral realism, rather than write hollow ethical instruction manuals that invariably rewarded the “right” choices. He never constructed choices, however, that allowed the protagonist to make cruel decisions. Stupid ones, perhaps—but never cruel. While the choices often carry an ethical charge, they land within the realm of what a decent person might do—sometimes prioritizing his own welfare, sometimes another’s.

Packard is proud of his fan letters: from someone who heard Ultima referenced in a dharma talk by a Zen Buddhist monk, and the Turkish Spinoza scholar who believes Choose books embody “the fundamental Spinozist ethos of empowering not just oneself but also others, of not just embodying but simultaneously radiating joy.” There’s a letter from a British man who painstakingly assembled a small stash of Choose books by collecting tokens from boxes of Weetabix breakfast cereal, and from a Dallas nurse who developed a set of “Branching Path Simulations” (based on the Choose books he’d loved as a child) to help “prepare nurses for the fight they will take on in the frontlines” of the COVID pandemic.

Many fans who write to Packard are Gen X-ers who loved these books as kids and are starting to read them to their own children. A man with a three-year-old writes that he is “tired from life” but thinks frequently of the wonder he felt at these books, how following multiple versions of the story felt like “skating over the ice that separates us from another world.”

If you’re curious about Gen X’s lasting obsession with choices, turn to LEGACY.

If you’re ready to hear Packard lament his own decisions, continue to IMPULSES.

IMPULSES

“I gave a lot of thought to decision-making, because my own decisions—for many years—were terrible,” Packard says, explaining that such choices arose from what he calls “a heap of impulses” (a phrase coined by the philosopher Christine Korsgaard). From the way Packard describes these “terrible” choices, it seems that he probably means the kind of poor choices you might imagine a twice-divorced man has made. In an essay called “The View from Ninety,” he describes “reviewing my worst decisions—the absolutely most momentously disastrous ones, particularly those relating to my career and my relationships with other people, particularly women.” He was trying to understand what had been driving him: “I asked myself, How could I have acted that way? What was I thinking? Why wasn’t I thinking?”

Packard laments the portions of his life that he spent “sleepwalking,” a state he compares to “floating downstream on a river raft . . . not paying proper attention.” In the Choose books, he always wanted to construct what the philosopher Mark Balaguer calls “torn decisions,” choices that were “as balanced as possible so that readers would have to think for a minute as to which was best.”

There’s an interesting irony at work in the way Packard narrates his life: as he was developing a series of form-breaking narratives that actively foregrounded intentional choices, he came to feel that in his own life his choices weren’t intentional enough.

If you want to hear what became of the Choose books after their heyday, turn to LEGACY.

If you’re ready for a closing paragraph that waxes eloquent about the existential implications of this kids’-book franchise, skip to ULTIMA.

LEGACY

In the nineteen-nineties, the Choose series began to decline, in large part because of the increasing popularity of video and computer games. In the early eighties, the Choose series offered a novel experience: a chance to control the narrative you were inside of. But by the mid-nineties this experience had become less novel, and it felt more seductive in digital media—where the worlds were more visually immersive, and the choices more constant. Nintendo released its first handheld Game Boy in 1989; the King’s Quest computer games appeared in the nineteen-eighties and nineties; the iconic computer game Myst came out in 1993, with lush graphics and a nuanced story line, the same year as its aesthetic opposite, the popular first-person-shooter game Doom. Meanwhile, both Packard and Montgomery felt that the publisher was neglecting their series. It had redesigned the classic covers, alienating readers who’d loved the originals. The books were languishing, and in 1999 the series was discontinued.

In 2003, Montgomery and Gilligan took over the Choose Your Own Adventure copyright and launched their own publishing company, Chooseco, to give the books a second life. It was a family operation, run by Montgomery and Gilligan, with Anson Montgomery involved as a writer. Chooseco has published more than fifty new titles, and sells between eight hundred thousand and 1.2 million books, old titles and new, each year. Much of this market is composed of Gen X-ers hoping to get their kids hooked on the series.

“I think you’re looking for Gladys and her damn cockatoos over in 2A.”
Cartoon by Juan Astasio

In the past decade, these Gen X-ers have also made new versions of the interactive narratives they grew up on. In 2015, the actor Neil Patrick Harris published a memoir with choices titled “Choose Your Own Autobiography.” The dead patriarch in the 2019 hit film “Knives Out” is named Harlan Thrombey, a nod to Packard’s “Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?” An educator in Texas proposed to his wife by finding the best ending in “The Jewels of Nabooti,” highlighting all the choices that would get you there, and handwriting his proposal underneath.

In 2018, Netflix released an interactive streaming film called “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” which allowed viewers to make choices. (One of the characters in the film explicitly refers to a Choose Your Own Adventure story.) Chooseco sued Netflix for twenty-five million dollars, claiming that its trademark had been infringed. It argued that its “marketing strategy includes appealing to adults now in their twenties, thirties, and forties who remember the brand with pleasant nostalgia from their youth,” and that the film’s “dark and, at times, disturbing content dilutes the goodwill for and positive associations with” the franchise. The lawsuit was settled out of court.

No contemporary creation summons the magic of Choose Your Own Adventure quite as strongly as “Sleep No More,” a wildly popular interactive theatre production loosely based on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” Arriving in New York in 2011, it allows audience members to wander through a haunted Scottish hotel that occupies five stories of a cavernous building in downtown Manhattan. You can follow characters through dim passageways to watch their quarrels and seductions, discover live eels swimming in grimy bathtubs, eat penny candy from jars, and stumble into coveted one-on-one interactions with cast members (like the legendary “wheelchair ride” on the hidden sixth floor). Envy at other people’s experiences is practically baked into the show—You watched a bloody orgy? You saw full-frontal nudity?—but after a few visits I came to feel that this sense of regret, this awareness of all the unexplored paths, was not only a clever marketing tool (why not see the show again?) but a powerful source of adrenaline during the experience, and a bittersweet form of realism: so much of living involves considering everything you missed out on.

If you’re ready for an ideal ending, skip to ULTIMA.

If you want to read more about the perils of an ideal ending, head to GOLDEN TICKET.

GOLDEN TICKET

Montgomery wrote his last Choose Your Own Adventure book, “Gus vs. the Robot King,” in 2014, as he was dying. It kept his mind off his illness, Gilligan recalls. He couldn’t sit at a desk, so he wrote in bed, on his iPad. Eventually, Gilligan transferred the file to her laptop and read it aloud to him as he dictated changes.

Every Choose author writes his or her books differently. Poets do particularly well with the structure, Gilligan says. They are not afraid to write nonlinearly, and the demands of the form inspire them like other generative constraints: patterns of rhyme or meter, the structure of a sonnet or a ghazal. Gilligan was initially self-conscious about working on Choose books; she felt chastised by the disdain of a friend who was getting a Ph.D. in literature from Yale, and clearly thought the books were trash. But over the years she has found herself gratified by the challenge of writing choices that genuinely entice younger readers. The beginning of every Choose book has to work like an epic poem—every line, every word, doing the work necessary to ground a reader in the story. She feels that the books are directly descended from oral storytelling, where the storyteller takes input from his listeners. Packard’s bedtime stories were nothing if not another installment in this long human history of oral narrative.

Anson has learned a lot about himself from the way he structures Choose books. “You see your own values and baggage reflected in your choices and endings,” he says, citing his own lingering preoccupations with achievement. His methodical style—precisely arranging his endings along a continuum from ideal to terrible—differed from his father’s more whimsical approach. Anson always writes one “Golden Ticket” ending where you get exactly what you want, and a few “Golden Ticket minus one” paths where you get almost everything, but not quite.

Gilligan, on the other hand, felt disappointed in herself when a friend pointed out that she’d written a Choose book that featured only one ideal ending; she worried that the book had unwittingly “reflected a monotheistic way of thinking.” Gilligan didn’t want to write a book that suggested there was only one path to the truth, only one right way to move through the world. The entire premise of these books, she felt, was an opportunity to free yourself from these constraints.

There is nowhere to go but ULTIMA.

ULTIMA

You are swimming with Edward Packard in a bay as warm as bathwater, the underwater reeds like noodles against your thighs; the author, disappointed that you didn’t arrive in time for high tide, is writing the scene aloud as if you were in one of his books. “It’s like we’re on page 83,” he says. “Do you swim left, with the tide, and feel like an Olympic athlete, or do you swim right, against the tide, and feel like you’re getting nowhere at all? And eventually the bottom drops out, and you find yourself in deeper waters, beyond the reach of rescue.”

Even at his age, Packard is still essentially a father worrying about his daughter, herself past fifty, getting caught in a riptide. Just as you’ll always be a mother trying to anticipate what choices your own daughter will make—whether she’s four years old, listening to the Choose books you read aloud to her, or twenty-four, figuring out whether to leave a terrible job, or a stale relationship. Right now, her favorite Choose book is “Prisoner of the Ant People.” She loves being their prisoner as much as she loves saving their queen. Whenever you read her an ending in which she dies, you feel the brutal integrity of these books—that their choices promise you absolutely nothing, except the chance to choose again.

Andrea believes that these books illuminate the value of regret. Regret doesn’t have to contaminate experience. It can inspire you to make choices that are different from the ones you made before. When Andrea tells you this, you remember an ex-boyfriend who had a tattoo—well, many tattoos—but this particular tattoo was on his wrist: KNOW REGRETS. As Packard tells you about his first divorce, and the ways in which it shaped his thinking about decisions, you think, of course, about your own divorce. In real life, most choices are impossible to unmake. But you keep having to make new ones. Maybe that’s where KNOW REGRETS comes into play. Regret can’t change the past, but it can change the future. Life isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure, but these books prepared you to feel exhilarated and terrified by all the choices you would someday make. They gave you a way to understand that no ending is really an ending. After every ending, you have to figure out what to do next. ♦