‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Director Daniel Kwan on His New Children’s Books, ADHD, and What He Never Wants to Read Again

It’s not often that a children’s book comes with instructions, but then, there hasn’t ever been one written by Everything Everywhere All at Once codirector Daniel Kwan before. 

Kwan is scooping up awards for his latest movie, including best feature at the Gotham Awards, but he’s proving that the multiverse isn’t just for grown-ups. Today, Kwan releases two children’s books, 24 Minutes to Bedtime, and I’ll Get to the Bottom of This, through A24’s publishing arm. The former is a four-dimensional adventure that somehow manages to explore both the nature of time and the agony of being the parent of a young child at bedtime (his own child is nearly four), and the latter is a rhyming whodunit with a distinctly Kwan-ian twist. 24 Minutes to Bedtime is such a trip that, yes, it includes a guide to reading it at the end, a balm for parents whose minds are maybe a little less malleable than kids’, and who seek answers. 

If it seems like Kwan has a lot going on, well, you’d be right. He wrote several children’s books while plotting Everything Everywhere All at Once to give his brain a break from the script, a coping method that he says helps him with his ADHD. Why write one multiversal story when you could write two at once, right? “I try to stick to one thing,” he insists, but his brain just won’t let him.

Read on for a conversation with Kwan about his new books, the quirks of time travel, and exploring kids’ curiosity, one dimension at a time.

Vanity Fair: I’m very excited to talk about these books. I have an almost five-year-old and I’m very excited to read them with her.

Daniel Kwan: Wow, I have an almost four-year-old and he’s a handful. But he’s a funny age. I don’t know why, he just doesn’t care about narrative. He doesn’t want to read other people’s narratives. He wants to come up with his own stories. So every night we just open up books and pretend, make up a new story. So it’s fun.

It’s a good thing that you don’t keep yourself busy, right? That you just stick to the one thing. 

I try to stick to one thing. It’s not how—I have ADHD and this is not how it works. These children’s books I came out with [are due to] the fact that like, it was taking so long to write this movie. This movie was such a massive impossible puzzle that I felt like I was drowning a lot of times and so I would just write children’s books on the side for fun. I didn’t actually know they would get made but I thought like one day, one day when I retire, I’ll be able to make these. So I’m gonna retire!

Well, this is the announcement. It’s good that we can do it this way. That side project thing, I always think of it as productive procrastination. Like, how many different hobbies and projects and things can I do to distract myself from the stress of the one thing I should be doing.

The term for it is called Slow Motion Multitasking. People think it’s actually very beneficial. You know, like, if you go to all the, all the great people of history, they always have a weird side project that coincided with their big masterpieces or whatever. Charles Darwin, while he was writing On the Origin of Species, he had this whole side project on worms, like he’s really into worms and and dirt. So it’s a very weird phenomenon.