BY KAREN BOSSICK

What would you take with you if you had to leave your home tomorrow for a strange and wondrous land?

That’s the question actress and New York Times bestselling author Jamie Lee Curtis poses in her latest children’s book, “This is Me: A Story of Who We Are and Where We Came From.”

Curtis, a longtime Sun Valley local, signed copies of the book from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday, Dec. 23, at Iconoclast Books in Ketchum.

Illustrator Laura Cornell, who has now collaborated with Curtis on 11 books, provides some charming illustrations featuring children of assorted nationalities. The book even contains a built-in suitcase—a pop-up suitcase that children can fill with their own treasures after reading the book.

The book explores emigration and immigration as it helps young children discover what makes them unique.

“It is sort of the story of everyone--a beautiful book about everyone’s immigration story told from the standpoint of a little suitcase and what you would take in that suitcase if you were leaving your home forever,” said Curtis. “All of our families are immigrants, unless you’re Native American. I don’t know where your family was originally from, but they were not from here.”

The story revolves around a teacher who shares with her first-graders the suitcase that her great grandmother brought with her from China when she was 7.

“My great-grandmother came from a far distant place. She came on a boat with just this small case,” writes Curtis in the book.

The teacher has the students take home the suitcase and bring it back filled with what they would take if they were leaving on an immigration adventure.

“How did she do it? What would YOU take? Would you be scared that you’d make a mistake?” the book asks.

Curtis said she wrote the book before immigration became the subject of daily news headlines. The book is not political on any level.

“For me, it was a chance to explore,” she said. “I’m at that age now where I’m really trying to look at who I am and where I came from and what I care about and who my children are and what my family looks like. I’m at that age where I’m exploring what’s important to me besides the health and security of my family.”

Curtis’s family on her mother Janet Leigh’s side came from Denmark. Her father Tony Curtis’s family came from Hungary.

“I think it’s important for children to remember that their ancestors were very brave and dealt with a lot of loss in the adventure of coming to America,” said Curtis. “Every family has an immigration story and I think it’s important to share it because, as we have more and more generations raised here in America, we are going to lose that sense of who we really are and what our family history is.”

And what would Jamie Lee Curtis put in her suitcase?

She would fill hers with several things but two things in particular.

One is a small gold diamond-studded jewelry box that has “Janet Heart Tony” engraved on it.

Curtis’s parents divorced when she was 3, she said, and she grew up in “a very separated family” with parents who were very angry at each other.

“I have always felt like I was the save-the-marriage baby that failed in my designated purpose, which was to save the marriage,” she said. “But this box represents all of the promise, fame, attention and love that my parents had early in their careers when they first met and married. It’s an example of their love and it’s one of the items I would put in my suitcase because, even though everyone else knows them because they were famous, I only knew them as angry people.”

Curtis would also put in a picture from her wedding that took place between herself and Christopher Guest 32 years ago on Sunday. They honeymooned in Sun Valley where Jamie Lee and her sister Kelly had spent many ski vacations with their mother. They brought land here, built a house here and raised their children here.

The wedding photograph is important because it’s the only time in Curtis’s life that her entire family was together in one room.

“It was what I asked for as a wedding present from my dad—that he arrange to have all of my siblings, my mother and himself in one room,” Curtis related. “Here we are at Christmas, which is all about abundance, and yet when you boil it all down it’s these other things that really matter.”