Backstory

Pam Jenoff's Backstory

I did not set out to write a continuation of The Kommandant’s Girl. But one day while I was brainstorming ideas (embarrassingly enough in the shower, where many of my better ideas pop up), I was astonished when Marta, who had been Emma’s best friend in The Kommandant’s Girl, raised her hand and said “it’s my turn.” I, like many readers, assumed she had died after saving Emma on the bridge, and I was most surprised to discover that she had survived not only her wound but also the torture and suffering of a Nazi prison. I decided then and there that she deserved to have her story told.

  I was surprised, too, at Marta’s jumping off point for the story. The Kommandant’s Girl ended in the middle of World War II, but The Diplomat’s Wife picks up years later as the war is just ending. The new historical time period raised many questions: How did displaced persons, left devastated and homeless by the war, find their way to new countries to make new lives? Once there, what were their relationships like with the places they had left behind? And what of the people who stayed in Eastern Europe, only to find themselves confronted with a new kind of war?

Marta’s story – from her recovery in a displaced person’s camp in Salzburg and tragically brief love affair with the American soldier Paul, to her new life in London and unexpected return mission to Eastern Europe -- has proven to be fertile ground for exploring these questions, as she steps out into the world for the first time as a woman, embracing life over adversity and finding love in the most improbable of places.

At first, I was a bit hesitant as to how the story would be received. Marta is not Emma; she is gawky, with none of Emma’s grace. And though heroic, she had been far from perfect in The Kommandant’s Girl – she had coveted Emma’s husband, judged Emma’s choices harshly. But the decision to write Marta’s story proved to be pure kismet: after The Kommandant’s Girl was published, I received a deluge of questions from readers, wanting to know what happened next. Did Emma find Jacob? Were they able to escape? Whose baby was she having? And what, by the way, had been going on between Marta and Jacob on all of those long missions for the resistance? By writing The Diplomat’s Wife, I’ve been able to answer these and many other questions, bringing the story full circle while at the same time creating a new and different chapter in the saga of these remarkable women.

Please visit Pam Jenoff's website to learn more about her work.

Meg Waite Clayton's Backstory

THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS started as an empty file in my computer, just a title that came to me while I was reading an article about which I remember nothing. Not a word of the story came with it.

The story itself started more than a year later, with a single nameless, faceless, character, just a character trait, really: white gloves—without any idea who wore them or why she might be a “Wednesday Sister.” But even before that, there was an ending to a children’s story I’ve never written, about a child who, like my own son, has a scar across the top of his head. There was a line in a Christmas letter from a friend of my mom’s, about the mysterious corner house in our old neighborhood—twenty years after we’d all moved away. There were the Hutchins Hall photographs of the nearly womanless Michigan Law School classes that came frighteningly few years before my own law school days. And another law school photo, me sitting on our balcony after my last second-year final, raising a wine glass to my roommate Jenn, who poured it for me and who is not hesitating to capture me at my worst on film.

My first journal entry for the book—the day after the white gloves attached themselves to the title without explaining themselves—begins: “Feeling incredibly well-run-dry today ... I don’t have anything ... Not a character yet. Not any idea where it will go, or even where it will start.” Which makes me laugh now, because sometime later a woman with a long blond braid sticking out of her Stanford cap walked across the patio, and though she was gone in seconds (I never even saw her face), already that braid was not a real braid in my mind, and the character who would be Linda was bearing down on me, wondering if I could possibly get her story into words before it was lost. By the time I looked up again, I had the guts of Linda’s story—and of Kath’s, Ally’s, Frankie’s and Brett’s. I had the idea for the first paragraph, which turns out to be two paragraphs, and the last line of them. And I knew the story would be about friends getting each other through the bad times, and celebrating the good.

To be honest, Linda was wearing Brett’s white gloves at first, and the ending for the children’s story I’d never written involved Linda’s husband rather than her friends. Frankie, originally named Bernie, wrote, but I wasn’t imagining anyone else would. And though none of the friends was much older than I was, those few years made a world of difference: they were married with children when the women’s movement began, while I came of age just on the other side, when women could apply to Harvard and Yale even if we couldn’t run Olympic marathons and didn’t sit on the Supreme Court. It’s something that has fascinated me since the day I saw the photographs of those nearly womanless law school classes, something I knew early on that I wanted to explore: how the women’s movement changed the world even for women committed to “the mommy track” before there was much of any other track. As was another issue on which progress is still thin: the ideal of womanhood as Virgin Mary perfection that no real person can live up to. From the beginning, all the Wednesday Sisters loved to watch Miss America be crowned.

I’d like to pin the Wednesday Sister’s shortcomings on someone else, but the truth is they all represent some aspect of me. Linda’s fear—for her children and for herself—is my fear. Brett’s tortured relationship with her “unfeminine intellect” draws on my own discomfort as a girl who was talented at math when girls weren’t supposed to be. Kath’s darkest moments draw from a relationship of mine that ended unhappily. Frankie’s self-doubt and her chubby phases are mine, as is her experience with her first novel. Even Ally—whose story was inspired by that Christmas letter line—is me in her middle-of-the-night journey at the end of the book, drawn from my own experience as a mom.

The heart of the story, though? True, my friend Jenn doesn’t write. My friend Brenda does, but she’s quick to point out that she’s a Tuesday Sister— the day our writing group in Nashville met—and she swears she wouldn’t ever do what the Wednesday Sisters did for Linda, not even for me. My husband Mac, also in that Tuesday group, would, and he was very Linda-like in pushing me to write, but he is ... well ... male. “Two Wednesday Sisters and one Husband”? Not such a good title, right? But the story behind the “The Wednesday Sisters” is those “Wednesday Sisters” of mine. It’s meant to be a hallelujah to them.

Please visit the author's website to learn more about her.

Steve & Melanie Tem's Backstory

      We are a long-married couple who write. Sometimes we write together; we'd have said we do that only very occasionally, but recently we compiled our collaborative stories into a collection (as yet unsold) and it came in at 19 stories, over 96,000 words.

     In 2000 we wrote a novella called "The Man On The Ceiling." We wanted to try something we'd never done before: use ourselves as characters in a story. We had our doubts about the wisdom of this, and at times we were pretty sure no one would ever publish it. The strange thing about our pessimism concerning the potential audience for this project, however, was that it freed us to say what we really felt about our lives and this career we had chosen, and about the death of our son Anthony.

      A small press, American Fantasy, picked it up and published it as a limited edition chapbook. It went on to win the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy Awards for that year—the only work ever to win all three. We were proud of having created a work that somehow managed to talk about grief, and hope, and love, and the power of the human imagination, all within a piece of writing that was neither pure fiction nor pure memoir, but an amalgam of the two. But it was a one-time thing: we strongly believed that that's not the sort of experiment a writer should attempt twice.

      Two years later an editor at a major house asked us if we'd ever considered expanding this material to book-length, writing a novel of metafiction in the same way we had created a metafictional novella. Our immediate response was certainly not, but we told her we'd think about it. And almost immediately we realized we had much, much more to say about how the imagination figures into the real life of an individual, a couple, and a family. We also realized that when you are given the chance to make a testament about what it was like during your time on the planet, you don't turn it down.

      THE MAN ON THE CEILING, A Novel {Maybe} is a March 4 release from Wizard's new Discoveries line, distributed by Random House. The scope of the novel is much broader than the scope of the original novella, and losing a child is only one of the things the novel is about--in a sense it's the trigger that sets off a larger meditation and speculation on personal and familial fears, and how storytelling can be an essential, not just a peripheral, aspect of life. It's a broader look at how the imagination works in the life of the individual and in the life of a family. At one point in the novel we call this book a "biography of our imaginations," and that's pretty much the way we looked at this project.

       In all our collaborations we have attempted to create a "third author" to tell the story. This third author has taken certain qualities from both our writings, left out others, and writes stories neither one of us might have attempted in our solo careers. Surprisingly enough, this "third author" was even more important to the successful execution of a book as personal as THE MAN ON THE CEILING. We needed this third author to tell us, as we were attempting to write about the most important things in our lives, when we had gone too far, and conversely, when we were holding back material that had to be in the story. We came to depend on this third author to tell us that we should give up our need to protect ourselves as characters or to present ourselves in any kind of balanced way, in order to give ourselves up to the needs of the book.

      It was a scary, exhilarating ride. When we read the book now, we’re sometimes amazed by what that third author wrote. We still think we'll probably never do anything quite like this again.

Visit Steve & Melanie Tem's home on the web.

Heather and Rose MacDowell's Backstory

TURNING TABLES
“What was it like, writing a book together?”

This is the second question people always ask — after “Are you identical twins?” — when we tell them that we recently finished a novel based on our experiences waiting tables. That we wrote it while living on opposite coasts sparks the next question: “Wow, did you ever argue?”

Apparently, yes.


We hatched the plot for the book during a week-long visit filled with morning walks, good wine, and long, relaxed dinners. Though we both loved to write, neither of us had managed to publish– why not combine our efforts and see if, together, we could break out of obscurity? Deciding on our subject matter was simple. Between us, we had almost fifteen years of experience waiting tables (something we didn’t admit to just anyone), providing us with endless material for a fast-paced novel featuring a protagonist who was just as naïve about fine dining as we’d once been. This was our chance to take the memories of hellish kitchens and ugly uniforms and turn them into entertainment. We would exact literary revenge against the celebrity chefs who had humiliated us and the guests who had left twelve percent tips, and find success in the process.

Back home in our respective states, we began the process of developing one voice and one vision. Since we could already finish each other’s spoken sentences, why not written ones? We sent the first pages of the book back and forth by email, discussing them via cell phone and revising until we were both satisfied, a process that often involved watching paragraphs of work deleted and pronounced “rambling,” “vague,” or just plain “wrong”. This wasn’t simply writing, it was writing by committee, and while each of us was acquainted with our inner critic, we now had to contend with an outer critic as well.

As the words flowed and the chapters stacked up, we started to notice glaring differences in our service experiences. There were no nice chefs, one sister would say, prompting the other to argue that a sous chef once took the waiters out on his boat and cooked them all lobsters. Soon, psychology entered the debate — after a bloody, underpaid apprenticeship in a high-end kitchen, was niceness even possible? Weren’t most successful chefs like great dictators, brilliant, charming, and a little evil? The surprising outcome of days of heated discussion was a character who was both likeable and frightening, an amalgamation of the chefs we’d known, and our first shared creation.

While we worked to shape our fictional restaurant, we found that no two four-hundred-dollar-a-night waiting jobs were the same:

“I always stashed a glass of wine in the planter. The assistant manager would refill it for me.”

“What? I ate a stale piece of baguette on my way through the kitchen and almost got fired.”

“I never made espresso. Only backwaiters and busboys did.”

“You’re kidding. I almost drowned in decaf cappuccinos that summer on Nantucket.”

We waded into the topic of molecular gastronomy with equal parts fascination and fear. Could we bend our abilities far enough to make liquid carpaccio and flavored air sound credible and appetizing? As with much of the book, the topic involved research and a willingness to answer the phone at midnight and seven in the morning. With two of us on the job, there was little time off, but taking turns with scenes meant that we could get instant feedback on new directions and ideas. One sister never knew what the other would come up with (“I think we should fire Enrique!”), making the process humorous and nerve-wracking.

By the end of our final round of edits, we’d realized that writing together meant allowing the other room to write as an individual, and to tread lightly when it came time to critique. It also meant campaigning for what we believed was right for the book until a compromise slowly emerged from the fog. Would we love every sentence in the book? No. But we loved the finished product, and by the time we pushed the send button for the final time, we were closer sisters and better writers. And we agreed on one thing:

If given the chance, we’d write it all again.

Learn more about the authors by visiting their website.

Joel Goldman's Backstory

The crime scene is more than the chalk outline marking where the victim falls. It’s the world surrounding that pale silhouette, spreading out in uneven ripples from the perimeter cordoned off with yellow tape to the metes and bounds of the jurisdiction that investigates and prosecutes the offense to the ill-defined society that wittingly or not harbors a killer in its midst.

The place where these overlapping scenes congeal and conspire is as alive and organic as any flesh and blood character. It makes and breaks promises, rewards strength and punishes weakness. It fills hearts with hope and drains them without a backward glance. Done right, place becomes a central character, casting heroes and villains against a geographic backdrop, driving the action as surely as any twitchy trigger finger.

Los Angeles has been immortalized as a place character by authors from Raymond Chandler to Michael Connelly. Dennis Lehane created domineering characters in the Points and the Flats of Boston while Elmore Leonard gave Detroit a singular pulse. George Pelecanos made real Washington, D.C.’s struggle to provide justice for all. New York’s literary parents are legion and legendary. Fictional places are no less powerful characters as Scott Turow and Nancy Pickard proved with their creations of Kindle County and Small Plains, KS. Read and listen to a terrific four-part series on NPR as Michael Connelly and three other world class mystery writers talk about the places that are characters in their novels. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13795507

My books take place in my hometown of Kansas City where my family has lived for nearly one hundred years. One of my great-grandfathers left Poland in 1881 for the New World under cover of darkness rather than marry the girl his parents had chosen for him, settling in Kansas City for reasons lost to time. Another great-grandfather, also from Eastern Europe, ran a grocery store in Alaska during the gold rush, later deciding to move to Kansas City because it was in the center of the country. My grandfather and a friend, down on their luck during the Depression, asked Kansas City’s boss, Tom Pendergast, for permission to sell the scrap from the construction of Bagnel Dam at the Lake of the Ozarks, giving birth to a salvage business that lasted more than forty years.

Originally nothing more than a trading post at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers, in 1838 the founders decided against naming it Possum Trot, settling for the more visionary Town of Kansas, later incorporating it as Kansas City in 1850. Once a wide-open town known for speakeasies, jazz and corrupt machine politics, everything has always been up to date in Kansas City. Mindful of its wooly past, Kansas City has a hard edge and soft heart.

Today, Kansas City is home to more than two million people spread over 380 square miles, though less than a fourth of them live inside the legal boundaries of Kansas City, MO. The metropolitan area covers territory straddling the Missouri-Kansas state line, from the airport north of the Missouri River, to the NASCAR track across the state line in western Wyandotte County, Kansas, to the Truman Sports Complex in eastern Jackson County, Missouri. There are better than forty municipalities spread over five counties and two states, enough for everyone to claim a fiefdom yet many will tell a stranger that they live in Kansas City rather than Raytown, Prairie Village, Independence or Overland Park. The southern reaches aren’t identified with an iconic landmark. In Johnson County on the Kansas side, they are defined by large, new and expensive rooftops sheltering more per capita disposable income than all but a handful of the country’s zip codes, extending beyond the eye’s reach much as prairie grasses must have in another time. The rooftops on the Missouri side are smaller, older and modest, covering the working middle class. Despite its reach, you can drive from one edge of the metropolitan area to the other in forty-five minutes, sixty in traffic.

For more about Kansas City, click on http://www.kcmo.org/kcmo.nsf/web/kchistory and take a photographic tour at http://www.visitkc.com/visitor_info/index.cfm?page=visitor_info_photo_tour.htm.

Much of Shakedown takes place in Kansas City, KS. Learn more about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City,_Kansas

Katie Arnoldi's Backstory

For years, I’ve been walking around wondering how in the world people get so damn messed up.  What traumatic incident leads them into the dark sexual fetish worlds of pony play, cannibal fantasy, or Balloonism?  Why do people covet root vegetables?  At what point was the natural instinct to survive replaced by an overwhelming desire to starve oneself?  Does the obsession with one's own reflection start at birth?  And what is the source of rampant materialism?

             In my opinion, it all starts in the home.  You want to figure out how someone got the way they are, check out the parents, review the childhood.  Natural birth or c-section? Breast or bottle fed?  Was the infant’s diaper changed regularly or was there a problem with diaper rash?  Kind siblings or torturous enemies?   Let the baby cry or bring them into the warm and vaguely incestuous family bed?  Every action has an impact.  In the early years, the parent is god. And, as we all know, mistakes tend to be passed down through the generations.

             The Wentworths are a wealthy, multi-generational family living on the Westside of Los Angeles.  It is a territory I know well as I grew up there and was surrounded by Wentworths. This is a world of country clubs and gated estates.  There is a sense of superiority that has nothing to do with Hollywood.  These people consider themselves old world aristocracy in a city with no history.  They exist on a plane far above you and me and wield their wealth and power like a weapon against all those beneath them.  There are no checks and balances in the world of the Wentworths.  They are impervious.

      I have to say right here and now that this book is not some thinly veiled  autobiography.  I’m not working out my childhood issues in the pages of my novel.  My family in no way resembles the Wentworths except for the fact that they are a family.  I swear.  But you probably won’t believe me.  In my last novel, I explored the ins and outs of sexual perversion and everyone assumed I was sharing the secrets of my married life.  I tried to explain that it was a novel and in no way was it representative of my life, certainly not my sex life.  Of course my protests just made the situation worse.  So, I swear this book is not about MY life but I don’t expect to you to believe me.

              There are other families surrounding the Wentworths, every character has one.  There’s Rosa the maid who was forced to leave her five children behind in Guatemala in order to support them.  There’s Honey the runaway from the Polygamist colony of Colorado City, Angela the gold digger, hoping to forge a better life for herself by bearing an illegitimate Wentworth child.  And Jack the drifter who’s spent his life running away from the family he left behind and now finds himself longing for a family he could create.

             The Wentworths is about the destructive and redemptive nature of the family structure.  It is a twisted, dark story that is ultimately hopeful—at least I think it is.

To learn more about Katie Arnoldi, please visit her website.

Hillary Jordan's Backstory

I grew up on stories about my grandparents’ farm.

      “We got our water from a pump in the front yard. In the wintertime the pump would freeze, and Daddy would thaw it by wrapping it in rags soaked in kerosene and lighting them on fire…”

      “The farm had a river running through it, and whenever it flooded we’d be stranded. That’s how it got the name of Mudbound…”

      My mother, aunt and grandmother spoke of the farm often, laughing and shaking their heads by turns, depending on whether the story in question was funny or horrifying. Often they were both, as Southern stories tend to be.

      “One spring our sow birthed her litter too early, and I found the poor piglets lying frozen in a ditch. I put them on a baking sheet and popped them into a warm oven. And do you know, four of those six piglets survived? At least, until they were old enough to be turned into bacon…”

      I loved these stories. They were a peephole into a strange and marvelous world full of contradictions, of terrible beauty. They revealed things about my family, especially about my grandmother, who was the heroine of most of them for the simple reason that whenever calamity struck, my grandfather was invariably elsewhere.

      My grandmother was not a country girl. She was forced to become one in 1946, when my grandfather abruptly decided to move the family from Dallas to a farm in Podunk, Arkansas. Like Henry in Mudbound, he wanted to be near his recently widowed sister. And too, my grandfather revered the land and yearned to farm it.

      My grandmother had never seen the property, and I can only imagine how she felt when she discovered she would be living and rearing her two small children in an isolated, unpainted shotgun shack with no electricity, telephone or running water. But Nana was a woman of her time, obedient to her husband’s wishes, and so she made the best of it. My grandfather’s brother came to live with them, followed by her cantankerous father-in-law, and she cooked and cleaned uncomplainingly for all of them. Like Laura in the novel, Nana was a singer, and the songs she sang were indicative of her mood. “Rock of Ages” was a frequent refrain on the farm, and—when things got really bad—“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.”

      To my mother and aunt, their year on the farm was a grand adventure, and indeed, that was how all their stories portrayed it. It was not until I was in my thirties that I realized what an ordeal that year must have been for her, and that, in fact, these were stories of survival.

      I began the book (without knowing I was doing any such thing) in graduate school. I had an assignment to write three pages in the voice of a family member, and I decided to write about the farm from Nana’s point of view. But what came out was not a merry adventure story, but something darker and more complex. What came out was, “When I think of the farm, I think of mud,” which was not my grandmother’s voice at all. That realization liberated me to write fiction, rather than fact.

      As the story grew, I began to want other perspectives. My grandparents had black sharecroppers on the farm, and a black housekeeper. They were usually in the background of the stories, where African-Americans in the Jim Crow South were thought to belong. My grandparents were both products of that time and place; their racism was deeply ingrained. And yet, they were good people, kind, big-hearted, devoutly Christian. That contradiction—the entrenched bigotry of otherwise good people—is a key underpinning of Mudbound.

     I decided to move the black characters to the foreground, to let them answer the ugliness of Jim Crow in their own voices. I was, frankly, a little afraid. I knew I would be excoriated if I got it wrong. A number of well-meaning colleagues said things to me like, “You know, even Faulkner didn’t write about black people in the first person.” But ultimately, I decided that letting my African-American characters speak was the only way to give them a small meaure of justice.

      My grandparents are long dead, as are the sharecroppers who worked for them. I often wonder what they all would have thought of the story I made from their stories. Certainly Nana would been horrified by the idea of committing adultery with her brother-in-law; Pappy, who by all acounts was a bigoted jerk, would not have appreciated being killed off for it; and my black characters would undoubtedly have wanted to set me straight about a few things. But my hope is that all of them would be proud that I was so captivated by their stories I had to retell them, and pleased that I’ve painted a lasting, if fictional, picture of their world.

Please visit Hillary Jordan's website at: www.hillaryjordan.com

Kelly Simmons' Backstory

Like so many things, it started with Tom Wolfe and a bottle of Xanax.

       I was at Penn Station, NY, after a terrible meeting with my former agent, who didn’t like the book I’d just labored over. And just as I was contemplating whether I’d ever come up with an idea that would make my agent happy, let alone be published, Tom Wolfe sat down next to me in his pristine white suit and spats. (Did I mention it was January?)

      I didn’t speak to him, because well, I’m me and he’s him. But I took it as a sign: he left a journalism career to write novels mid life, and dammit, so could I! I willed myself to come up with a new idea for a novel before I got off the train. I asked myself a classic question: What story can only I tell? I reached in my purse for a pen (there wasn’t one) and saw my bottle of Xanax. Hmmmm. Could I write about a woman who’s so afraid of things she has panic attacks? That’s a start, but not very special, I thought. (Plus everyone would think it was a memoir.) Then I thought: what if that fear-filled woman did one singularly brave thing? Within five minutes I had the core of the story: about a panicky woman who offers to take her daughter’s place as she’s being kidnapped.

      It was a perfect way to blend my obsession with the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case with a lead character, Claire, who shared many of my own quirks and personal characteristics. Like Claire, I had first-hand knowledge of anxiety and panic disorder, and because of that, I was able to give the fiction an authentic feel. I added other details from my life: a husband who travels, three small daughters, a home under renovation. I did this not because they were familiar, but because they served the story perfectly.

      The manuscript for Standing Still helped me nab a new agent, and she sold it in two weeks. I spent nearly three years revising it with two different editors at Atria, but the core of the story is still the one I sketched out on the train that winter day in a few minutes’ time. Some times the best ideas come in an instant---some times they percolate for years—and sometimes they come to you from an angel wearing white.

      I like to think there was some divine intervention that day—but the truth is, rejection and criticism were part of the equation, too. My agent’s lack of enthusiasm angered me just enough to spur me forward in an “I’ll show them! I’ll show all of them!” kind of way.

       Still, what I remember most about that day was how depressed I was when I got to the station – and how elated I was when I reached my destination. It’s almost enough to make me start wearing white myself. Almost.

      Learn more about Standing Still at my website: www.bykellysimmons.com

Julie Shapiro's Backstory

Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries

In Southern California I noticed flip-flops and running shoes left on the beach, the freeways, construction sites and parking lots and felt this uncanny urge propelling me to write about them. I couldn’t escape them, nor the unshakeable sadness and loss I felt emanating from the shoes themselves.

Why singular shoes I kept asking myself? Is it a Cinderella complex?  Is this a poem I should write or a short story? I wrote them all featuring singular shoes and then one pivotal day I remembered a time as a teenager when my friends and I had been goofing around with a Ouija board and a shoe moved by itself. It was this big aha moment! Of course, the shoes are haunted. Why didn’t I see it before? And that’s when I found Brad, my main character, the photographer who chronicled the shoes in the wake of his girlfriend’s uncertain death. In the singular shoes he saw, Jen-Zen, the eternal soul mate and relived their love affair in search of answers as to why she died.

He snapped pictures of the shoes and tried to say goodbye and get on with his life, but he couldn’t for the very shoes started to tell him something.  When outsiders called his photographic odyssey nuts and others wanted to capitalize on it Brad believed most of all in his gut instinct and his intuition telling him…there’s a message in the shoes…just believe…believe in yourself.

I identified with Brad, pursuing a dream and love, no matter what anyone says. Even if his Grandma told him, “intuition is a fool’s wobble and you got the wobble all right!”

Like Brad, I listen to my intuition. So it didn’t seem out of the ordinary when in the midst of searching for a publisher that a real life photographer, Randall Louis Hamilton contacted me and mentioned having a shoe photo collection. Guess what he called it? It’s the One Shoe Diaries like the original name of my novel. What’s even stranger is that Randy wanted to be named Brad and he photographs dolphins like Brad.

My novel is not Randy’s life story. It just captured his artistic vision somehow and some way. From two separate coasts we each shared this unifying vision, albeit independently. Neither one of us knew about the other's work or the many parallels that existed between us. Simultaneously in Florida where Randy lives and in Southern California where I live, a fascination with the "one shoe sightings" emerged. We each wondered about the untold story of the singular shoes. I imagined a tabletop book of the shoe photos to go along with the novel; the very photographic collection Randy is amassing. Randy also imagined people sharing stories about where and when they noticed a “singular shoe sighting” as in my novel.

When we hung up the phone from that pivotal day both of us felt like we’d stumbled into the Twilight Zone, proving that life sometimes is stranger than fiction. It validated for me that intuition is anything but a fool’s wobble, that is, once you set it straight, a lesson Brad and Jen-Zen learn in my novel and one that continues to surprise and amaze me in everyday life.

Please visit Julie Shapiro's author's website here.

Wendy Walker’s Backstory

How an Opt-Out Mom Opted Back In as a Writer

      I remember the day I began writing with perfect clarity. Sitting in my makeshift office, there was a cup of coffee on the desk, a laptop open to a blank screen. From the window I could see my son with the sitter walking to the swing. Even now, I can feel the all-consuming guilt that held me captive as I watched him toddle hand-in-hand with someone else. A mother’s guilt is a powerful thing. What was wrong with me that after making this choice to be an “opt-out” mom I was trying to find a way to opt back in to something?

       The truth is, I had jumped at the chance to opt-out of my career as a lawyer and raise my kids. I did this in spite of four years at Brown, two years working on Wall Street, and three years of law school. The decision was surprisingly simple. I could use whatever talents I had helping corporate clients, or I could use them to nurture my own offspring. What did not occur to me was the fact that by leaving the life I had worked years to create, I was also leaving a piece of myself behind.

      As it turned out, I had joined masses of former-professional-women-turned-moms whose talents were now being directed at their children. My job was my child, my child was my life. The piece of me I had abandoned became fully embedded in this new job of mothering, and the drive for perfection began to overshadow the small moments of joy that all of this was for. I had become a case study from Betty Friedan’s epic work The Feminine Mystique, and I knew that it had to stop, that I needed an outlet that transcended fabric samples and lunch dates. I had never thought of being a writer. But this was the dream I discovered when I reached inside myself for something to save me from the trap of perfecting motherhood, and when I finally turned away from the window that day, I pursued it every chance I got.

      It was three in the morning when I devised the plot for Four Wives. Sitting in the dark while I nursed my third baby, I began to think about the raging debate over women opting out. I thought about Betty Friedan, the feminist movement, and the very different life I believed I would have through college and law school. And I wondered how much longer I could survive the physical exhaustion and mental starvation that filled my every day life.

      The baby stopped feeding and I draped him over my shoulder. I felt his breath on my neck, his body against mine. It seemed impossible to me that I could love my children so deeply and still be unfulfilled. That night, I knew I had to keep writing, and that this dilemma was what I needed to write about. I considered the issues that were swimming around in my head, issues that are shockingly common among women who opt-out to be stay home moms. Loss of self. Longing for the past. Marital malaise. Societal pressure to stay home that seems magnified in the suburbs. For the next few months, I had no time to write, so instead I thought. In the car, in the rocking chair, at the stove. I thought about these issues and constructed four characters around them.

In those months, my characters were born. Love, the former child prodigy whose career came to a shocking and devastating end and who now buries herself in the endless work of homemaking. Marie, the smart part-time lawyer who can’t seem to get with the program dictated by suburban culture. Gayle, the wealthy but docile wife to an abusive husband. And Janie, the perfect suburban housewife whose marriage is dead and now finds herself drawn into an unlikely affair.

      Through the bonds of friendship, which are formed among women who walk the same path, these four wives face very different struggles. And yet there is a common thread because their struggles have all resulted from the decisions they made years before about marriage, motherhood, and who they would be as women. I think all women face these decisions. I know I did. And I never could have foreseen the consequences, both good and bad.

       I wrote this novel about women who could easily walk among us. I wrote it for the women who walk with me along this path, and I hope they will find pieces of themselves within its pages.

      Building this dream of opting back in was not easy. Through guilt and doubt, it was built around everything that was in its way. It was built because beneath it was sheer need - the need to be seen, and heard, and valued in the world beyond my front door that so many stay-home mothers come to feel. I am no longer the perfect mommy. I never was. But I am a better mother because I have found a path back to myself.

Please visit Wendy Walker's website to learn more about her work.