Backstory

Sam Taylor's Backstory

The Amnesiac is the story of a 29-year-old Englishman living in Amsterdam who breaks his ankle and spends the next six weeks alone, thinking about his past. He comes to the realisation that three years of his life are missing from his memory, and he goes back to the city where he was living during those years to discover the truth of what happened to him.

                                                                                                                      

     This is certainly the most personal and autobiographical novel I’ve written. Its seeds, however, are scattered in different places and times, and – like memories – they are not all that easy to pin down.

For instance, I did break my ankle in Amsterdam, but not while living there. I was younger than my protagonist – 24 years old, staying with friends on a short holiday – and I came back on crutches. The next week my girlfriend and I discovered that she was pregnant. It was one of the major turning points in my life.                           

                                                                                                      

     For a second instance, there is a part of my life of which I have almost no memory: a period of about six months, during my first year at university. I do not have total amnesia for this period. I recall places, faces, names, and something of the general mood. But in terms of events, I have memories of only two or three, whereas for the three-month period following this, I have perhaps twenty or thirty.

                                                                                                      

     There are doubtless pragmatic reasons why I remember so little of this time – I drank too much alcohol; I was very shy, so probably didn’t leave my room or interact very much; I almost certainly did and said many embarrassing things, which I willingly blanked out – but looking back at this time from my mid-thirties, I felt both attracted and disturbed by the mysteriousness of those empty spaces in my mind.

                                                                                                      

     The love story in The Amnesiac also dates from this place and time – or a little later, to be precise. I fell in love while at university, and had my heart broken, like many another 19-year-old. It was something that haunted me for quite a long time afterwards, and in the end I did more or less blank it from my mind as a way of getting over it. As soon as I quit my job as a journalist (aged 30) and decided to write fiction, I knew that this love affair was the one thing I desperately needed to write about – a ghost I needed to exorcise.

                                                                                                      

     So I set out to write a detective story, in search of lost time. But the more I compared those ‘lost’ months to other months that I did remember, the more I came to realise that my amnesia was merely a question of degree. The more I thought about memory, the more I doubted its existence.

                                                                                                      

     Certain mornings, particularly after a heavy night’s drinking, I had the impression that my brain was scrambling to retrieve even the smallest fragments of the night before and to fit them into some kind of chronological order. In many cases, I felt like I had to decide what must have happened, based on very little evidence at all. And if that were true of a single night, whose events were separated from me only by eight hours’ sleep, how much more true must it be of events a year, or five years, or ten years, in the past? This insight had a powerful effect on me. I felt as if my own life were slipping through my fingers, vanishing second by second into oblivion.

                                                                                                      

     As you may have gathered, I became somewhat obsessed. I began reading about the science of memory, and came across many strange cases of amnesia and memory. I came to believe that memory doesn’t really exist – that it is essentially a myth; a lie we tell ourselves every day. That we are all, in a sense, amnesiacs.

                                                                                    

     I finished writing The Amnesiac two and a half years ago, and I am now far less neurotic about memory. Not that I have any greater faith in its existence, but simply that, after working through my own horror at how little of my life I truly remembered, I have now learned to stop worrying and love my forgetfulness. In the words of Bertrand Russell: ‘Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.’

                                                                                                      

    Sam Taylor was born in 1970 and is the former pop culture correspondent for the Observer (UK). He lives in France with his young family.

Timothy Hallinan's Backstory

The backstory of almost any book is likely to be a combination of deeply personal material and events or facts from the external world. That's certainly the case with THE FOURTH WATCHER, the second of my Bangkok novels.

When my father was fifteen, his father deserted the family, leaving his wife and three children to shift for themselves. My father, the second oldest, dropped out of school and went to work to put food on the table and pay the rent. (Although he went on to be quite successful, he regretted all his life that he hadn't finished high school.)

When he turned eighteen, my father said to his sixteen-year-old brother, "Your turn," went to the Port of San Pedro, and boarded a boat to China. He remained in China for years, finally fleeing when the Communist victory became inevitable. He returned home with a box of yellowing Chinese money and a fund of stories he never told. Eventually, he married my mother. He never talked about China. He never again ate Chinese food. But every morning, when I inherited the paper from him, I would find creases folded around the stories about China.

To the end of her life, my mother believed that my father had another family, somewhere in China.

My father's story, extensively fictionalized, is one of the three threads that make up the plot of THE FOURTH WATCHER. The protagonist of my Bangkok novels, Poke Rafferty, lived through the destruction of his own family when his father, Frank, packed up one night and returned to China, abandoning his wife and seventeen year-old son. Poke's intense desire to create a new family in Bangkok, through the former bar girl he marries and the street orphan he adopts, is a continuing component of the series.

Poke's resentment of his vanished father is a source of unhappiness to his wife, Rose, who takes the Thai view that we all owe our parents love simply because they gave us life. Her own father drank and gambled away the money she made prostituting herself in the bars and even demanded more from time to time, but when he died, several months before the book begins, she was grief-stricken. More than anything, she wishes she had returned to her village and thanked him, telling him, one final time, how much she loved him.

So when Poke's father, Frank, suddenly emerges in Bangkok, Rose sees a precious opportunity for reconciliation. But it's immediately evident that Frank has fled China just ahead of an avalanche of danger, and that the threat is going to swamp Poke and his new family. Ultimately, father and son are forced – much against Poke's will – to join forces in order to survive, but even at the end of the story, when it seems reconciliation is inevitable, there is a hidden barb.

So my father's life provided one of the seeds of the backstory for THE FOURTH WATCHER. Another is the astonishing counterfeiting operations run by Kim Jong-Il's North Korea – a trade in fake medications, bootleg cigarettes, and American currency, the proceeds from which actually exceed the country's legitimate income from foreign trade. One character in the book, a former CIA agent, says of North Korea, "It's not a country. It's The Sopranos." Bangkok is one of North Korea's primary distribution points for the bad bills.

North Korea's counterfeit American hundred-dollar bills are so good they're called supernotes – in fact, the engraving is better than it is on legitimate American currency. In order to find any telltale irregularities in the supernotes, the American Treasury Department had to blow the bills up to almost twenty feet long, projecting them on the floor of an airplane hangar. Rose is innocently caught up in this, and an overeager American Secret Service agent targets Rose and Poke as potential participants in the scheme.

These two stories (and a third) are braided together to create the plot of THE FOURTH WATCHER. I was interested in the idea of counterfeiting on a broad scale – in currency, in the cigarettes Rose smokes (virtually all "American" cigarettes on sale in Asia are North Korean counterfeits) and in the relationships among family members, where the potential damage is so great. And I must say I had a wonderful time embroidering on my father's mysterious life in China, although Frank – Poke's very complicated father – has almost nothing in common with my own father, who was certainly one of the most admirable men I ever knew. Any resemblance is purely on the surface.

 

Timothy Hallinan has lived off and on in Southeast Asia for more than twenty years.  He is the author of eight published novels and one nonfiction work on Charles Dickens.  THE FOURTH WATCHER is the second book in the Poke Rafferty novels of Bangkok that began in 2007 with A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART. 

TRICIA DOWER’S BACKSTORY

     A University of Toronto production of Othello sparked my story collection, Silent Girl. Reflecting on how willingly Desdemona allowed her life to end, I thought of domestic abuse victims and the seeming collusion of some in their own misfortune. Many, like Desdemona, are socially isolated. The story that resulted from that evening—Nobody; I Myself—ended up being as much about idealism and racism in the United States in the ‘60s as it was about social isolation, but that’s the thing about stories: they often end up being about something other than what you intended.

So it was with Not Meant to Know. Miranda in The Tempest isn’t a particularly complex character. She falls in love with the first good looking guy she sees. What interested me, initially, was how she would relate to that guy, not having had any female role models in her life from the age of three. I intended to tell the story of a girl who is kept hidden from the world by her father but, as I began to write, it morphed into something else.

Other stories were triggered by questions I had about specific characters. For example, what was behind Gertrude’s hasty marriage to her husband’s brother in Hamlet? She doesn’t come across well in the play, primarily because we see her through Hamlet’s eyes. She has overstepped gender bounds by not remaining grief-stricken and devoted to her husband’s memory. In Passing Through, I give my Gertrude a chance to explain herself and time to reflect on what’s important to her.

In the title story, the question sprang from the improbable plot of Pericles. The hero’s daughter, Marina, is kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel yet retains her virginity. Shakespeare didn’t shirk from revealing incest between King Antiochus and his daughter. Why, then, leave Marina’s virtue intact? This was the incongruity that fuelled Silent Girl. Researching the story was painful, writing it even more so. I am stunned by the scope and range of the sex slave trade in North America.

Kidnapping also figures in Kesh Kumay. I had been searching for a modern counterpart to the Taming of the Shrew’s Kate whose abdication to Petruchio at the end of the play always makes me squirm in empathetic humiliation. By lucky accident I caught Petr Lom’s illuminating and moving documentary Kidnapped Brides on CBC’s Passionate Eye. When one woman tells Lom, “After the kidnapping, you've no choice —you start loving, even if you don't want to, you have to build a life,” I knew I had found my Kate in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

The Winter’s Tale, like Shrew, presents a problem for feminist sensibilities. Hermione’s husband Leontes falsely accuses her of adultery and locks her up in prison where she gives birth to their second child, a daughter. He orders the baby taken out into the wilds and left for animals to feed upon. When he gets word Hermione is dead and their first child has died of a broken heart over separation from his mother, he repents and goes into protracted grieving. Too darn late, you think, forgetting this is a romance. In the last act—which takes place sixteen years later—Hermione reveals herself to Leontes as a statue that comes to life and they stroll off into happily-ever-after land, she apparently having forgiven all of his treachery. Pondering Hermione’s sixteen years of fealty to an unhealthy relationship led me to imagine, in Deep Dark Waves, another woman’s suspended animation.

I was intrigued with the atypical mothering of Volumnia in Coriolanus. Thinking I would work with some of feminist bell hook’s theories about the continued disempowerment of North American blacks, I envisioned a story about gang culture. That it evolved into The Snow People, a parable about oppression in an environmentally degraded future, I can only attribute to alchemy.

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s “trouser plays,” as a writer friend calls them: plays in which women disguise themselves as men either to be able to travel without molestation or to gain entry into the privileged world of men. It’s laughable that they get away with it, but the plays are comedies, after all. In my comedy, Cocktails with Charles, I wanted my characters to get away with breaking old patterns to find new meaning.

It became apparent to me as I got deeper into the research and writing of this collection that some things haven’t changed much for women since Shakespeare’s time. The reason, I suspect, is that we are still locked into gender roles and a patriarchal value system, despite the efforts of many women and men to change their thinking and their behaviour. We need different kinds of stories—a new mythology, perhaps—to free us.

To learn more about Tricia Dower, please visit her website.

Sherri Rifkin's Backstory

I am what you might consider to be a veteran of the Hamptons Summer Share House experience.

I’ve been a member of almost every kind of house situation, from renting cramped, ant-infested beach shacks with a tight-knit group of friends, all the way up to a nine-bedroom McMansion replete with pool, hot tub and tennis court. Along the way, I learned a lot about how the different share house dynamics worked and more importantly, what worked for me. (Hint: something in between those two extremes.)

Then in the spring of 2002, one of my best friends whom I had met several years prior when we were both editorial assistants in book publishing, came back from a lunch with a foreign book scout and instant-messaged me with a recounting of their conversation about the growing “chick lit” market. (This was post-Bridget Jones’ Diary and around the time when The Nanny Diaries was just coming out and The Devil Wears Prada was just sold.) They talked about how no one had written a novel set in the Hamptons , codifying the various social mores of living and socializing on the East End . I wrote, “That’s a great idea! Someone should definitely do it,” and she replied, “I think YOU should do it.”

At first I demurred, but the truth was that I had been thinking about doing something around my experiences in the Hamptons in the first-person essay vein—not fiction—especially given my experience the summer before. All my life I had been a writer “on the side,” mostly sporadic short-term writing gigs I happened upon as I pursued my “real” careers first in book publishing and then in television marketing. As much as I loved writing, I always resisted writing fiction because it seemed like too much of a harrowing pursuit especially given what I knew about the publishing business.

However, our conversation got me thinking, then excited, then scribbling in my notebook as I sat by the pool of my latest Hamptons share recalling the previous summer when I, like my protagonist Tori Miller, joined a share house without knowing anyone in it.

Though this impending scenario could’ve been fairly daunting, at the time I wasn’t overly worried because I had been dating someone since the beginning of the year and was hoping-slash-expecting to spend more time with him at his summer place than at mine.  So, when I bought the share in the wildcard house, I was thinking of it as insurance only.

But that’s the thing with insurance policies: you never plan to cash in on them (in fact, you consciously hope you never have to), but when the time comes to do so, boy are you glad you have them!

Needless to say, my relationship imploded at the beginning of July. My one consolation was that I still had my own share situation to fall back on. Because I had spent so little time at my place, I hadn’t realized that it was full of what I called “Professional Party Chasers,” something I was not nor ever aspired to be. But I quickly learned that if I didn’t jump on their bandwagon, I would’ve been left behind in the dust. So for the next two months, I immersed myself in the pervasive house culture, right down to playing all of their reindeer games—and wound up having a lot of fun.

As enjoyable as it ended up being, I was relieved when Labor Day finally arrived. That whole time I felt like I was living somebody else’s life—which was frighteningly easier than I ever thought possible—so I was happy when September came and I could return to my “normal” life. While the fast-paced, non-stop swirl of that summer helped me get over my breakup, the best part of that experience was that it provided me with the most unexpected and invaluable gift: the premise for my first novel, LoveHampton.

Sherri Rifkin lives in New York City , where she writes full time for a variety of entertainment and media clients, including Bravo, USA Network and the Style Network. This is her first novel.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller's Backstory

May 4, 1970 – Ohio National Guard shoot and kill four Kent State University Vietnam War protesters and wound nine others.

    Two days later, newly married, I am on my way to Ft. Knox, Kentucky, for my husband to start Armor Officers Basic training.

    Mitch's orders to report to active duty say nothing about bringing his wife.  (You know the old army saying: "If the army had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one.")  But I am not going to be left behind.

     Skip ahead a few days after we have managed to secure an appointment in Muldraugh, Kentucky, a small town with no mail delivery.  Mitch comes home from AOB one day with an invitation for me to attend a social function for AOB wives. 

     Of course I go – I am so bored in Muldraugh, Kentucky.  And there I learn that we are going to be trained how to be a proper officer's wife.  For our graduation luncheon there is a need for committee chairs.  I shoot up my arm to be the entertainment chair.

     "Now we usually have a fashion show or an etiquette lesson," a senior officer wife says.  I nod, and think how I'll write a skit satirizing AOB.  (To protect the innocent I set the scene at Valley Forge in 1776.) 

     To this day, while I remember everything else and have all my original army documents (some of which can be seen on my website at www.mrslieutenant.com), I can't remember how I got the four other members of my committee: a Southern Baptist, a black (the correct term in those days), and two Puerto Ricans – one of whom couldn't speak English.

     The five of us spent the next few weeks together learning how to be a Mrs. Lieutenant.  And from that day onward until now, I've wanted to tell the story of what being a new officer's wife in the U.S. Army was like during the Vietnam War. 

     MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL is the result 38 years later.  I mashed up characters and incidents (some things I included at Ft. Knox really took place when we were stationed in Munich, Germany, the scene of the sequel I'm now writing – MRS. LIEUTENANT IN EUROPE), and I invented backstories for the main characters.  Yet the overall story is an accurate depiction.

     And in order to place the events in their historical context, the start of each chapter includes a news item as well as a quote from Mary Preston Gross' booklet "Mrs. Lieutenant" (Third Edition), which we used in 1970 to learn the rules and expectations for an officer's wife.  One such pithy statement of the book: "It has been said that when a man acquires a commission, the government has gained not one, but two – the officer and his wife."

    The story of MRS. LIEUTENANT may seem like ancient history.  But today the U.S. is again involved in another unpopular war.  And race issues, which are a theme in MRS. LIEUTENANT, are again in the news.  Maybe I was destined to wait 38 years before publishing the book – until the time was ripe for this specific past to shed light on this specific present.

     Please visit the author's website for more about her life and work.

Vincent Louis Carrella's Backstory

Twenty years ago a man carried a camera into the hills of Tennessee. He had a technique for bringing out a certain quality in the faces of his subjects, who were the rural poor. He used an automobile headlight rigged to a car battery to illuminate the faces of a vanishing people. In the glare of a headlight, on a date that is unrecorded, stood a boy without a name.

The man took the boy’s picture and published it in a book that was given to me as a gift. I was struck by this image - a Holiness boy holding a jar of poison in one hand and a rattlesnake in a wooden box in the other, part of a series depicting the lives of snake-handling Pentecostals. The title of the photograph: Boy with Serpent Box and Poison Jar.

I could not shake the image of the boy. I had to write about him but what did I, a New York transplant living in San Francisco, know about rural Appalachia? What did I know about God and the Holy Ghost? What did I know about writing? Nothing. I had never written anything before.

How is it that a beam of light, reflected off a boy’s face and back through the lens of a camera, could travel so far and change my life thousands of miles away? The answer to that question lies in Serpent Box, a story about the meaning of faith, the meaning of God, and the chance connections that make up a life.

The book’s original title, The Serpent Box and the Poison Jar, refers to two simple containers, a box and a jar. The first is meant to house a deadly snake. The second, a caustic acid. Crude implements of an aberrant Christian faith. Crude containers for lethal poisons - venom and lye. Things that can kill you must be contained. They must be kept apart from us. They must not be allowed to make contact with our flesh; which is also a crude container. Can we not also kill ourselves? Must we not be protected from our own natural inclinations? Are we not the serpent and the box?

I wrote this story about faith because I had none, God, because I needed one, belief, because I didn’t believe in anything. I wrote about a boy in search of himself, because I was searching for myself. The story of Jacob Flint, a boy based on my impression of a child in a photograph, is a coming of age story and a becoming a man story, and a story of fathers and sons, and wrote it in order to live. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I knew that it had to be done or I would die inside.

Now, I know how to live. By writing, by searching, by asking questions, I remind myself that we have within us the power to change lives and help one another to live.

Find about more about this author by visiting his website.

Micha Berman's Backstory

When I stepped off Carnival Cruise Line’s M.S. Ecstasy after serving as Assistant Cruise Director for a year, I had no idea what awaited me on land. I feared, as many former crewmembers do that I would not be able to adjust to the everyday responsibilities of land life and soon find myself back on the ships. God forbid I would have to cook my own meal, pay rent, or even do my own laundry.

I had experienced a world few would ever see and my months of hard work networking with college alumni, chasing cruise line executives into bathrooms, sending thousands of letters, and reading every cruise magazine published had paid off as I landed my dream job hosting fun activities such as beer drinking competitions and hairy chest contests aboard one of the largest cruise ships in the world.

As I went about my daily life interviewing for jobs, attending family functions, shopping in the local grocery story, going to the doctor, I often found myself answering the same question over and over – “What is it like to work on a cruise ship?”  Everybody I met was fascinated, and couldn’t stop themselves from delving into my experience, probing me with interviews. “Where did you eat?” “Did you have relationships with passengers?” “How do you get a job on a cruise ship?” was the most popular question and when I stared deeply into the questioner’s eyes I saw their forbidden dream of leaving on a jet plane and heading to the world of fantasy and fun aboard the Love Boat.

I began browsing bookstores looking for stories from people who lived on cruise ships. After all there must be stories, memoirs, best sellers chronicling the life of thousands of people around the world who spend years and sometimes even a lifetime at sea serving the millions each year that take cruises. What I found instead was lifeless informational books on how to cruise – you know the typical “Everything you need to bring on a cruise ship” type book next to books recommending sunscreen, seasick prevention patches, and disposable cameras.  Or I found typical travel books on Caribbean Cruises with maps and itineraries for different cruise lines.  If I looked hard enough, I found an occasional “How to Get a Job on a Cruise Ship,” type book. 

This didn’t surprise me. Before I began my cruise job search I had no luck finding any decent books telling me what to do and who to contact. It was the Wild West. This has changed today with websites devoted to helping potential crewmembers and even chat forums where you can talk to actual crewmembers sailing around the world. After leaving Carnival Cruise Lines I could not find any memoirs or detailed accounts of life behind the scenes on a cruise ship. The curious and amused looks of friends and family set off a light bulb in my head, why not write that book. So began my journey to chronicle not only my crazy job search but a book that would take readers behind the scenes on a cruise ship and honestly portray the world most people only know through the television series – the Love Boat.

It didn’t take long to write the story. My mind was popping from all the different crazy moments I experienced on the ship.  I often hear comments about how so many people thought about writing this kind of book but never did.  As I contemplate my cruise memoir I understand that I have married many of my passions through this work: love of travel, crazy fun, women, and the search for something meaningful in this strange box we call life.
 

Find out more about the author here.

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.

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