Book Club Cookbook’s Guest Author Blog

Whenever I meet with readers, one of the most common questions I get is “How much of this book comes directly from your life?” I think it’s generally true to say that all serious fiction is emotionally autobiographical–that is, the themes of the story, the struggles of the characters, their moral quandaries all tend to parallel an author’s experience–but certainly in my novels Three Junes and The Whole World Over, the characters and plot lines were, for the most part, pure invention. I even wrote about places I’ve never seen firsthand. (The heroine of my second novel, Greenie Duquette, has a nature extremely unlike mine. Decisive, declarative, confident, thick-skinned, even impetuous–boy is that NOT me. If I’m deciding between two dresses in a store, I have to try them on, one then the other, ad infinitum, about a dozen times. I drive sales clerks berserk with my agonizing. In restaurants, I read every detail on the menu before ordering. One of my best friends will yell at me, “It’s not the last supper, for God’s sake!”) But this third book, I See You Everywhere feels different to me, because although it’s definitely fiction, the two main characters and their challenges are drawn from my life and my perception of my sister’s life. Originally, this book was a collection of linked stories–stories I wrote about these two sisters over many years (some were written before Three Junes, others within the past three years). As I revised them over and over again, they began to flow together in a way that makes the entire narrative close to (if not quite!) a novel. But whether you read this book as stories or a novel, it’s definitely not a memoir. And that’s an issue I had to tackle a few years ago: Why wasn’t I simply writing a straight-up autobiographical account? Because, I finally realized, I didn’t want to write about “me and my sister”; I wanted to write about what that relationship has taught me, emotionally and spiritually, in my life. To do that, I had to treat the “facts” of my story like clay, shaping and reshaping, glazing and firing, till I achieved a vessel with a form and integrity all its own. (I just realized that the older sister in I See You Everywhere starts out as a potter. Funny I would use that metaphor to describe the process of crafting her story!) All in all, though the book isn’t out in stores yet, I suspect I’ll feel a bit more vulnerable this time around–but it’s also been somewhat cathartic.