When I was in graduate school, one of my teachers shared an E.L. Doctorow quote that has always stayed with me. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. I love that idea—and I find it particularly comforting when I embark on a novel. For me, Doctorow’s words serve as a reminder that in order to tell the story I most want to tell, I don’t need to know all the answers when I’m on page one (or page twenty or page eighty, for that matter), I just need to know the question I’m trying to answer to move a story to its next honest place.
For , when I opened a new document to page one, I knew what that question was: Can we ever really know the people closest to us? Can we ever know the people we love most?
This question led to my creation of Hannah Hall—a smart, independent woman, a woodturner by profession. I didn’t know anything about woodturning until my husband and I got married and good friends gave us a gorgeous woodturned bowl for a wedding present. I became enamored with the art form, which is quite beautiful and specific. It involves strength, patience, skill, precision, and faith—all traits I wanted to infuse in Hannah, who finds herself in a dramatically impossible situation. She finds herself newly married to a man she is convinced she inherently does know. A ma`n she believes is good and solid and kind, despite the world telling her otherwise. When Owen mysteriously disappears, this paradox is compounded (did Hannah know Owen, at all?) and Hannah is left reeling, trying to figure out who her husband really is (and where he is)—while also trying to engage with Bailey, the sixteen-year-old daughter her husband has left behind. Sixteen-year-old Bailey who wants absolutely nothing to do with her.
“There is so much beauty in all the ways that love arrives into our lives.”
I worked on for more than eight years, on and off—my headlights steering me in many, many directions. But it was after I had my son in 2016 that I realized Hannah’s story, as much as being about trust and secrets and enduring love, was also the primal story of becoming a mother. Hannah’s journey to motherhood, like so many women, takes an unexpected path. I loved the idea of honoring Hannah and Bailey’s specific journey while also honoring motherhood, in all its remarkable forms. We often become mothers to people we don’t birth, we find our families in people we may not have planned for, we define home and love in ways that may be more generous and fulfilling than our younger selves could have imagined. There is so much beauty in all the ways that love arrives into our lives—and I was drawn to spotlighting a version that is surprising, both in its formation and where it ultimately leads these characters.
Driving through the fog (with only a woodturned bowl and my initial question by my side), I certainly didn’t know this was where I was headed. But I’m so happy this is where I ended up.
