Author Interview

• What first inspired you to write The Good Side of Bad?

I think I was more compelled to write this novel than inspired. I wanted to discover how people react when confronted with a turn of events that tosses their lives in unexpected and challenging directions. When the once reasonably predictable future becomes a chaos of ambiguity or loss, how do we find the courage and resilience to adapt? I created three characters, siblings, who were all forced by external events to face major changes in their lives. My hope was that I could give these siblings, whose lives and challenges are very different, ways to find a path towards each other.

My own life had suddenly and dramatically changed as a result of an illness, and I found writing this book was my own life raft to survival and coming to terms with "life interrupted." The greatest satisfaction and even joy in writing for me comes when the characters I have created slowly become so real to me that they are capable of making their own choices, continually surprising and teaching me in the process.

• Which of the three main characters came to you first?

The character of Florence was based on a woman in her mid twenties I knew many years ago. I was haunted by how her young life was forever altered by mental illness. I had worked in a psychiatric half-way house for a short time when I was younger, so I had compassion for what she was going through.

I wanted to juxtapose Florence's terrifying mental breakdown with a character at the other extreme of life. A New York hedge fund trader was about as far as I could get from Florence's life. I had closely followed the economic events of 2008 and wanted to explore what happened to a high-flying trader when his world melted down...so Peter was born.

At first I wanted Sara to be a place of calm amidst the chaos her brother and sister were facing. But I could hardly leave her as passive glue in the middle of other people's lives. In the end, the changes and choices of her life were as powerful for me as those of her more dramatic siblings.

• Why did you choose to write the novel from three first-person voices?

In an early draft the novel was in the third person. Most of my short stories and my novel, The Breath of Juno, were written in the third person. As a playwright, I love the free flow of creating dialogue. I love hearing character's voices in novels, it's a great way of getting their unique personality on the page. But for this book it didn't feel like that was enough. I think it is almost impossible to understand what a person like my character of Florence is going through without being inside her head. A third person narrative couldn't touch the depth of her struggle. She had to be the narrator of her own life. As soon as I put her voice on the page, I knew that Peter and Sara needed to speak for themselves as well.

Writing from the first person, especially in three different voices, was, at first, so much harder than having the all-knowing perspective of the third person voice. But it was so much more intimate to me.

• You make several life and death decisions. Did you know which way these choices would go at the beginning?

I never know how everything will go. That's the thrill of writing a novel. I start with a chapter by chapter outline but I never stick to it. Sometimes a single sentence will force the book to go in a different direction. At first the fate of my characters is all in my hands. If I'm their creator, I believe I can make them do whatever I like, but that doesn't last long. Even at the very end there were life and death choices that were made, not in my head in advance, but in the midst of the action.

I'm reluctant to say anything more about these choices. I don't want to spoil it for those who might read this interview before starting the book.

• The story is set mostly in Seattle and New York. The financial Wall Street plot clearly dictates the New York location. But why Seattle?

I live in Los Angeles, but all my summers for the past fifteen years have been spent in the Pacific Northwest. The beauty and the water draw me there with every summer solstice. Seattle is surrounded by water with Puget Sound on one side and Lake Washington on the other. Bridges cross over small canals and vast lakes. Everywhere the water is waiting, tempting, inviting. Water literally runs through the novel. And there is the ever-present rain.

Seattle is also about as far as you can get from the New York world of high finance, at least geographically.

• What do you hope readers will take away from the story?

All of the characters are on their own journey towards understanding and compassion. I guess that is the one thing I would want readers to feel. When people come to a crossroads in their lives, they not only discover who is there to fight with them but how they ultimately learn to find the strength to fight for themselves. Our motivations, our choices and even our values can be wildly different, but opening yourself to deeply knowing someone can't help but bring compassion.