The Author Responds, Part I

Dear Lynn,

I had just finished a draft of this novel when my husband suddenly died in January 2004. Putting the novel away--along with so much of the rest of my life--was what I did, or what happened. Just how much this novel is about grief is not something I was all that aware of, but as I've been doing readings from it, I've realized this. Someone close to me recently said, "Michelle, it's prophetic," and I suppose now, with all I know, it is, but you know, if you'd asked me in December 2003 if I was writing about grief, I'd have cranked my face up a bit.

I actually don't remember when I first started writing this novel. Years ago, but even years before that. I've been interested in autism since I was about seventeen and first encountered mention of it in a psychology course at San Francisco State University. I was interested immediately because of the individual worlds these children often live in, and perhaps, to be honest, my interest was fanciful, or associative. I was a huge reader as a child and I think I was because reading provided an alternative universe to live in--thank God! I think I was also fascinated by children who didn't really care what their parents thought or felt, or weren't capable of knowing what their parents thought. Children who couldn't read their parents' faces. Wow. What an idea, not knuckling down under some glance from one's mother. (I was a very dutiful child.) So, I've been thinking about autism for many years, but I suppose I started this novel sometime during the year of 2000. I had returned to the University of California at Irvine as a professor; I had been a graduate student there, and I had written a second novel--also unpublished--about two sisters, and I'd put that novel away. So, I needed a new project, and I was always being called a "claustrophobic writer," a little something reviewers like to call women writers. Maybe I was a little in their faces, too, a little like, "here, you want claustrophobic! Let me show you claustrophobic!"

[more to come from Michelle's response tomorrow...]