spy on the couple. I wanted to know what she saw and how involved she was in their lives. The story stuck with me and over the next twenty years I’d find myself revisiting the couple and their squatter until I decided to sit down and meet them. I did so in my mind, and I did not get what I was expecting.
What draws you to write about a complicated—maybe even doomed—marriage? Or family dynamics more generally?
I’m an introspective person. When I began writing seriously in my early twenties, I was exploring myself and my personality in a fictional world. I took my issues and my questions and my trauma to stories where I dressed them in characters and scenes. When I ran out of personal issues to write about, I began exploring human issues in general. Why do we do the things we do? Some authors write to beautify the world; I write to expose things in the crumbling of it.
How did you develop the character of Juno?
When I first moved to Seattle, I’d often write in coffee shops downtown. I befriended a handful of homeless men in the area who’d come sit at my table and chat with me. I met a homeless engineer, a homeless mechanic, a homeless musician, and a homeless vet during the three years I spent in the area. Their stories were told with painful remorse as they would recount the one mistake that derailed their lives. Juno mostly developed herself from those stories. I could hear those men in my head as I wrote about her. I knew she had to be desperate and I knew she wanted to make things right.
Juno’s and Winnie’s voices are so different, and yet they struggle with some of the same issues. Did one of them come more easily to you? Was one more of a challenge? What similarities do you see between Winnie and Juno? Might we say that they represent two directions stemming from the same forked path?
Winnie and Juno: different voices, same issues. They were separated by age and economics and yet they shared so many similarities. Juno was hiding in a crawl space; Winnie was hiding in her pretty house. One wanted to make amends for what she’d done and the other one wanted to forget what she’d done entirely. In the end, both were seeking peace, and they were both too dishonest about themselves to ever find it.
What comes first for you—the overall idea for the book or a character?
I ask what-if questions about myself and then seek to answer them. What if your husband had two other wives...? What if you were homeless...? What if you snapped and became a serial killer...? What if someone kidnapped you and locked you in a cabin? I’ve written all those stories because I wanted to read them. The characters show up at their leisure and I don’t always like them. But I always listen and tell their truth.
One of the great ironies of this story is that Winnie works in mental health but can’t see how deep her own brother’s struggles are, and Juno also worked in mental health but can’t see her own diagnosis. Was that irony deliberate, something you wove in from the beginning, or was it something that developed organically and perhaps even unconsciously as you wrote?
I think that it is a human issue. We see what we are comfortable seeing and shade our eyes to the rest. Winnie and Juno are both very selfish and self-involved individuals. They might work in an occupation that aids people, but they look to help themselves first. I think they’re both addicted to how doing good makes them feel, but in the end it’s still about their feelings.
A similar question: this book touches on a lot of important and deeply relevant social issues. Mental health, homelessness, incarceration—the book shows us how someone can be affected by any or all these things, and that people’s situations are rarely simple. Was it your intent to write about those things, or did the characters and the story reveal themselves to you as you went?
I worked in mental health and those experiences definitely shaped me as a writer. What I’ve found about people in general is that they rarely try to understand their personal antagonist. When you put a face and a past and a trauma on your enemy, you are given understanding which is a powerful avenue for growth. So I want to write about the complicated