Goodreads asked Cynthia Robinson:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Cynthia Robinson When I was five years old, my cousin--15 at the time--shot my favorite aunt and killed her. Ruled an accident, he was supposedly cleaning his gun, but after the afternoon of her funeral--I remember my mother crying as she looked in the mirror, pinning her veiled black hat in place with hat pins--it was never discussed. Ever. No pictures of my aunt anywhere to be found. She was a librarian, she introduced me to books; she was divorced (not something women readily did in the South in the '60s), beautiful, she wore red lipstick and dyed her hair and she smoked. She fascinated me. The truth is I already wrote a novel about this, my first, but it's lost somewhere on a floppy disk, floating in the mists of time... Possibly a good thing: I think all writers should probably 'lose' their first novels. Maybe I'll write it again; I'm sure it would be better the second time around.

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