Patrick Brown asked Matthew Thomas:

Did this book always have the somewhat epic scope (covering 60+ years)? Or did it start with a narrower focus and expand out from there?

Matthew Thomas Hi Patrick. Thanks for this great question. I had an idea of the sweep of the story, but I started in the middle. There's something useful about getting into the middle of something and looking around to see where you are. I realized fairly quickly that I would need to tell the story of Eileen’s early life if I wanted what happens to her later to resonate with the reader in the way that I wanted it to. If the reader had a window into Eileen’s somewhat unstable early childhood experiences and why she expends so much energy in pursuit of psychic equilibrium through upward mobility, then the reader would understand how hugely disrupting it would be for Eileen’s husband to get the particular disease he gets. So I went back in time, to when Eileen was a young girl.

Once I accepted that I would need to tell the whole story of my main character’s life, then certain opportunities opened up, because I would be writing about a wide sweep of time and taking the reader through a large chunk of history. And I saw that I could write, through Eileen, about one of the stories that I consider most central to the second half of the 20th century, namely the rise of women in greater numbers into positions of power in the workforce. I also saw that if I focused on the particulars of this one family, the Leary’s, I could tell some of the story of the experience of the middle class during this period. I could also write about race relations and the flight of whites to the suburbs in the 70's and 80's. And I could indirectly comment on the American Dream motif and the notion that life can always get a little better through the acquisition of material resources, and quietly draw attention to how we are always encouraged, in Western culture, to want and need more and not think about whether this accumulation, this ostensible betterment of our circumstances, actually makes us happier. Weaving in a storyline involving a degenerative disease with which I had experience in my family was a way to undercut a lot of the assumptions in that Dream.

I guess I waded into what was just a little body of water at first and saw that it would get deeper and lead out to larger bodies of water if I had the nerve to keep going. I think that’s probably how a lot of novels get written. There’s a sense of how much work you’ve signed up for, but only a sense, because if you knew what you were really in for, you might head back to the shore.

flag