Goodreads asked Virginia Macgregor:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Virginia Macgregor My most recent book for adults, 'Before I Was Yours' is about adoption. I have a godson adopted from Romania and have watched the journey his adoptive parents took through years of fertility treatments to finally adopting him and his sister in Vietnam. As I got to the stage of having children of my own, the challenges of not being able to have children - or the thought of having to give a child up for adoption - became even more real and emotional.

My most recent YA book, 'Wishbones' is about a teenage girl who looks after her morbidly obese mother. I spent quite a bit of my teenage years looking after my mother who was unwell for different reasons, so the idea of being a child carer interested me. The book also tackles eating disorders, which is something I struggled with in my late teens and early twenties.

For all my books, however, I tell my readers that the inspiration is always a balance between experience, research and my imagination. The balance of these three elements might change from novel to novel but they are always present. And even if my books do have personal elements, they are never autobiographical - I invent characters and situations very different from my own life.

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