Where does inspiration come from?

I've been working on my author interview for the first novel - quite a few of my friends responded with questions and I'm in the process of answering them. Here are the first two:


What inspired you to write about this subject?

When I got divorced twelve years ago, two weird things happened. First of all, women started spontaneously telling me their bad marriage stories, even women who I thought were perfectly happy. If you get divorced in a small town, you’ve screwed up in a very public way. All of a sudden you become the person it’s okay to confess to and women were practically flagging me down in the supermarket, leaning over my cart and saying “You know, things aren’t that great at home….” I became the repository of a hundred women’s secrets, and the notes I kept from that period became the basis of Love in Mid Air. The stories were altered, of course, a loose amalgamation of what was happening to me and my friends. For so long I had thought it was just me who was unhappy but now I was being shown the whole spectrum, the oceanic quality of female discontent. I walked around for a year saying ‘Wow, isn’t anybody happily married?”
The other thing I realized is that there were very few books that dealt with the subject of divorce in a realistic manner. Most of the books were about men leaving women, even thought it’s more statistically likely for a woman to initiate divorce, especially after the age of 40. And there was often some sort of quick fix - the deserted woman ended up falling in love with her attorney or some hunky handyman who showed up to help at her new house. I resented this whole idea that divorce is about swapping one man for another - ideally as fast as possible - with little exploration of the affect a woman’s divorce has on her friends and the whole social web. I knew that needed to make it into the story as well.


Is the material autobiographical? Are you Elyse?

I’m Elyse, but I’m also Kelly and Nancy and Lynn and Belinda and even Gerry and Phil and Jeff. For me, a novel is like a dream - all the characters are aspects of me, in dialogue with each other. But while the material isn’t literally autobiographical, it’s emotionally autobiographical. I’ve never been kissed by a stranger in the traveler’s chapel of the Dallas airport, but it’s the kind of thing I’ve wished would happen. It’s not hard to imagine how it might feel.