How did the seed of Julia, Gabe, and Elizabeth\u2019s story come to you?<\/p>\n
I was in New York, in a cab with my friend leaving a party, and during the cab ride, she told me that a friend of hers was dating my ex-boyfriend. That ex of mine really was a good boyfriend\u2014we had a fine, amicable little breakup\u2014and she said that she\u2019d recommended him based on my experience. But now her friend was not having a good time\u2014like, he wasn\u2019t being a good boyfriend to her. I was like, \u201cI\u2019m not Yelp for boyfriends!\u201d But that made me think: that was my experience with him, but it\u2019s been a few years. Maybe he\u2019s changed. Maybe the dynamic of that relationship is contributing. It was just interesting to me to think, Oh, we dated the same person, but if we were in a room together, would our experiences overlap?<\/p>\n
That was years before I started the book, but it was in the back of my mind, and then when Parks ended, I had always wanted to write prose fiction\u2014that\u2019s what I\u2019d gone to college with the intention of doing. I ended up with this great job [writing for television], but I\u2019d been wanting to write a book since I was a kid. I wrote a nonfiction book in high school, but I really wanted to write a novel. It kind of felt like, why not do it now? It was just after we\u2019d wrapped this show I really cared about, I didn\u2019t have kids or anything, I had just gotten married, and I thought: Well, now is the time to do it. That\u2019s when the cab conversation came back into my mind.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d already been thinking about loss, just because of my personal experiences with loss, and I talked to a friend who lost her grandfather, and she was aware that I had a few people close to me pass away. She said that I was the \u201cexpert in grief,\u201d which wasn\u2019t, like, a great moniker, but I thought, Okay, well, maybe there is something to explore here. There are so many books about grief now, but at the time when I started writing, I wasn\u2019t really seeing that in literary fiction. There were memoirs about grief, but I wanted to write something about grief that, if you were going through a loss, you would read it and not feel further depressed, or it wouldn\u2019t make you feel worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How did the seed of Julia, Gabe, and Elizabeth\u2019s story come to you? I was in New York,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134,20991,20992,1672],"class_list":{"0":"post-66473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-splitscreenimagerightinset","13":"tag-storytypeinterview","14":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}