If you’ve ever been to one of my book launch parties, Dad was the guy forever refilling your champagne glass. Mom was the reader I counted on to tell me when a book wasn’t finished, and when it was. I first put words to the page for this novel on February 11, 2022, a Friday eight months after Dad died unexpectedly and, it would turn out, just a month before Mom died.
Leo is my father’s middle name; Leo isn’t my dad, but Dad’s generous and loving soul is buried in this character I love as much as Gemma and Iz do.
Leo’s typewriter is my mom’s (a 1940s Woodstock), as are Rebecca’s legs. Rebecca’s desire for Gemma to make friends was my mom’s desire each time I started the six different grade schools I attended.
Gemma comes from Meg run backward; like her, my writing began with journals and typewriters, and I don’t know what it means to have a grandmother.
There are shreds of my heart all over this one.
Many weeks, the only time I wrote was the forty minutes I spent with Jenn, Ellie, and Sheryl— the JEMS, Ellie dubbed us, a name that I see only now is also echoed in Gemma’s name. We began each Friday Zoom by saying what we were going to write.
That February morning, with my heart no longer in the novel I’d been working on when Dad died, I said I was just going to start something new, a novel about the Hollywood blacklist that had long fascinated me.
What I wrote in the 40 minutes we wrote together was a scene with a writer like me facing the empty space where her grandfather, the only father she knew, used to be.
Like Leo, I believe in beginning wherever I can.
I thought those pages would be my way into the story, which I meant to be a straight historical story set in the 1950s. But as I wrote, I began to see that Leo and Iz had secrets, and they would not tell you theirs, nor would they share with you each other’s secrets, if they knew them.
So Gemma became my way to uncover them, and Sam came along with her because … well, who doesn’t love a love story, or two, or three? André joined them in no small part because I learned from my law school classmate and dear friend André Jackson that the opportunity I’d been given with my place in our class was a privilege I ought to respect—and I have long been looking for a place to honor him.
I found also, in pursuing this more contemporary story, space to share my passion for having women behind the scenes in movies. Who is behind the scenes shapes how women appear onscreen, and how we’re portrayed onscreen has an outsized impact on what is seen as societally appropriate. How we can behave. What we ought to aspire to. How we should be treated.
And the particular challenges women face is, it turns out, a theme that threads through all my novels.