It’s her life as a mother, her struggles with her marriage, her questions about her own choices, good and bad, that make her completely real to me. Eileen could be me. She could be my best friend. She could be any number of the women in my book club or living on my block. I love that she is a flawed person—but this doesn’t make her a bad person, only human. My hope is that having an Eileen character gives women space to consider aspects of their own lives that are not so perfect and, if they didn’t already know it, the knowledge that they are not the only ones.

Your story pulls the reader from the rocky shores of California to the small towns of America and even visits the busy streets of New York. Do you have strong connections to these places, and did you mean for them to play such important roles in the book?

I seem to always be drawn to writing stories that cover a lot of physical territory. I think this may stem from growing up in a military family and moving as much as I did as a child. Because of this, I don’t have a strong sense of “home” the way many people do and I feel connections to many places I’ve lived and/or visited over the years. I have loved many small towns and big cities in America and all over the world. Not unlike people, they have their own beauty, strengths, and drawbacks as well. For me, places have personalities all their own, and because of that, I feel they can’t help but become one of the characters in a story.

But no, I didn’t intend them to be important. I think it’s more just the way I view places and settings in general—so it ends up coming across in the story.

On to questions about writing! Are you an outliner or a “pantser”?

I am both. I like to have a map, which is my general outline of the major destinations I want to hit on my way through the book. And I have to know about how long I’m going to take to get there, word-count-wise. But for the most part, when I sit down to work on a scene, I let it go where it wants as it comes to me. Some scenes I know I’ll write ahead of time, some scenes I know I NEED to include, and others pop up based on events that transpired along the way, but I always know how it’s going to end before starting. It might change slightly, or even completely, but I like to know where I’m going before I take off.

What does your writing space look like?