A. The moss-draped Lowcountry is where my heart truly resides, where I feel the most alive—as if I can hear the earth’s heartbeat. I believe people have a landscape or geography that speaks most clearly to their spirit. I grew up spending summers on the craggy coast of Cape Cod and maybe that’s where the sea and marsh began their call to me.

I consider the Lowcountry setting to be as essential a character in the novel as the people who occupy it. I chose the Lowcountry for Amy and Nick because it is seductive—lush, overgrown, frivolous, passionate, mystical, and dangerous, just like Nick and Amy’s relationship. My intention was to use the setting both to bring them together and to echo their dilemma.

Q. The idea of a former lover who reenters a woman’s life in her middle years seems to have enormous appeal to women. Judging from your own experiences, and those of your friends and family, why do you think that is?

A. A woman’s middle years seem to be a time for reevaluating life. How did I get here? Do I want to be here? Have I made the right decisions? This is when questions rise to the surface, when the exhaustion of raising young children may have worn off and women revisit their life goals. Memories of a past love, and the feelings associated with it, may also return when times are hard or when life seems emptier than one expected—one may then imagine the “road not taken.”

Often (not always, by any means), memories of a first love carry a strong sense of possibility and passion. Memories of these feelings—the pungent, almost innocent and intense emotions of first love—seem easier, simpler than the complicated emotions involved in committed or broken relationships. Of course this is just an illusion, but first love seems to carry a certain longing and reminds some women of a time when love wasn’t so much an act of will, but of pure, raw sensation.

Q. At the beginning of the book you quote a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Why did you choose that particular sentence? How does it relate to the book, and what personal meaning does it have for you?

A. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), a scholar and teacher at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities who is best known for his Narnia Chronicles for children, was an atheist for most of his early life, but he converted to Christianity in 1931.

A talented debater and writer, Lewis published many works on a wide variety of topics—but the subjects that most interest me, especially as a writer, revolve around his exploration of human longing and the search for meaning. His writing has inspired me since I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a child. The Screwtape Letters offers profound insights into human nature.