For ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk. And then in 1980, she stopped. Full of pent-up, raw emotions that had no outlet, she found a writers’ group consisting of four other women. They based their process on Peter Elbow’s “teacherless writing class” in which everyone reads each other’s work and then tries to give the writer some sense of how their story was experienced by each reader. For five years, these five women met every single week, during which time Gutzmer published a few short stories here and there—in Crispin Burnham’s Eldritch Tales zine, in one of Maui’s community college’s literary journals. But until she went to Disneyland, nothing clicked.

By now, Gutzmer was sober, married and had adopted her husband’s two children, and when the family went on vacation to Disneyland she rode the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction and had a full-blown panic attack.

“You can see from the top that nobody’s even submerged,” she says. “It just goes around a track in the pool. But I was inside and suddenly there wasn’t enough air for me and everyone else, and I wanted to claw my way out.”

The idea hit her almost fully formed: what if she was trapped underground and pregnant? The novella poured out of her and she submitted “When Darkness Loves Us” to Theodore Sturgeon’s writing workshop. You can read his reaction in the other foreword to this edition, but he did more than admit her to the workshop, he found her an agent. Sandra Dijkstra signed Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, now writing under the name Elizabeth Engstrom (her married name combined with her daughter’s middle name, Elizabeth), and Dijkstra told her that if they had another novella they could submit the two together as a book.

Engstrom had already written “Beauty Is . . .” which was based on a real-life incident. On Maui, a developmentally disabled woman had gotten a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken, a relatively progressive employer at the time. A group of guys started harassing her on her daily walk to work and she didn’t know how to make them stop. They started inviting her to a bar. And getting her drunk. And taking advantage of her.

“I was horrified,” Engstrom remembers. “I thought, did I want to live in a world where things like that happened?”

Together, the two novellas were sold at auction to William Morrow. They wanted a third story to round out the volume, but Engstrom didn’t have anything she liked enough. Didn’t matter. There were hardcover sales, book club sales, European rights sales, and a sale to Tor for the paperback edition (with a now-classic cover by artist Jill Bauman). “Beauty Is . . .” would go on to be optioned twice for film.