Why I’ve never told anyone how I started this book.

I started writing my novel one morning 5 or so years ago quite by accident. I’d been having a love affair with books since Mrs. Sharrett read The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe in it’s entirety to our second grade class, but I never had the gall to call myself a writer. Sure, I spent my middle school years scribbling poems about longing and loss (two things I didn’t know much about, but would soon be dancing intimately with) in my purple Garfield folder, knowing all the while that my immigrant status in this country pretty much necessitated law school or medical school. I grew up, got married, pursued a PhD in history, and had two kids. (The PhD was so I could read and write stories for a living.) Then one day, while my 5 year old son was entertaining his15 month old brother in the next room, I heard an entire paragraph in my head. Yes, that’s right. An entire paragraph. About words, and their futility. About the grace that comes with silence. It was a very old voice and female. The paragraph was heady and poetic and certainly nothing I would come up with myself. I had no idea where the four sentences came from or what I would do with them. I certainly couldn’t tell anyone I was hearing voices. I can imagine my hard working mother’s response, “There’s no time for that nonsense, I’ve got to get to work.” I guess a normal person would chalk the experience up to an overactive imagination and ignore it. But I didn’t do that. I wrote the sentences down on a piece of paper and tucked them into my diaper bag.

In the ensuing months, I’d pull the four sentences out at my “Mommy and me” class and wonder whose words they were and why they’d come to me. Eventually, little by little, I pursued the voice. Whatever I couldn’t find, I made up. I knew the elderly female voice, who I named Seda, had a profound story to tell and that she didn’t think telling it would do the world much good. I decided she was wrong. I started imagining, creating her entire world, past and present. My obsession with her grew and very shortly I began weaving my own great-grandmother’s voice and story with hers. Five years later, and numerous shitty first drafts later, I had a manuscript. Last week, a few editors at major publishing houses validated my decision to follow that voice, all those years ago, by bidding for the publishing rights of the book. When Kathy at Algonquin, who was the winner of that auction, asked me why or how I started writing the book, I told her the bit about my great-grandmother, which is entirely true, but I left out the part about Seda gifting me those first four sentences early on. Those sentences are still in the book. They were tiny seeds that appeared in the ether. And had I been more rational, been more concerned about my sanity, I may have ignored them. I’m glad I didn’t.