Good friends tell each other the stories of their lives—mothers and men, siblings and shopping sprees, triumphs as well as flops--all the time. Could we survive without that telling? It seems to me that, as we grow older, how we feel about our lives, and therefore how we tell our stories, changes. I think of my own life as if it were unfolding on a stage, with me as the audience. Except, as time goes by, I’m in a different seat in the theater. As my seat changes, so does the angle at which my life.

That’s how I wanted my narrator, Grace Hanford, to tell her story. I wanted to create a character who talked to the reader as if she were talking to a good friend--with the same truth-telling, humor and hurt, the same self-doubt and self-justification, sharing the small moments of wisdom as well as the crazy mistakes. And I wanted Grace to tell her story at different ages, from different seats in her own psychic theater.

I found Grace when I found her anger. That was the story “I Asked My Mother,” the first story I wrote. Here was Grace at 30--single, sad, despairing of ever getting her life right. I saw how her anger masked a world of hurt. I felt the force of her fury and her pain in the comical, urgent way she confided in the reader. As a writer, I wanted to find out where Grace’s complicated feelings came from and where they might take her. I felt tenderness toward both her anger and her pain. She also made me laugh. I began to see Grace as a woman on a quest—for nothing less than her own life. Whenever we see Grace--at 18 or 30 or 50—she’s struggling to find that balance between the hurts of the past and the unknown future. For Grace, that balance is the best place to be.