What made you want to write this book? What was the idea that sparked your imagination?

Oddly enough, the original germ of an idea came to me when I was seventeen (lo those many years ago) when I saw the film version of Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye's troubles with his daughters and his philosophy of love bounced around in my head for years. A bird and a fish may love each other, but where will they make a home together?

Usually the stories about a mismatch are about race (Othello), or family (West Side Story), or religion or age.

I wanted to take a different approach. I have anxiety disorders myself (all under control), but as I get older I have had the sense that I'm becoming slightly agoraphobic. I really prefer not to travel outside the town where I live. I will do so, but I avoid it where possible. My husband, on the other hand, is an outdoorsman and he loves moving through the world. We have developed ways of accomodating both sets of needs (twenty years working at it, after all). But I was thinking about all this and the idea of a claustrophobic man and an agoraphobic woman falling love. The only vaguely similar story I could think of was As Good as It Gets, where an obsessive/compulsive and somebody with her head on straight develop as a couple. Thus came Dodge and Julia into being.

What do you want readers to take away with them after reading the book?

A good story can't be tied down. It walks away from the author and develops a life of its own; the characters run off in all directions. And that's a good thing. That's the sign of a great story, when the readers can't let it go. It makes me oddly happy when readers ask me how one of my characters is doing -- this happens quite a lot -- as if I met with them for dinner every week. It means I told a good story. I'd also like them to be insanely curious about all the rest of my work, to the degree that they have to run out and buy all of them, immediately.

Hey. An author can dream, no?