a book. Did the novel start out as a “lit-
erary thriller,” or did the mystery ele-
ments emerge over time? Did you know
the ending when you began, or did you
write your way into it?
I had no idea what I was doing most
of the time I was writing this book.
I’m frankly shocked that I managed
to write a book with “propulsive ten-
sion.” It definitely didn’t come eas-
ily. Most of what I write starts with
a premise. I love a strange or unset-
tling premise, love the words what if.
This book first presented itself to me
as a what-if scenario: What if there
were grown up siblings whose brother
had died when they were babies, and
they’d been haunted their whole lives
by that loss, and what if when they’re
twenty-eight a stranger shows up and
he’s eerily familiar to them, and he
knows about their lives, their home....
At first that was all I had. I saw the
characters. I saw the setting. I knew
the premise. The rest was a mystery
to me. I 100 percent had to write my
way into it.
Although the book didn’t start as a
literary thriller, it makes sense to me
now that that’s where it ended up—I
wanted to write something the right
readers could fall in love with, the
way I fall in love when I’m reading:43 POETS & WRITERS^in Abandon Me: it’s an intensely physi-
cal experience to live on the Cape. The
sand, wind, salt. You’re always in salt
water, half the time naked, skinny-
dipping. You leave and the taste of
it is on your skin, in your hair. So I
wanted to set the book in a Cape Cod–
ish place in part because I wanted to
spend time there, smelling the salt
and seaweed. The sensory nature of
the setting made it easier for me to
slip out of my present life and into that
imagined world. An island setting also
made sense for the story. My charac-
ters Lydia and Lucas are brother and
sister, and live this very insular life,
literally surrounded, bounded by
ocean, their daily life circumscribed
quite literally by water. That physical
boundary was important—the safety,
security, familiarity of the island,
which they both resent and take com-
fort in, the way so many of us do with
home. In the book a stranger shows
up, and his presence shatters the fa-
miliarity, renders their home almost
unrecognizable.
I am forever looking for novels with
a perfect combination of propulsive
tension, meticulously developed char-
acters, and gorgeous sentences—so I
thank you profoundly for delivering such
FIRST FICTION 2019never-ending; the roof needs patching,
then the furnace breaks down, then the
door gets warped from weather, and by
the time you’ve tended to these things,
the roof needs patching again. There’s
both futility and optimism in our ef-
forts. It’s a strange combination. Some-
times I think our fixation on houses is a
way of focusing our wide-roaming fears
onto one very concrete object with one
very specific purpose. So then of course
I was curious in this novel about what
would happen when the house was
compromised or taken away.
I didn’t read the description of the
novel before I started reading, so I was
shocked when Ruby died in the first
chapter. The novel then became some-
thing else entirely. Rather than leading
up to this moment, it circled around it.
Ruby’s death became the silent center.
What made you decide to have Ruby’s
death occur so early in the book? Was it
different in earlier drafts?
It was very different at one point. I
wrote several chapters leading up to
Ruby’s death. But I realized that those
chapters were stagnant. My intent was
not to play with readers’ emotions—to
force them to know her just enough
to be devastated when she was taken
away. The death of a four-year-old
child is sad. It doesn’t take a whole lot,that infatuation, the pounding heart,
dilating eyes. I think I was almost
trying to trick readers into love—I
wrote something scary, so their hearts
would beat faster. I wrote surprises to
make them catch their breath. I had
no idea how the novel was going to
end when I started writing it.I know that this book has been in the
works for a long time. Can you talk a
little about your process and how it de-
veloped over the years?
This book took fifteen years to write.
I did other things during that time—
got an M FA, got married, had two
babies, bought a hundred-year-old
house, edited a magazine, helped start
an M FA program. But always there
was this book, and I wrestled with it
all those years. I worked on it when-
ever I could, which often meant lunch
breaks, nap time, dawn. Sometimes
I’m amazed that I continued working
on it for so long, but there was some-
thing in it that kept me interested.
I’ve always believed that obsessions
or preoccupations are good for writ-
ers, and I was pretty obsessed with
this story—which I’m so grateful for.
It would have been easy to give up
on it years ago. In fact at one point I
told my agent I didn’t think I had itas a writer, to move the reader. But
the reader’s sadness was not the point.
When I cut those chapters and moved
her death to the very beginning, it was
as though the story received a surge of
energy. We jump right into the most
confounding questions or press on the
most tender spots. Ruby’s death sets
each family member off on a differ-
ent journey of grief. No one seems to
grasp exactly what anyone else is going
through. Why are they so alone when
they’re constantly surrounded by one
another and coping with the same
event? It felt good, to cut off the false
beginning and immediately see the
story more clearly.