A year ago this past May, I was granted the gift of a month at an artists’ retreat in Wyoming.  I didn’t have a book in the works at the time, but I hoped that in leaving behind my normal routine and responsibilities—disconnecting from email and phone calls and household maintenance chores and even the pleasure of seeing friends—I’d find a story to tell. It’s an exciting thing for a writer to experience that kind of freedom, but it’s also a little scary heading out to a little cabin in the middle of a 20,000 acre ranch, without a clue what you may do there. All you can do is pray that interesting characters will pay you a visit and that when they do, they’ll have enough going on in their lives to sustain you for a few hundred solitary hours.

Ten days before I was due to leave for Wyoming, a magazine I write for asked me to report on a story for them about two women in their fifties (just my age, in fact). Both lived in Oregon and were strangers to each other until one day they discovered a surprising and disturbing link between their families.

I was tempted to take the job. I’ve been a writer of both fiction and nonfiction for nearly forty years, and one thing I know from moving back and forth between those two worlds is that when someone sends you off to report a story, you can pretty much bet the story’s there—but when you send yourself off to go find a story, you never know if you’re going to find it.

Still, I’d been looking forward all year to that month-long retreat. And so I made the difficult decision to turn down the sure thing in favor of the unknown adventure I hoped I’d find in Wyoming.

For the first four days, I just watched elk and wild turkeys outside the window of my little cabin. For the next ten days, I struggled with a story that wasn’t working, about a woman who bore a certain resemblance to my younger self who was in a difficult marriage not totally unlike one I used to be in.  This was old territory for me, and the fact that I had chosen to revisit it was not a good sign. After two weeks in Wyoming, I threw that book away, knowing it wasn’t working.  I went for a long walk across the plains, wondering if I should have taken that reporting job instead.

And then the idea came to me: revisit the situation of the two women I’d been asked to interview about a mysterious and troubling event in their family history. Only instead of researching the real story—and limiting my scope to what the two actual women chose to reveal of their lives—I’d invent  circumstances and characters from my imagination. I chose to set my story in a place I know very well—the state of New Hampshire, where I spent the first forty years of my life. However, the lives of my main characters would revolve around a family farm modeled on the childhood home of my old friend Becky. I made my characters a couple of years older than I am, but close enough in age that their childhood and coming-of-age years were roughly the same as mine so that the events they lived through (the Kennedy assassination, the first moonwalk, Woodstock) were ones I remembered well too. 

Simply stated, I took the bare bones of a real human event, and performed some major surgery, starting with the characters of the women themselves, whose stories bore no resemblance to those of the women I’d been asked to interview for the magazine.

A novel comes alive when you set characters in motion, give them a problem, and see how they handle it. If a journalist lives by the question “What happened?” it could be said that a fiction writer’s mantra is “What if?”

Last year I published a novel called Labor Day, in which the entire story played out over the course of six days, mostly within the walls of one small house, by a cast of four crucial characters. I loved writing that book, but this time around I decided to tell a story that would unfold over a much broader stretch of time and space—a full five decades, roughly spanning the five-plus decades of my own life so far, with all the accompanying dramas of marriage and childbirth, deaths of parents, divorce. I wanted to explore how my characters and their relationships would evolve over time, and to watch what happens to families as they move from youth to adulthood and middle age.

The book that emerged is The Good Daughters. Because I don’t want to spoil the reader’s discovery of the family secrets that are ultimately revealed over the course of the two women’s lives, I will simply say that The Good Daughters is a book about self discovery and identity—about roots and home, and (always a big theme for me) the longing for family. I wanted to explore the twin forces of heredity and environment and the way they shape a person’s destiny. And, as a woman who has written often about motherhood and the powerful attachment between parent and child, I set for myself the particular challenge of creating a mother character who lacks a sense of maternal connection . . . and a daughter who hungers for it.

As you read The Good Daughters, you may or may not gradually come to recognize the family secret that shapes the lives of my characters. Maybe you’ll discover it before they do, maybe not. Ultimately it’s a made-up story, inspired only in its barest essence by the facts of a true case, but I’d like to think that like all successful fiction, there is authenticity in the emotional lives of my invented characters. Like all characters in fiction—all characters in good fiction, anyway—I hope they feel like people you might have met. And like all of the characters I’ve invented in the seven novels I’ve written thus far, I found myself worrying about them, dreaming about them, occasionally impatient with them, and sometimes grieving with them. Now that The Good Daughters is finished I miss the sound of their voices, whispering in my ear. I hope you enjoy hearing what they have to say as much as I did writing it.