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In the week after my first child, a daughter, was born, my hormones took me on one heck of a thrill ride. Up, down, exuberant, weeping, weirdly angry with my husband for not understanding. And who could blame him? I didn’t understand it myself. Yet every feeling was so deeply real and rational in the moment, it seemed he should be right there with me. Thank God he wasn’t.

I remember with crystal clarity staring at this tiny bundle of soft vulnerability, and realizing at full volume what I had taken on. Not just the care and feeding of another human being, for which I was fully prepared—I’m an oldest child, had babysat my way through high school and worked with kids for a large portion of my career. I’d had thirty years of preparation.

What I hadn’t figured on was this: I had willingly agreed to a lifetime of desperation.

Desperate love of a kind I’d never known. Desperate worry. And a thought blinked across my hormone-addled, sleep-starved brain like an LED warning sign over the highway: THIS WILL NEVER END.

Before she was born, I had considered parenthood from my own daughterly perspective. I grew up and moved away and my parents stopped taking care of me. Their job wound down to check-ins when I went to college, and ended completely when I graduated and moved across the country. They have their own lives; they don’t “parent” anymore.

Right?

Well sort of. But not really. Like muscle memory, the instinct never quite goes away. I figured that out quite abruptly in a large urban maternity ward, gazing starry-eyed at my newborn girl. That’s when I understood with anvil-dropping certainty that no matter what happens to either of us, I would belong to this child for all eternity.

Which means an eternity of parental desperation. I would love and worry about someone who’s bound to leave me. Forever. Because that’s how real love works: it permanently alters the soul.

One of the stranger thoughts I had (remember those hormones) went something like: “Ohmygod (sniff, weep), I’ll be ninety, and she’ll be sixty and I’ll be worried about her retirement package (sob, sob).” At every crossroads in her life, big or small, I would be holding my breath and praying for good results.

Eighteen years later, I’m even more certain it’s true. Because this is when she leaves.

She’s chosen a path for herself—yes, with guidance from us, but not that much. In truth, we only nudged her away from places we thought would be a bad fit, toward places that would provide fertile soil for her her-ness.

And while I feel completely confident in her ability to make her way in the world without our daily presence, I don’t feel nearly as confident in myself. Me and my altered soul aren’t so sure about it. My desperation meter is inching into the red zone.

I recently watched a movie in which a young woman was deciding who would walk her down the aisle at her impending wedding—who would “give her away.”

Years ago, as I planned my own nuptials, people would occasionally ask if my father would be “giving me away.” My reply was generally along the lines that both my parents would be walking me down the aisle, but I would be giving myself. I wasn’t theirs to give.

I still feel that’s a true statement. No one can give your heart but you.

However, I now realize my parents, who held my hands and cried all the way to the altar, weren’t really capable of handing me over, anyway. They love me—desperately—and so I am engraved upon them in ways that they, and I, have no control over. They’re not the them they used to be before I came along. I get it now. Boy, do I ever.

By the way, at the end of that aisle, I saw my beloved soon-to-be husband, dropped my parents’ hands and went to him without so much as a backward glance or a “thanks for the ride.” When I saw the wedding video a couple of days later I felt kind of bad about it. My guilt has grown over the years, as my own “letting go” time draws near.

If we’re any good at it at all, we parents are, day by day, hug by hug, door-slamming fight by door-slamming fight, supposed to be working our way out of a job. The point is for them to go off and find their own deep and desperate loves.

And I take some secret pride in how excited I am for her to leave the confines of this small, sweet town, and in the fact that she has no idea how often I bite back sad, selfish tears at the very thought of it. That’s my girl. Her future is bright.

And so I am letting her go.

But let us be clear: I will never, ever give her away.

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I’d fantasized about it for months: the week when all three of my boys, ages 16, 12 and 10, would be at overnight camp. My 18-year-old daughter would be home, but this barely counts, since she’s gainfully employed, self-sufficient, and has a busy social life. I love my kids, but let’s be honest, a week completely off duty for the first time in 18 years was not unwelcome.

Both younger boys were also gone the following week. The parenting factor remained extremely low, however, because the 16-year-old avoids parental intercession as if it were extra homework. One day that week his dad and I asked him if he wanted to go to the beach with us.

“Just me?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’ll be nice,” I said.

He gave us his signature half-smile-eye-squint that reads Highly doubtful.

(He stayed home and built a raft out of scavenged logs with 30-gallon Rubbermaid buckets lashed underneath. A couple of days later, he and a friend paddled it out across a nearby lake. I was calling them Tom and Huck. Don’t worry, they wore life jackets. See pictorial proof above.)

During the preceding months, the anticipation of these two low-parenting-factor weeks had been delicious. I nurtured it like a seedling through the spring whenever life got more hectic than the high-alert level that we at the Fay house generally enjoy. It was my favorite self-soother whenever I wasn’t getting much writing done.

I would mentally list the vast amounts of work I would accomplish: finish the last third of my next novel, prep for the fall release of my current novel, update my website, write several blog posts, exercise every day, spend quality time with my husband and clean out the boiler room.

That was the plan. (Laughs hysterically at own naiveté and general ridiculousness.)

Actually I did get a lot of those things done, which is great because just ramping up for a novel release is far more involved that it’s ever been. By comparison, when my first novel, Shelter Me, pubbed in January 2009, I wasn’t on Facebook yet, and Twitter wasn’t really part of normal life. (Seriously, there was a world before Twitter, no lie.) I wasn’t much of a blogger. My “tour” was limited to a few drivable locations.

So I was feeling pretty accomplished during those two weeks, between that and exercising and spending much needed time with my smart, funny, thoughtful and devilishly handsome husband. We’ve had so little alone time recently I’d almost forgotten.

I even cleaned out the boiler room and gave away all the no-longer-relevant sports equipment. (Personal obsession: getting rid of stuff. If I could choose between that and simultaneously reading, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream and getting a pedicure, I would still choose getting rid of stuff. Weird, I know, but that’s my thing.)

What I did not do was complete the last third of that next novel. Okay, no real surprise there, but I barely got even a couple of pages written. This was so strange! I was looking forward to it more than anything else, including getting rid of stuff! (Not including time with my husband, though. That would sound cold.)

I can’t really explain it. Maybe I thought that with such a seemingly vast amount of time, I’d get to it after I’d checked off all the have-to boxes. Maybe I should have noticed sooner that the writing wasn’t happening and made a course correction.

I went for a walk with a friend recently who’s at a very interesting point in her life, ripe with possibility. Kids getting older and moving out. She’s been taking on smaller projects for years, but never quite finding that thing that truly blows her hair back. She’s always fantasized about writing but has never taken the leap.

“Now’s your chance!” I said.

But she’s hesitant. “What if it doesn’t work?” she said finally. “What if it never gets off the ground?”

Of course. We all feel that way. The reality is rarely as good as the fantasy, because fantasies don’t include the false starts and wrong turns and setbacks that real life always involves. And if she tries it, and it doesn’t work, she’ll loose the fantasy, too.

I think there may have been a little of that going on for me when I forgot to write during those two weeks this summer. I’m always wishing for more time to write, but if I get it, what if it’s not nearly as wonderful as I think it will be? What if it starts to feel like drudgery?

What if—and I think this may be the thing—what if that high voltage bolt of happiness I get from writing is partly about the fact that I can’t do it whenever like. Could a person read, eat ice cream and get pedicures all day every day? No, because you’d be in insulin shock and your feet would be screaming “For the love of God, leave me alone!”

My kids came home, which is nice because I really did miss them. I’m not getting nearly as much work done, but the fantasy is in tact. Besides, the kids loved overnight camp and want to go back next year. (Hot diggity!) And all is well.

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How do your words sound when someone else speaks them? Okay, how about words that you agonized over?

Personally, I can blow an entire morning thinking and rethinking an absurdly small detail of text. Should the character say, “Thank God” or “Thank goodness!” And how will that exclamation point “sound” in the reader’s mind? Will it be too loud or overly enthusiastic? Maybe “Thank goodness” is better, the italics communicating the gratitude at a lower volume yet with more sincerity …

It’s not lost on me that while others spend their days performing life-saving surgery or prosecuting violent criminals, I spend mine obsessing about italicization. But there you have it. And books are important, too, right?

So take the average writer with the average level of word obsession, and add a narrator who might say those words in not quite the same way the writer hears them in his head, and well, we’ve got ourselves a crisis. After polling a number of my author friends, a high percentage have not listened to their novels in audio at all, or for only a few pages worth, because it just doesn’t sound “right.”

I think it’s the dialog that really throws us. So much of how people communicate is not about the words themselves. It’s about the tone, pitch, cadence, emphasis and mood. The “sound” of a character, in conjunction with their words and actions, is like a signature. For the author, an unfamiliar character voice can feel like identity theft.

But not all authors have a negative reaction.

• Cathy Buchanan says, “I must admit, for the first chapter or so of THE DAY THE FALLS STOOD STILL I was dismayed. But after hanging in for a bit, I changed my mind. The narrator told me she took forever recording the last chapters because she couldn’t keep herself from bawling, and readers have said how beautifully emotional her reading was in the final pages.”

• Allie Larkin says, “I adore the audio version of STAY. The director asked me about word pronunciation and I had a discussion with the narrator. When I first heard the sample audio clip, I got choked up, because it was like actually hearing my main character. I’ve since listened to the whole thing, and I think it’s helped me with my own public readings.”

Having a say in the choice of narrator seems to lead to a much happier author experience.

• Adrienne McDonnell says “My publisher was kind enough to send me audio clips of five actresses who auditioned to read THE DOCTOR AND THE DIVA. I knew immediately who had my vote. I’ve rarely heard such a versatile voice. She’s a virtuoso of dialects and accents, and alternates with ease between genders.”

• M.J. Rose told me “It felt horrible when I didn’t know to ask for a narrator of my own choosing. Since then I’ve chosen the narrator and I love listening. I wish I could have him read it before I do my last draft, to fix things. I have a really special relationship with him since he’s done all 7 books.”

• Melanie Benjamin gives this advice: “I think most audio book producers are open to working with the author, but only when the author makes that happen. With THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MRS. TOM THUMB, they asked me about the pronunciation of some word, and that’s when I voiced a concern about the narration. This one email opened the door to them sending me some audio clips of actresses and letting me decide. Moral of the story—always ask!”

My own experience of listening to the audio books of my novels SHELTER ME and DEEP DOWN TRUE were more along the lines of disorientation. They weren’t bad—the narrator of SHELTER ME actually received a Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review for it. But the characters just didn’t sound like they did in my head.

After polling my author pals for this article, I was emboldened to ask if I could be involved with choosing the narrator for my next book, THE SHORTEST WAY HOME. The publisher sent me a clip of the woman they were thinking of using. She seemed great, but the main character is a man! How would it sound for a female voice to express his inner thoughts? I communicated this concern to the publisher. Within 24 hours, they had sent me a clip of a male reader, and he sounded perfect. He recently contacted me to set up a time to talk about it.

That said, I still anticipate having some disorientation. After all, narrating is a vocal interpretive dance, and just as with visual acting, no two actors will perform it the same. It’s even less likely that the actor will perform it precisely the way the author intended.

But having had a hand in the choice of the narrator and talking with him ahead of time, I hope I’ll be more open. I hope I’ll accept that my way isn’t the only way to hear it, and that the narrator can contribute his own interpretation to the listener’s experience. I hope that with a little luck, it won’t feel like identity theft so much as identity gift.

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Of all the roles you’ve seen Michael Boatman play, Italian female anarchist and Irish cop from Boston aren’t among them. And unless you’ve been living a television-free life for the past twenty some-odd years, you’ve definitely seen Michael Boatman. With feature roles in series like China Beach, Spin City, Law and Order and The Good Wife, he’s enjoying a very enviable career by anyone’s standards.

He has even played that Italian woman and that Irish cop. You just didn’t see him because he was narrating Dennis Lehane’s bestselling historical novel, THE GIVEN DAY. Within a couple of chapters of hearing him play characters young and old, male and female, with a seemingly endless array of Irish, Italian, Russian, British, African American and even (gasp) Boston accents, I was saying out loud to the CD player in my car, “This guy is unbelievable!”

I was soon composing a slightly gushy—okay embarrassingly gushy—note in my head to Michael. I found him on Twitter and reached out with a tweet. Let me tell you, it’s no easy task to convey tasteful-yet-blubbering fan-hood in 140 characters. Here’s what I went with: The Given Day – So impressed with your performance. Holy smokes! Who knew you could do 6 different brogues!

He tweeted back within a couple of hours: Thank you! The Given Day was one of the greatest acting challenges of my career. SO glad you enjoyed it!

That’s a nice tweet. It gave me the courage to ask if he might be up for an interview. When he agreed, my teenage daughter, recognizing him immediately from his role in Gossip Girl, said, “Wait, you get to talk to that guy? That is so cool!”

So, not only did Michael provide me with hours of listening pleasure, and yes, I’ll admit, a fun audio-crush, he also gave me a brief moment of coolness in my teenager’s eyes. And with that, my debt of gratitude is officially endless.

Here’s what we talked about:

How does audio work differ for you as an actor from the visual medium? When you were recording, did you find yourself doing gestures or other visual character traits?

Narrating an audio book is a performance, and I take it just as seriously as if I were onstage or on camera. This performance is limited only by the fact that you can’t move. If you do you’ll bang your head against the microphone and, no one wants to hear that.

You not only do a very believable Irish brogue, you do about ten of them, each a distinct character voice. How did you prepare for the accents—and the variety of characters within each accent?

The credit goes to my director, the brilliant (and terrifying) David Rapkin, who came to each session armed with dozens of recordings of the various accents the book required. I have always had an ear for accents and David took full advantage of that. It was incredibly challenging and difficult. My throat felt like hamburger at the end of the day, and that was just after the first chapter. But it was an awful lot of fun.

At times you spoke different languages—Italian for instance. Do you actually speak Italian?

I don’t speak Italian. I barely speak English. But honestly, that was one of the most challenging parts to perform. We had to listen to Italian speakers to get the proper inflections, Northern, Southern—the correct regional differences. Really difficult. It took weeks to get that stuff just right.

The Boston accent is one of the hardest—we Bostonians routinely make fun of actors who try and fail. You grew up in Chicago. What’s your secret? How much Boston Harbor water did you have to drink?

Well, I spent a few summers up around Baaaa Haaabaaah. Actually, it’s the “Ear for Accents” again. I’ve always enjoyed language, and listening to how people speak. Being from an African-American-Southern-Midwestern family, I heard it all while I was growing up. My grandmother made me particularly attentive to language by insisting that we speak clearly, and only use proper grammar. I believe this made me hyper-aware of the ways other people spoke. It’s a gift that serves me to this day.

Which was the most difficult character voice for you? The easiest?

Danny Caughlin, the Irish cop protagonist. Lead roles in audio books are always hardest to perform, because they have to be consistent and fairly bland. The great character parts are always more fun—they don’t have time to become boring. They’re only there to make things more difficult for the protagonist, so they’re usually more funny, tragic or wicked in some crucial way that’s fun to interpret.

The audio of The Given Day is 24 hours long. How long would you guess it took you to record? Did it involve a lot of retakes?

It required numerous retakes. It took us approximately twenty-three years to record the entire book. Dennis Lehane had the germ of the plot while still a developing fetus, and I was hired shortly after I was able to wear “big boy pants.” (Actually it took about three weeks to record the book.)

What, if anything, did you take away from the experience?

I took away the fact that narrating books is a commitment, one that is as challenging and potentially-rewarding as any acting or writing gig.

You’ve done some award-winning audio work, ranging from Walter Mosely’s EASY RAWLINS series to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, THE LONG WALK OF FREEDOM. You’re also an author yourself, most recently with the 2009 publication of THE REVENANT ROAD, a “… rollicking roller-coaster of monsters, murder, mayhem and modernity!” What was it like to read your own book?

Narrating THE REVENANT ROAD was fun, and nerve racking. Half the time I was enraptured by the experience, listening to the prose and various turns of phrase…while the other half I spent wondering “Who the Hell wrote this crap?” It’s part of the curse beneath which I labor: I’m hypercritical. It takes me eight to nine drafts of something before I feel it’s ready to see the light of day, and even then I still find problems, minor glitches in paragraph structure or something else. I’m very critical of my writing and my narrating. Even when I love what I’ve written, after it’s been published…I still find problems. That was the same for the audio book. But it was a blast to do and I hope I get to do it with the next one.

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I recently read THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME by Allison Winn Scotch and THE FIRST HUSBAND by Laura Dave, one right after the other, and fully enjoyed them both. What struck me was how each began with a similar premise for the protagonist: a moment in time when suddenly all bets are off.

In SONG, Nell Slattery suffers a head trauma that erases her memory. Her husband, mother and sister all tell her versions of her history that suit their purposes, and she has to figure out what’s true–and more importantly, who she is now.

In HUSBAND, Annie Adams suddenly gets dumped by her long term boyfriend, and on the advice of a friend to “be the opposite of you,” she very quickly marries someone else and moves across the country. Jumping into an entirely new life with almost no back story is chocked full of challenges.

While reading, I learned that these two talented authors are also good friends. They were kind enough to pick five of questions to answer together, and tell us how they met.

How does being a writer make you a better parent, partner, friend, pet-owner, etc?

LD: Being a writer makes me patient, I think.  And it reminds me that anything worth creating takes both devotion and generosity. That is great to remind ourselves for marriage, family, and friendship. (The dog ownership we are working on!)

AWS: For me, certainly being a writer has made me a better parent – I’m always up for tales of adventure and encourage my kids to both share their stories and read all sorts of other stories. But it has also made me a better pet-owner! Why? Because I do my best brainstorming while walking or running, and this often means that our dog, Pedro, gets treated to extra-long, meandering walks when I’m in the thick of drafting a book.

Name a favorite object. (No body parts, please.) Tell us why you like it so much.

LD: My bookshelf.  It is enormous and messy and full of my favorite books.  It traveled with me cross-country when I moved to Los Angeles. And it makes me happy to look at it.

AWS: My favorite object is probably the half-finished baby books I’ve made with my kids. Last summer, in a fit of exuberance, I printed up about 200 pictures for each child, and sloooowly, we’re forming them into something they’ll hopefully have for a lifetime. Filtering through all of our adventures and trips and occasions has been such a bonding experience.

What’s the oddest response you ever got when someone asked you what you do for a living, and you said, “I’m a writer.”

LD: He said: “Do you write greeting cards? I have some great idea for some polka dot greeting cards.”

AWS: Ha! I don’t know if I have a specific “odd” response, but I do (very frequently) get the, “Oh…have I read anything you’ve written?” response. How can I possibly answer that without a) knowing what you’ve read and b) sounding like a self-important jerk?

What’s the best, worst or most unusual advice you’ve gotten about writing, publishing or promoting your work?

LD: I was taking this writing class and the teacher told the class: “you shouldn’t write because you think getting published is exciting. Getting published often involves a box of books showing up at your door. Then you go back to making dinner.” What makes us writers is that we sit down everyday and write. Her advice reminded me that is the beginning, the middle, all of it.

AWS: The best advice I ever got was from a friend who was a well-respected editor at the time I was trying to break into fiction. She read a manuscript that I’d written and gave me honest, blunt feedback as to why it wasn’t good. (It wasn’t good for a lot of reasons that I won’t get into.) A few of her suggestions that I remember to this day include: go READ, NOW, the authors I want to emulate. Read them with a critical eye for craft, and then try to do the same with your own book. She also told me to stop adding in so much freaking exposition. No one cares or needs to read every last thought in a character’s head: show the action, don’t tell it.

Name a book that profoundly affected you, changed your thinking, or made you take a different path. Tell us why.

LD: THE GIRLS GUIDE TO HUNTING AND FISHING by Melissa Bank.  It was so funny and wise. And I remember feeling like it was giving me permission to be funny and candid in my writing. It is still one of my favorite books to pick up and read. I feel the same way about WONDER BOYS by Michael Chabon.

AWS: GOOD GRIEF by Lolly Winston. Per my above answer, that was the book I picked up on my editor friend’s advice. Something clicked for me in reading it, and I finally understood how to write a good book. There’s a difference, after all, between writing a manuscript and writing one well.

You two are friends in real life, not just the writing/publishing world. How did you meet?

AWS: Laura and I met because I read her debut, LONDON IS THE BEST CITY IN AMERICA, and saw that she and I had attended the same college. I loved the book so much and wanted to reach out and let her know, but honestly, I was so intimidated! Here she was, a fancy published author, and even though my own debut was coming out a few months later, I was…nervous. But I looked her up anyway, sent her an email, and got a reply back within a day or so. Naturally (and I only know that this is natural now that I know her), she was lovely and kind and proposed that we meet for coffee. (Such a Laura thing to do!) We did, and had that wonderful moment where you just instantly “get” each other. From there, our friendship has really evolved to the point where we read each other’s early work, we offer critical career advice, and we gossip and talk about life almost every day.

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Amy Hatvany’s latest novel, OUTSIDE THE LINES, is the story of a woman searching the homeless shelters of Seattle for her long-missing father who suffers from bi-polar disorder. Part mystery, part love story, it’s a fascinating exploration of the interior of a mental illness, and of what holds us back in life. Along with garnering many positive reviews, OUTSIDE THE LINES was selected by Target as the February 2012 Book Club Pick.

As wonderful of a writer as Amy is, it’s not her only talent, and I like how her website and Facebook page give a real sense of her personality. For instance, true to her love of cooking, her website offers some delicious-looking recipes, in addition to book information. I posed some writerly and not-so-writerly questions to Amy, which she answered with her characteristic humor and honesty. Here’s what she tells us:

When you’re faced with a tough stretch in your writing—writer’s block, indecision, a sudden desire to go out and interact with real people—how do you get through?

Ha! You mean besides compulsive eating? Seriously, I think the only way past that kind of struggle is to push my way through it. I attempt to focus on the next indicated step – what is the next thing my character would do or say? What’s the most logical next scene? I put myself into task-master mode – just write the next thought, Amy; the next sentence, the next paragraph. I remind myself that I can’t edit a blank page. I also have a few wonderful writer friends whom I can call and discuss my situational angst. We mull over character arcs, gossiping about them like they were our friends until we figure out their next steps. I’m not a big fan of walking away from a work in progress for very long – giving myself a break from it – simply because for me, it becomes all too easy to abandon it altogether.

Social media. Discuss.

When my first two novels came out ten years ago, there was no such thing as social media, and my, oh my, how the authorly world has changed. With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, I’ve had the amazing experience of being able to connect with other writers and readers in a way I never have before. It’s such a gift to be able to reach out and have so many gracious, lovely people respond. I’ve formed such wonderful friendships online and have had the privilege of strengthening those connections in real life.

The downside, of course, is the time-suck that these mediums can be for a writer. I’m not as good as I should be about setting boundaries – logging onto Facebook to see what everyone is up to can quickly spiral into a wasted morning or afternoon.  I also think that in some ways, readers being able to connect daily with their favorite authors has affected how many people show up at book signings or other events. In some way, they feel that they already “know” you, so the impetus isn’t as strong to come see you in person. (I don’t know if this is really true; it’s simply a theory I came up with to address why attendance at their events has gone down for many authors, even some of the “big names” out there.)

Name a favorite object. (No body parts, please.) Tell us why you like it so much.

I have a blanket my mother sewed for me when I was fourteen years old that I just adore. There’s nothing fancy about it: it’s simply two pieces of thick, furry fleece sewn together. One side is dark purple and the other is off-white and I can’t remember a night at home that I haven’t slept with it for the last (gulp!) twenty-five years. It’s what I wrap around my children when they’re ill – they call it Mama’s Get Well Blanket. I’ll probably have to cut it in half so they each can have a piece of it when I die!

What’s the best, worst or most unusual advice you’ve gotten about writing, publishing or promoting your work?

When I first signed with her, my agent gave me a very sage piece of advice. She told me that I needed to be able to summarize my novel in one compelling sentence. If I couldn’t, then I didn’t have a strong enough idea to carry an entire book. At the time I thought she was a little nuts. How was I supposed reduce three hundred pages to three lines? But I soon realized that readers don’t want a lengthy synopsis when they ask you what your book is about – they want a sound byte. They want a brief description that will make them gasp a little and say, “I must read that story!” They’re looking for a tagline. It’s the line that will stay with the reader, the one that will – hopefully – lead them to your book instead of another. If I can pass on any piece of knowledge to an aspiring writer, it’s to know thy hook!

What’s one piece of advice you wish you could tell your pre-published self?

It would definitely be: Calm down! This writing journey you’ve embarked upon isn’t going to be a straight line. There will be spirals upward, then back down again. You’ll zigzag all over the dang place. But wherever you are, whatever you go through, you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Embrace it. Learn from it. And most of all, write about it.

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I’ve had two concussions in the past year. By “I,” I mean “we.” By “we,” I mean two of my sons. Because when your kid has a brain injury, so do you.

If your child’s brain has somehow been slammed up against the inside of his cranium, here’s what he can’t do:

• read, watch TV, play video games, text his friends, run, turn his head fast, concentrate for more than a few minutes (so the whole education thing becomes pretty absurd), play the drums or electric guitar, ride his bike, play any kind of sports including stuff that doesn’t seem like it would hurt, like swimming or shot put, be in bright light (like sunlight), be in loud places (like anywhere there are more than a couple of kids, for instance our dinner table), be in the car for very long, because the visual of things coming at him hurts like crazy. Pretty much anything fun or educational. Or normal.

Here’s what he can do:

• bake, do art projects (but not complicated ones), sleep, have his grandfather or aunt mercifully show up and take him out for lunch, sleep some more.

Here’s what you can do:

• worry, take him to endless chiropractic and other alternative practitioner visits because western medicine’s only recommendation is physical and cognitive rest, worry some more, yell at him for sneaking video games because he’s so bored, apologize for yelling, wrack your brain for new “concussion-friendly” activities, get depressed, worry some more.

Both of my boys had prolonged post-concussive syndrome, which meant months of the above. Here’s how it happened: football. For both of them. Now, I have nothing against the sport (total lie), and I really enjoyed going to their games. Both of them were pretty good at it, as a matter of fact. And God knows you can get a head injury just walking out your door—or into it, as the case may be. Nevertheless, guess what sport we no longer play in the Fay house.

Okay, now that you think I am the most depressing person since Eyeore, here’s the funny thing: some cool and interesting stuff has happened as a result.

My older son, Liam, has never gone a season without playing a sport, but he was so desperately bored he decided to try out for a play. Unfortunately, even four months post concussion, he couldn’t memorize lines for the audition—short term memory goes haywire with a head injury. But he could ad lib, so he faked his way into a small role.

He enjoyed it so much, he tried out for the spring musical, FAME. Again, not a big part, but he’s having a blast, and has met a bunch of very fun dram-y friends, who are now in and out of our house, being dramatic and laughing a lot.

“So,” I said to him the other day. “I think you’re officially a dram-y.”

“I am,” he said, grinning.

I’m sure there are more satisfying things than watching your kid find a whole new side of himself, a whole new way to love life, but at the moment, I can’t think of any.

My younger son, Nick, has always had difficulty with reading. Not enough to bump him into the echelon of kids who get Individualized Education Plans. But enough to make reading a real chore (for both of us, if you know what I’m saying.) Our good friend Concussion has changed all that in two ways: first, Nick jumped to the front of the line in terms of school supports, teacher help, and tutoring from a young woman whom I’ve never met, but would likely kiss on the lips if I did. School is working for Nick in a whole new way.

And second, out of extreme, oceanic boredom, he started listening to audio books. I really don’t care how you take your fiction, as long as you find ways to drink deeply from the clear, cool, bottomless well of stories in this world. I’m a fiction writer. That’s how I see it.

And one last concussion-rendered gift for the Fay family: I’m now working on a story I really, really like.

I had been slaving away on a historical fiction piece, second-guessing every word. Is this how people talked to each other in 1919? Is this what they were worried about? Was this product even invented then?

Sidebar (because I ought to do something with all that information I dug up): The radio had been invented, but there were no public broadcasts until 1920. So you might have had radio, but there was nothing to listen to. You see what I’m getting at? Every flipping sentence was a quagmire of research and self-doubt. I was exhausted.

Along came the beginnings of another story in my head, and I thought, well let me just write this scene and save it for later, when I’m done with the brain-eating, confidence-snuffing historical fiction project. But, oh my gosh, it felt so good just to write, without all the angst!

And because I was feeling sorry for myself about the concussions and everything, I let myself  off the hook with the historical fiction. I said to myself, “Hey, you’ve got a lot of balls in the air. Setting this piece aside for later (and so help me, I will get back to it) is not the worst, most irresponsible thing in the world. It’s not even the worst, most irresponsible thing you personally have ever done. (Let’s face it, not even close.) So, poof, here’s the hook—you’re off it.”

The moral of the story is not Get a Concussion, Good Things Might Happen. In fact I’m not sure if there is a moral, or even a point, except maybe that life is funny. And wonderfully unpredictable sometimes. Worthy of fiction.

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“Sitting alone in a room, being forced to write about people who don’t even exist—that’s the definition of hell for me.”

I’ve heard variations on that comment ever since I became a fiction writer, someone for whom spending time with people who don’t exist is heaven. When I can’t get to it for one reason or another, after a while I get a little depressed. We’ve all heard those tales about the hard-drinking writer “opening a vein” to get the words on the page. Not me. It’s not writing that makes me feel that a trip to the liquor cabinet is in order.

I have no idea why that is. Why fiction writing and not, say, clog dancing or totem pole carving? Does anyone really know why certain activities blow their hair back and others leave them flat?

I have four children and each of them is passionate about something that has nothing to do with how they were raised. My oldest son, for instance, would live in a tent in the woods if he had his way. His father and I never took him camping. In fact we hate camping—we like beds. But when he joined the Boy Scouts, it was like he’d located his mother ship. If some sort of cataclysmic disaster occurs and we all end up living in the wild, he’s your man, because at 16 he has more wilderness skills than most of us accrue in a lifetime.

I like to live in a story the way my son likes to live in the woods. And yes, that’s how it feels, like I’m living there. If that sounds mildly psychotic … well, it is, in a pleasant, controlled sort of way. I think about my characters all the time. Rather than creating them, it feels like I’m discovering them. “Oh,” I’ll realize in the middle of driving someone to sports practice, “that’s why she’s so angry. It’s because …”

For me, “discovering” a story involves four completely different activities:

• Information gathering: standard research (e.g. what’s the flight route from Nairobi to Boston?) and general noticing of things (e.g. the way a girl walks backwards to talk to her friends as they cross a parking lot at the mall).
• Planning the characters, plot and setting: Who are these people, what’s their problem, and where are they having it?
• Generating the story: Getting the words onto the page, cranking up that word count. (I love word count! 1,000 words a day is really satisfying. Any more and I start to feel like a superstar—in my own head, anyway. I still get up and do the laundry.)
• Editing: It’s great to reel off a bunch of words, but let’s be honest—they aren’t always pretty. Sometimes they don’t even make sense. Molding the rough draft it into something meaningful and artful is just as important as creating it in the first place.

These four activities are happening in various rotations almost daily. The most inherently creative is generating the first draft. And strangely it’s the one that feels the least like “doing” and the most like “discovering.”

My mind drops below the normal level of consciousness, almost into a trance-like state. I’m in control of the story, and yet it feels like I’m watching it, too—not quite as a passive observer, but not as the man behind the curtain pulling all the levers, either. It’s a little like watching a YouTube video where your semi-conscious mind is buffering the file, and your conscious mind is taking in the show.

It’s also a bit like dreaming. Most people believe that our brains create our dreams, choosing the subject matter, scenery, characters and action. But when you’re slogging through a leach-infested swamp, trying desperately to hide from a guy with a crossbow who is alternately your high school trigonometry teacher, your college boyfriend, and your great uncle Frank … it sure doesn’t feel that way, does it? It feels real.

Neuroscientists are now finding that reading fiction is also experienced as real. A recent piece in the New York Times titled Your Brain on Fiction states, “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”

Further, “just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.” Reading fiction, it’s now being proven, helps us learn more about the complexities of relationships and hone our own interpersonal skills. And it only works because it feels real.

When I write a story—or when you read a story—we know it’s not real. The book is in your hands. The keyboard is under my fingers, the words are new, the characters are completely … sorry guys, but it’s true—you’re fictional. But the false realness of it is what makes my brain crackle and zing and spin around in dizzy joy like a two-year-old. And my greatest hope as I’m writing is that it will do the very same thing for your brain, too.

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If the thread of romance were to be pulled from the storyline of every book ever written, what a bleak and boring catalogue we’d be left with. I’m not just talking about genre romance or chick lit or even its more literary sister, women’s fiction.

I’m saying let’s imagine David McCullough’s John Adams without his passion for his wife Abigail, or Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses without John Grady Cole’s fateful affair with Alejandra, or Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity without the quirky yet lovable Marie.

Nevertheless stories with a romantic subplot are often considered to have less literary value, especially if the lovers are allowed to be happy in the end. I really don’t know what to make of that. Who gets to love whom can be a very important question, sociologically, politically, historically.

I love love. I like to read about it and I like to write about it, following unlikely pairs through discovery and infatuation, over the obstacles of social pressure, internal turmoil or misunderstanding, toward the bliss of connection.

One of my very favorite literary romantic couples is Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth of Persuasion by Jane Austen. There is something electric about reunions—people who have a past together, separated by choice or the vagaries of life, thrown into each other’s path years later to see if the spark of former passion might once again ignite.

I like the fact that they are both older—at the advanced age of 27, Anne has been relegated to spinsterhood. Eight years before, she’d been engaged to Captain Wentworth, but was persuaded by her family that he was not distinguished enough to marry into her high-ranking family. Austen was a master of satirizing the entrenched social strata of early 1800s England.

By happenstance the two once again travel in the same social circle, and the reader doesn’t know if Captain Wentworth still shares Anne’s feelings until he writes her a note, telling her: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.”

In my humble opinion, “You pierce my soul” has to be one of the best lines of tortured passion ever written. I, like Anne, would have fallen for it in … well, in a heartbeat.

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I just did something a little strange: I ordered a circa 1919 Montgomery Ward catalog on eBay.

It’s particularly unusual for me since I often take a free moment to call catalog companies and tell them not to send me their glossy pages of wares. I am the opposite of a shopper. I am a chucker. I like less stuff, not more.

(When my teenage daughter and I were helping my mother pack up for a move to a smaller place, I whispered to her, “Don’t worry, when my time comes, I won’t have this much stuff.”

“Oh, Mom,” she said shaking her head, “by then you’ll be living out of a backpack.”)

But I need this particular catalog because I just started a new novel. It’s historical fiction, set  in 1919, and I need to know about the stuff.

So far, all my novels have taken place squarely in the present. But when I finished my most recent novel last spring, and began to think about the next project, I didn’t have a clear idea of the story I wanted to tell. So I started taking a look at stories that have spoken to me, were memorable, entertaining, inspiring, edifying in some way.

One night my family decided to watch the movie A League of Their Own, which is based on our country’s brief but fascinating experiment with women’s major league baseball. I got to thinking how it’s not only a good story with memorable characters, but it also has that added nutritional value of teaching us about a mostly-forgotten, but intriguing piece of history.

And it got me wondering about a related historical issue: women’s suffrage. What was it like to live in a time when intelligent people debated whether it might be dangerous to let women to vote? In my own state of Massachusetts there was a law passed in 1915 specifically denying women the right to “enfranchisement” as they called it. What would it have been like to live in a family where people had differing opinions about it—to be a girl coming into adulthood, thinking about her future, with all this furor about what women should and shouldn’t do flying around?

As much as we feel our own times are bristling with rapid change, people in 1919 felt the same. A war of unprecedented scope had just ended, the Spanish Influenza epidemic had killed half a million Americans in a matter of months, Prohibition had just been signed into law, and yet at the same time social mores were becoming much looser.

So, I’m delving into history books, newspapers, fiction from that time, everything I can find that will give me the facts and the flavor. It’s pretty intimidating to think about tossing all this new knowledge into the usual juggling act of plot, characters, setting, relationships, etc. But little by little I’m starting to get a sense of how to integrate it with the story I want to tell.

At the moment, what really intimidates me are the clothes. I barely notice the fashions in my own time, how am I going to properly convey what women were wearing almost a hundred years ago? Apparently there were corsets for some, girdles for the more modern, and for the truly avant guard … no hardware whatsoever! No wonder so many people thought the world was going to hell in a hand basket.

I’m learning that people are worried about that hand basket trip in every age. And as soon as my catalog comes, I’ll know just what they were wearing in 1919 as they prepared for whatever surprising thing might happen next.