Sue Miller

I'm delighted to be here.

Well, first of all, I wanted to explore the characters.

I mean, I think it's very much a character-driven novel.

I wanted them to be very, very real.

So that was my focus.

first desire from it and my first impulses and something that I really worked on.

But I actually had the experience after my father died and I began to try to write a memoir of him.

He died of Alzheimer's disease in the early 90s, 1990.

I did a lot of research and I got a lot of information from friends of his and I had his correspondence, everything except his letters back and forth to my mother, which he had carefully destroyed before he died.

And I just felt as though, as I was reading through all of that material, as though my sense of him was changing all the time.

I really felt, not radically, he was the same person, but there were just surprises and things that I was just terribly interested in.

It seemed to me that there was some connection and some real new understanding of him that was coming to me after his death.

And I wanted to explore that fictionally somehow, the sort of sense of communication with someone after death, sort of a change in perception as a result of that post-death communication.

I wanted it to be very far from my own situation, so I invented a couple, and sort of the plot followed after that.

But that was the original impulse, to sort of deal with someone...

vitally in touch with someone after he's died to the degree that it makes possible a sort of a revelation.

I think sex is at sort of the heart of it in a certain way.

They're just incredibly attracted to each other.

I mean, he animates her, and he is madly in love with her.

And she's a little bit more at the receiving end, but he adores her, really.