Sue Miller

But I must say that what turned the corner for me was one of the things Annie does the day after Graham has died is to begin to call people, the people who were in his life and to whom he deeply mattered, to let them know that he's died in the night of a heart attack.

The first person she calls is her daughter with Graham, who lives in her late 20s and lives on the West Coast.

And Annie's in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the East Coast, so she has to wait a little while to call her.

so she won't wake her up sort of at the tail end of her night on the West Coast.

After she'd made the call, and the call is a short chapter of these exchanges things with her daughter, and the daughter says, okay, I'm coming, I'm coming there, and they hang up.

And then I just wanted to stay with Sarah, the daughter, and trace through the way it was affecting her immediately.

And then I thought, okay,

Let me try to make this a little more interesting.

So I have her in bed with a lover.

And then that just opened up the door to all kinds of other things.

She talks to this lover about her father in the most devoted way.

It just sort of happened that way.

The circle widened and widened.

And in each case, I just felt so interested in each of the other characters who are then Annie calls Frida, the first wife of Graham.

whom she knows very, very well.

She's a deep friend of hers because Graham has wanted this and also because Graham has had a child with Frida who's very much in the family.

So it's this odd, large family.

She calls Frida, and so I sort of talk about Frida for a while and then have her response.

And then Frida calls her son Lucas, her son, with Graham.

And in each case, it just was at that point that I realized I wanted the book to widen out and I wanted to trace through