Susan Choi

With my own kids, I always knew like you can't hide anything.

They might not know exactly what you're hiding, but they know you're hiding something.

So I felt that Louisa would know

both of her parents are hiding something from her, from each other, and it makes her quite obstreperous.

But I think it must have been, again, for Louisa, this fictional character, but I think it must be lonely, quite lonely.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So this is very, very much, I mean, like I've spoken about this kind of, you know, hybrid quality of some aspects of the story where they, you know, might begin in autobiographical circumstances, but then they evolve quite far away.

But this really is something that actually more as I was writing the book,

evolved closer and closer to reality, if that makes sense, because my mother has MS, multiple sclerosis, and she was diagnosed in my childhood.

I didn't plan on writing about it in this book when I was first sort of cooking up this book in my mind.

I never, first of all, I didn't even really know how far I would follow these characters.

That was one of the big questions.

I meant the book to be shorter and to cover less time.

So when I realized that we were going to follow the characters for more years,

and just started taking on symptoms, you know, almost as if, you know, there was sort of this biological process at work.

I was like, oh, dear, she's getting sick.

And I realized at some point, I think I'd always wanted to write about my mother's illness.

I wasn't aware of wanting to do it, but it was such a huge part of, still is, a huge part of our lives, obviously a huge part of her life, but also mine because I was a child when she was diagnosed.

It was another one of these things that my father was very protective of me about.