When did you first start writing?
I don't actually remember. Pretty early on, I wrote a poem about my grandmother's early life; my dad kept it in a folder on his desk until he died. I don't know what became of it afterward. And I knew I wanted to be a writer by second grade, because when our teacher praised another girl' s story--it was a Bobsey Twins pastiche and its only virtue was its length--I said, "I'm going to be a writer, not her!" It seemed I was always coming up with stories. I turned out my first novel the summer after eighth grade. In ninth grade I entered it in a school contest and won a prize, although in retrospect it was pretty awful. After that, writing was always something I did.
What's the story behind your latest book?
The Cruel Mother, which is the fifth book in my Caitlin Ross series, was a difficult book for me. I had the idea for it quite early on, maybe even before I completed the first book in the series. I knew I wanted to take Caitlin back to her roots and explore her past and her family of origin. It's a personal book in a way none of my others are, because Caitlin came from an emotionally dysfunctional family, and so did I. And that made me frightened of writing it. I didn't want to risk any of my relatives reading it and coming down on me because they took characters and situations too personally. So for a couple years I avoided writing it. I tried at least six different plots for book five and discarded tens of thousands of words. The stories I wrote were fine stories, but they weren't the right stories, and I'd inevitably get a few hundred pages into the manuscript and hate it. Finally, I bit the bullet and returned to my original concept. It was the right thing to do, and what I learned from this is that you have to face the fear of what you need to say and say it anyway.
Read more of this interview.