The novel that took 44 years to write...

Just before I graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz, happenstance and good luck got me the use of a small stone cottage in rural West County Cork, Ireland.

Photo credit: Elias Ehmann

I lived on next to nothing there, in all the months but summer, with fingers that were sometimes blue from the cold. I wrote some tales set in the nearby village of Ardfield, which was largely unchanged from how it had been in the 19^th century. I also began pulling together the strands of a longer story confected from the small but tantalizing trove of details my maternal grandmother and great-uncle had given me about growing up as Russian Jews in a family of dressmakers in Kishinev, under the last Tsar.

An unsolved mystery at the heart of that manuscript I wrote in Ireland some 44 years ago—along with the disappearance from my life of my own beloved sister—evolved into the plot for what will be my fourth published novel, What Disappears, coming out from Regal House in 2021. It’s a story that begins in Tsarist Russia, with the birth of identical twins, and ends in the Belle Époque world of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

In writing and reimagining this tale over the years, I found a way to explain why someone like my great-grandmother, a humble provincial tailor who made hats and coats for the girls’ parochial school in Kishinev, took the train twice a year, all by herself, to Paris. My grandmother, shrugging, said it was to see the fashions. But the emotional truth of this extravagance required a much deeper explanation. What but the search for one’s own lost sister would compel such risky and even obsessive behavior?

It’s a great joy to me to see this novel about to be so beautifully launched into the world by Regal House!

Do you have family stories that have haunted you over the years?