Alicia Drake's Blog - Posts Tagged "starting-a-novel"

I was living in Paris in the 6ème arrondissement, near to the Jardin du Luxembourg. I have five children, which meant I spent a lot of my days walking. I walked back and forth across the jardin every day, several times a day, through the different seasons. I saw children coming out of school, hanging out in the jardin. I saw them playing football on the dalle, I saw them getting dropped off at the swimming pool. I saw them in dentists' waiting rooms, with babysitters at the sandpit. I watched them sitting in the park, on their phones, eating McDonald's. I saw them alone. I started writing pages and pages about loneliness in Paris, my loneliness, their loneliness: Children going home to dark and empty apartments.
I felt there was a strange disparity between the unyielding beauty of Paris and the dark solitude that I felt there.
Paul came to me after I had been writing these pages for two years. I wrote down: "What if this story is about a boy who is searching for unconditional love? What will he do if he can't find it?"