(The full blog post appeared on Reese’s Book Club site on Feb. 6)

I believe that the greatest stories float through the universe begging to be born. Characters choose their conduit by ruffling a writer’s imagination, stroking her curiosity. That’s what happens to me, at least. My characters visit me in my daydreams, eventually becoming my friends. Once I say yes—yes to the journey, yes to telling their stories--we have a contract. My characters unravel their stories to me, and I follow along, capturing these tales onto paper.

Yet after my last novel, Yellow Wife, was published, I waited for a long time to hear from the universe, from my new characters. I was terrified by their silence. I wondered for months if I had another historical novel in me.

Desperate for distraction, I decided to take a different strategy, and set out to write a young adult novel featuring four teenagers in a Philadelphia high school. I had plans to turn this venture into a series. Ruby was the one character that kept wandering into my daily thoughts. Suddenly, she was speaking to me! I could see and feel her so vividly. She was fifteen. She was smart. She had a coke-bottle shaped body. And she had a mother who wished that Ruby had never been born.

The idea of being unwanted by one’s own mother was not foreign to me. My grandmother, Yvonne, was smart, beautiful and looking for love when she got pregnant at fourteen. My unmarried, impossibly young grandmother was immediately shamed, and she gave birth to my mother at fifteen in secret. My mother lived with her grandmother, who she assumed was her mother, until she was eight years old. That’s when the lady she knew as Ms. Yvonne revealed to her that she was, in fact, her mother. The mother-daughter duo had a tumultuous relationship. It was a relationship filled with guilt, shame, sacrifice, missed opportunities—but also love.

[Watch for Part 2 next week!]