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Goodreads asked Jaclyn Gilbert:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jaclyn Gilbert I was running along the Bronx River Parkway past a local golf course when I wondered what would happen if I stray golf ball hit me. All through my time as a runner at Yale I had trained for cross country on a golf course, and suddenly the threat of this accident seemed terrifyingly plausible. I spent the next five years researching the accident I'd imagined, refracting its fragments & ghosts through the present narrative of a coach obsessed with training young women as a means for forgetting a trauma from his past. The coach's repressed history unfolds simultaneously through the voice of his wife as she seeks to understand the trauma her husband won't acknowledge--her narrative becomes about trying to forgive what can't be controlled, predicted, or changed. As a whole, the novel is about love, running, and perfection as evasive ideals countered by the body's search to let go of its past.

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