Goodreads asked Rhonda Riley:

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

Rhonda Riley I wanted to write about my mother, but I couldn't get it right. I tried telling the truth (nonfiction) but that didn't work and, besides, I really didn't know the truth, not the whole truth. About that time I was sitting outside the library at UF where I worked at the time. My mind wandered as it is inclined to do especially on a lunch break and I got an image of two hands touching in the mud. I did not imagine who they were and I did not have a whole story there at that moment, but I understood that there was a transformation involved in that touch, a transfer of being or energy from one to another. A few years later, my brother died, the last of my biological family. Looking down into his coffin, I understood what time can do to delayed goals. I gave myself permission then to leave the idea of factual truth and try to tell an emotional truth. It felt like a wild deviation from the path I'd been on. So I followed that image of two hands touching.

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