Goodreads asked Ruth Wariner:

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

Ruth Wariner I remember the moment I started thinking about writing my story clearly. It was in 1995, and I was twenty-three years old. I was having lunch at a Burger King one afternoon with my three youngest sisters, Elena, Leah and Holly, who were twelve, ten and eight at the time. We were living in Grants Pass, Oregon, and eating our lunch that we'd ordered from the dollar menu when Leah asked me out of the blue, "So what happened to our mom anyway?" I was stunned by the question and suddenly realized that I had never told my sisters the story of what had happened to our mother when they were just toddlers. We were all crying over our unfinished cheeseburgers by the time I stopped talking, and my little sisters were in shock.

That was when I began thinking about writing our story. To tell them about the mother they would never remember or know the way I had. After I finished graduate school and started teaching, I also began taking memoir and creative nonfiction writing classes after work. My sisters were grown by then and had moved out of my apartment. But still, I wanted them to know who our mother was, at least as I had known her, where we had come from and why we had to run away and grow up without parents.

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