Goodreads asked Heather Tosteson:

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

Heather Tosteson My last short story collection, Germs of Truth, was inspired in part by my step-daughter and her wife's use of a sperm donor. They invited us to read descriptions of potential donors and give our opinions, and I began to imagine all sorts of scenarios, many of them humorous, based on different dimensions of the whole experience and the questions it raised about how we decide to have children—and how life keeps upending our logic in fortuitous ways. The other half of the book, made of longer stories, took situations roughly similar to ones I had encountered in my own family life or saw in the lives around me—what I would call burrs, those things that for some reason catch uncomfortably in our heart, mind, or imagination and that we feel we can't share or put to rest. I gave myself the freedom to explore these situations as openly and honestly as possible—with one constraint: the stories needed a resolution that was liberating to whoever I felt was most trapped by the situation. The title of the collection reflects that tension.

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