Claire LaZebnik Hosts a Q and A discussion

Thanks for joining the discussion. Please feel free to ask me any questions about my writing process or my latest novel IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU'D BE HOME NOW.

In your new novel, the two grown daughters are half-sisters. What led you to have them be half-sisters from different marriages? I liked this, and felt it gave the book more texture and allowed you to write about what family is (something I loved about your book), but I am interested in how you came up with the idea and why.

I wanted them to truly care about each other but with just a tiny bit of distance. Their relationship is based on genuine affection: they've come through for each other in the past and will continue to do so. I think sisters who grow up in the same household have a more complicated relationship (as I explored in THE SMART ONE AND THE PRETTY ONE). By making these two women half sisters, I could keep the relationship simpler and just positive. I also liked the fact that the mother's relationship with her step-daughter is less complicated than the one with her own.

That sounds interesting, and I can relate to part of what you're describing: when I was growing up my father was a monster - no exaggeration - but I had a great relationship with my stepfather (and my mom), and he (my stepdad) was much closer with my brothers and me than he was with his own four daughters from his first marriage. When he died, I was holding one of his hands and one of my brothers was holding the other, and the daughters were AWOL though three of the four were in town.

That's really moving, James. How old were you when he became your stepfather?

I was eleven, and my brothers were seven and six. He had a closer relationship with me than with either of my brothers, although those relationships were very positive too. I think it was just a matter of personality type - as a teenager, even when Mom was baffled by whatever I was doing or saying, it was as if he could just look at my face and read my mind, and vice versa more and more once I was an adult and started adding more life experiences to my resume.

He was a very kind and gentle man, though not very expressive of pain when he was hurting; a product of his times in that way - he was born in 1923 and remembered the Depression and the displaced folks from the Dust Bowl coming through on their way to California, and was in the Navy for World War II. Although he hated guns, he was the gunnery officer on his ship, and since the ship was too small to rate a doctor or even a corpsman, he had the medical books and the job of deciding whether anyone who was sick or injured needed to be moved to a hospital ship. So he had a lot of conditioning to be the stoic type. But he taught my mom a lot about gentleness; her love for us was infinite, but sometimes she had the personality of a flamethrower, and he got her to look at that and turn the flamethrower off.

I feel that I've spent most of my adult life trying to become more like him. He and my mom were my heroes, my role models, and my best friends.

Claire, when do you write? Do you carve out blocks of time, do you squeeze it in between all your other responsibilities? When are your magic moments, early in the morning, after you get the kids off to school? Late at night after they've gone to bed? I know you like to write at Starbucks. Do you write in between facebook checks? How do you focus with a million distractions coming at you from all sides?

I don't focus very well. I think that's the answer. I write a few sentences then float away and do something else for a minute then come back and write a few more. It would be a bad system for anyone who has lots of free time but for someone who's always multitasking, it sort of works!

amazing that u can write a long narrative this way--so u fit it into the rest of ur life which is 'multi tasking'....really cool that u can write this way----no wonder why ur so prolific!

Well, as someone very wise once said, "Where there's no choice, there's no problem." I have no choice--I have to do it this way. We'll see what happens when the kids grow up--maybe I'll lose my edge.