Full Disclosure: Sara Shepard is a friend from my MFA days. I care about her, and her writing. I am not unbiased. It felt a little ingenuous to simply post a glowing review here, even though a glowing review is entirely merited. So we’re skipping the review, and getting straight to the interview. I will say this: I loved The Visibles. I would have loved it even if I did not know and love Sara. It is smart, and beautifully written, and emotionally honest in a way too few writers dare. So do please check it out.

When we met in grad school, you were working on an adult novel. Since then, you’ve gone on to become a bestselling author of YA novels. Did you intentionally set out to write an adult novel this time, or is that something that sprang organically from the story when you sat down to write it? Was it a difficult adjustment to write for adults again?

I intended it to be an adult novel all along—and actually, it developed out of the adult novel I was writing in grad school, although you’d never know it. (Note to readers: Cari was a great reader for me in grad school. I’m a big fan of her work, as well as a regular reader of her blog. And she taught me to knit.) The character in that novel was Summer Davis (from The Visibles), though with a different name and at a different point of her life. She had fled her life to the Outer Banks, married a man and had two kids, and was teaching biology and flirting with a precocious boy who was the only other person in her world who shared her love for science. I had to keep putting the novel aside because of YA commitments, and every time I returned to it, something about it nagged at me. I just couldn’t make it work. I realized that the thing that I really wanted to write about was her past, when she helped her father through his terrible depression. Once I realized that, I started all over again, scrapping the entire thing. Well, almost the entire thing—parts of the middle section, where Summer takes her father to ECT treatments, were in the original novel. I even tried to work in the precocious boy, but it just didn’t work, and his section was cut.

I try to have an adult novel and a young adult novel in my head at the same time—while writing YA is enjoyable, adult fiction works a very different part of the brain. When I was waiting for editors to comment on a various book in the Pretty Little Liars series (my series for young adults), I would work on The Visibles. I’d have to put it aside to do YA revisions, but as soon as they were over, I’d work on it again. It’s surprisingly easier than I thought it would be to make the switch, probably because the voices are so different. Once I read a little bit of either book I’m working on, I get back into the swing of it and can go from there.

The Visibles is very much concerned with family ties and obligations, and the way past events reverberate through our lives, and the lives of our families. What questions in your own mind lead you to tackle these themes? What did you hope to explore?

Well, I was going through personal issues that were directly linked to a lot of the novel’s themes at the time, especially those of mental illness and loss. I think what I was most looking to explore in the novel is how much we’re expected to give up of ourselves for someone else, especially a family member—especially a parent. I also wanted to examine how nebulous and frustrating mental illness can be on caretakers and family members—it’s not something tangible that you can see healing on an x-ray, nor is it something you can even really test for to make sure it’s gone. Another important discovery I made while writing The Visibles and mining each character is how much of our parents’ lives are unknown to us children. They had decades of experience before us, lives we might never know. Perhaps this doesn’t sound very profound, but I wrote the novel in my late twenties and early thirties, I think shortly after I truly figured that out in a concrete way.

The Twin Towers are a strong presence in this novel, and the characters witness the 9/11 attacks toward the end. What was your intention in drawing on the 1993 bombing and 9/11 so directly?

The Twin Towers are very strong for Summer symbolically. They appear on almost the first page of the book, when she recalls gazing at them from her rooftop deck in Brooklyn Heights with her best friend, Claire. At first, those buildings represent stability for her—they’re the tallest buildings across the water, the place where her mother works, an easy beacon where she knows her mother is every day. But Summer’s mother abruptly abandons the family before the book begins, and the buildings’ meaning almost immediately begins to shift. The first WTC bombings occur about a year after her mother is gone, showing that what once seemed so sturdy is now fragile and precarious. And then, right around the time of 9/11, Summer is faced with a lot of big decisions for herself, which includes letting go of some of the wistful but misguided beliefs about how things in her life should turn out. The towers are gone, the world she thought she understood is gone, and now she has to start over.

As a side note, my first title for this book was “Skyline.” And if you read carefully, the Manhattan buildings across the water look different to Summer depending on her state of mind. Sometimes the buildings are warm and inviting, other times cold and indifferent. She sees them almost as people.

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? Was it different for this book than for other projects?

My writing process for adult novels is different than for young adult novels. For young adult novels, I generally have a clear-cut outline of what I’m going to do. For adult novels, it’s more freeform. I have an idea of where I’m going, I may jot down overarching plot points, I write for awhile, and suddenly it all changes. It’s a lot of gentle, gradual molding until the very last draft. Sometimes I go back and read my first draft compared to my last and laugh at how different is it. I’m working on a novel now that includes a character who in the first draft was a nun but now has morphed into a pregnant woman living off the grid in the Pennsylvania wilderness. It can sometimes be that extreme.

What are you working on now?

As I mentioned above, another adult novel. It doesn’t have a title—I never have title ideas until the very end, and often not even then—but I’m on my second “official” draft of it, I guess you could say, meaning my agent has already seen one draft, suggested some revisions, and now I’m changing things around. It’s about a well-to-do family whose irresponsible son is accused of something that could potentially be damaging to the family’s legacy and reputation. It’s also about the struggles of the first few years of marriage, letting go to someone’s infidelities after death, dealing with a nagging hypochondriac mother, and, as I mentioned, that pregnant woman who lives in the woods.