Coming Back to Me
by Caroline Leavitt
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312305540
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Caroline Leavitt is the award-winning author of six novels, including Meeting Rozzy Halfway, Lifelines, Jealousies, Family, Into Thin Air, and Living Other Lives. The recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Award, she is also a National Magazine Award nominee. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Salon.com, Redbook, Parenting, McCalls and the anthologies A Few Thousand Words About Love, Forever Sisters, and Father. She lives with her husband, the writer Jeff Tamarkin, and their young son Max, in Northern New Jersey.
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Q: Is it true that Coming Back To Me is based on a true event?
CL: Well, yes and no. I did have a dream pregnancy, and three days later, I did indeed come down with a medical nightmare, a potentially fatal blood disorder called Factor VIII inhibitor, where my blood stopped clotting. My baby came home a few days after he was born. It took me five emergency operations, three near deaths, and two months later, before I could come home, too.
Q: Why base a novel around such a traumatic time?
CL: To exorcise it, and to create memory where there was none. Because, like my character Molly, I had memory blockers, I couldn’t remember much of what had happened, and I needed to remember in order to get beyond it and to process it. I had to create a fictional memory for myself so I could begin to heal. And as I wrote, as I got lost in my character’s world, I began to feel better.
Q: So the book is a memoir?
CL: Not at all. The situation is true, but the characters and the plot are all imagined. My sister is nothing like Suzanne! And my husband and I weren’t as alone as my characters. We had round-the-clock nurses and baby nurses and my mother came and stayed with us.
Q: The book talks a lot about the importance of community. Can you comment on that?
CL: Molly and Gary start out as outsiders in a tight-knit community, and I loved it that those who were most suspicious turned out in the book to be the most nurturing. I think, like Gary thinks, that people can surprise you, that throughout life, there are all sorts of different communities that form around you. There was one point when our medical bills were over a million dollars and the insurance company was refusing to pay. Desperate, I offered to pay my doctors in installments. One of my surgeons told me he wouldn’t think of billing me for another two years. My obstetrician told me he wouldn’t bill me at all. Unexpected, and wonderful! A community of my doctors!
Q: What’s on the horizon for you now?
CL: I’m writing another novel and we’re raising our son.
Q: Your characters don’t end up feeling safe. Do you feel safe?
CL: No, not totally, but I feel very lucky, and I have wonderful people in my life, and that’s enough.
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Excerpted from Coming Back to Me © Copyright 2008 by Caroline Leavitt. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved.
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