Mothers and Other Liars
by Amy Bourret

List Price: $13.99
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780312586584
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

Amy Bourret is a Yale Law School graduate and former partner in a national law firm. In school and in her practice, she did pro bono work for child advocacy organizations, where the passion that fuels Mothers and Other Liars was born. She splits her time between Dallas and Aspen, where she’s currently at work on her next novel. Visit her online at www.amybourret.com.

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Q: A question authors seem to be asked the most is what parts of their work are autobiographical. And your answer is?

A: That is easy. No, I have never found an abandoned baby, never given up a child for adoption. Probably the strongest link is Ruby’s Midwestern sensibility and sentimentality. My grandparents, to whom this novel is dedicated, were proud Iowans. And I have very fond memories of time spent with them, working in the garden, “helping” my grandfather refinish furniture, and partaking in family races to see who could eat the most corn on the cob. The tool chest made from wooden Velveeta boxes is real; it sits on my own workbench now. My grandfather died while I was in law school. A decade later, I received the honor and profound gift to be able to move into their home to be with my grandmother during her last months.

Q: What was your inspiration for this book?

A: This sounds kind of wacky, but I was on a walk when a “what if” popped into my head: What if you built your whole life on a certain assumption and then years later discover that the assumption was wrong? I am intrigued with exploring the personal past and discovering how it informs the present --- the road not taken and all.

Q: You have a background in child advocacy. Is the novel based on an experience you had in the field or a case you may have worked on?

A: Not any specific case, really. It’s more just the general experience. A child builds her own life from the foundation of her family environment life. If that environment is abuse or neglect or incest, when she is removed from the situation she faces reshaping her life with a new definition of “normal.” I think my experiences of working with scared and scarred children are wrapped into the reasons my protagonist, Ruby, makes the choices she makes.

Q: This is your debut novel, and you have created characters that are complex, believable, and ones the readers will really root for. How did you come up with their stories?

A: I’ve been told since I was a young kid that I have an “old soul.” I study people, try to figure out what makes them tick. I know the people in my own life very well, and my characters seem to be a patchwork of lots of different pieces of them and of me. That and pure invention from my arguably warped mind. Writers are lucky; they can call the voices in their heads characters while the rest of the world calls them crazy.

I’m glad the characters seem believable to the reader, because they become very real to me. My friends tease me about the time I was shopping for Christmas presents and didn’t realize until I was up at the counter that I had picked out a gift for Ruby.

Q: The subject of the book is very sensitive. What are you hoping readers will take away from Mothers and Other Liars?

A: Ruby faces some choices that make readers think what they would do in that situation. People have strong feelings about her story, some telling me they could never make those same choices, others that Ruby’s path was the only one she could have taken. I’m thrilled that the story makes people think and engage in lively debate. In addition to their opinions about Ruby’s choices, I hope readers also take away a different sense of what makes a “family.” It is a privilege to be invited into peoples’ homes, to have them give my story a chunk of their own limited time. I’m honored when they feel that their reading time was well spent, that the story sticks with them after they finish the book.

Q: You were a partner in a law firm before you published this book. What made you decide to become a writer?

A: Oh, I’ve been a writer since before I could hold a pencil. Mothers and Other Liars is my debut novel but my first publishing credit was a poem called --- I kid you not, but my family kids me about it plenty --- “Where Buffalo Where.” It was a plaintive ode about the disappearance of buffalo due to overdevelopment of their land. I guess Lark gets her green streak from me. As a child, I also wrote short stories and kept journals. In high school and college, I was a writer for and editor of yearbooks and newspapers and I think there still exist somewhere out there beside my parents’ bookshelf a few copies of my college thesis, published by the university press. And in my law practice, I wrote lots of legal documents and articles.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when my parents moved a few years ago, I went home to clean out my “stuff” and found notebooks full of my old writing. There were these journals entries from when I was like eight and nine where I wrote dreck like “I am a writer. It is who I am. It is the destiny of my soul.” I asked my mother if she had seen that stuff and when she said she had, I asked her why she didn’t get me into therapy!

At the same time, though, I’ve always been very analytical. “Dogged” and “Type-A” are some of the nicer ways I’ve heard friends and family describe me. Hence the law part. I guess I’ve just kind of lived in the middle space between my left and right brain, drifting back and forth from time to time. But my life-long love affair with words, as my eight-year-old self knew even then, is what defines me best.

“A Muse Named Johnny”

An Original Essay by the Author

I went to law school because I wanted to be a child advocate. Yale has a terrific clinical program where students can take on real-life cases. My very first assignment was representing a twelve-year-old boy. Let’s call him Johnny Doe. A teacher had recognized signs of abuse in Johnny’s younger sister, and --- warning, there’s an ick-factor here --- an investigation had revealed that Johnny had been sexually abusing her. Johnny was being prosecuted in juvenile court for child molestation. And I was his lawyer. The kicker was --- and this one really puts the “ick” in “kick” --- that the children’s mother, a single parent with mild retardation, was sharing her bed with the boy. Johnny had clearly committed a crime, but he was no criminal; he was only doing what was “normal” in his little world. In an instant, that boy’s little world imploded. He was taken away from his mother, his sister, his school, and thrown into a juvenile detention center. When I met with him, all I could see was a skinny, scared boy peeking out of a too-big orange jumpsuit. Johnny was book-smart. He excelled at science. And he didn’t understand why he was being punished for something he was “supposed” to do.

It’s been over twenty years, and that boy’s story is still vivid in my mind, along with Janie, whose mother’s boyfriend found sport in dipping her in scalding water, and every other Johnny and Jane who I represented. Stories are never pretty in child advocacy. But the children, they were all beautiful enough to break a heart. Every time. Which is how I ended up practicing corporate law, and taking on one pro bono child advocacy case at a time—that was as much breaking as my heart could handle.

Over the years, more than just the details of those stories has stayed with me. The cases made me wonder, what would I do if one day my whole world changed? What if I discovered that the assumptions upon which I had built my life were wrong? The cases also made me think about nature versus nurture. Johnny’s actions were surely a product of his environment --- he learned at the hand (or other body parts) of his “nurturing” mother. Or were those actions “nature”? Maybe both Johnny and his mother were hard-wired that way and would have acted accordingly in any environment.

And what about me? I have tight bonds with my family. When my sister’s friends meet me, of course they notice the dimples. No doubt my sister and I swam in the same genetic pool. Yet people also comment on how we make similar gestures, how our voices have the same timbre. I have my mother’s eyes, and her sense of humor. My interest in furniture refinishing is a piece of my grandfather that I carry around like a precious family heirloom. So which of these are nature, threaded through that double helix, and which are nurture, mere products of the times our family has spent together? Yes, I’ve been told a time or two that I think too much.

Like my character Ruby, I left one life behind and moved to Santa Fe. That area is like a candy store for a hiking lover such as myself. My meanderings are prime musing time --- I ponder as I wander, so to speak. And somewhere along the way in those dalmation hills, spotted with pi~non bushes, and beneath the shivering gold of the Aspen trees, I noticed that other voices were chiming in to the conversations in my head. Either I was in the midst of a psychotic episode, or all of those musings about nurture and nature and what is family and lives changing in an instant were weaving themselves into a story. I decided on the latter.

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