Today, I have a very special interview with Ellen Meister, author of the book THE OTHER LIFE. Welcome Ellen!
I think we’ve all dreamed of what life would be like had we made a different decision at one point or another. What made you decide to write a book with this very plot?
It’s true that everyone ponders “What if?” at some point, but for a mother of a child with a disability, it’s a question fraught with a huge tangle of emotional complications. What if you had the chance do it all over again? Would you choose an entirely different path? What would that mean for you, for your child? However hypothetical, it’s not even easy to distinguish where line might be between a loving decision and a selfish one. So it was natural for me to want to explore this in a book. But the germ of the idea for THE OTHER LIFE came to me when I was thinking about the fact that I got to escape into a fictional world each day when I sat down and went to work. It made me wonder what would happen if a woman like me had the ultimate escape””a literal portal to the life she would have had if she had made other choices.,
You took a bit of a risk combining a contemporary women’s fiction novel with a slight paranormal twist. What made you decide to take that risk?
It was a risk! I honestly had no idea if I could pull it off. But the concept had grabbed me and I knew I had to at least give it a try. And so, after thinking about the concept for two years, I sat down and wrote the first chapter to see if I could find a way to make it work. My goal was to write a very grounded story with an element of magical realism, so I needed to steer clear of leading the reader down a science fiction or even a paranormal path. Once I found the right balance to achieve that, I was on my way.
All women can likely see a bit of Quinn in themselves. How did you create the character Quinn?
Thank you! From the beginning, I saw Quinn as the product of her upbringing. As the daughter of a mentally ill mother, she became a 
caregiver by default, and had a hard time letting that go. I think a lot of women are brought up to see themselves in this role. For Quinn, it’s turned up a few notches.
Can you share a bit about your writing process? How long did it take you to finish writing and revising THE OTHER LIFE?
As I mentioned, I thought about the idea for this novel for a very long time. I knew there was something there, but it wasn’t until I understood that Quinn’s mother was dead in one life and alive in another that I knew I had a book. My process involves writing reams of notes””some of it quite stream-of-consciousness. I open a Word document, and start asking myself questions about the characters and the story, and I simply type every idea that comes to mind. Before long, the answers reveal themselves. From there I shape the outline and write the scenes. In the case of THE OTHER LIFE, once I started the actual writing it took about a year to finish and revise.
Tell me a bit about your journey to publication.
My journey began with a nearly tragic amount of procrastination. I put off pursuing my dream of writing a novel for decades. But once I finally woke up, faced my own mortality, and realized I didn’t want to shuffle off this mortal coil without having reached for my dream, I sat down and wrote my first book. It took two years, and almost all the work was done between the hours of 5 am and 7 am, before my family awoke. From there it took 9 months and dozens of rejections before I found a wonderful agent who was in love with my book. Two rewrites and about 6 months later, I had a book contract with a major publisher. It took another two years for that debut novel, SECRET CONFESSIONS OF THE APPLEWOOD PTA, to appear in bookstores.
To learn more about Ellen Meister and THE OTHER LIFE, please click here.
Oooh, I went over to Ellen’s site and read up on THE OTHER LIFE (it sounds AMAZING!). Thanks to both of you for the great interview 🙂