A Dialog together with Kristin Hannah Amazon.com: Why did you select Seattle as the backdrop for Firefly Lane? Is there something distinctive concerning growing up in the Northwest this helped you to define the kind of women Kate and Tully become?  Kristin Hannah: Quite just, I chose Seattle as the backdrop for Firefly Lane for the reason that it's so much a part of who I am. I've lived in the Northwest for much of my life, and obviously, in all those years, I've seen this part of the country evolve from an undiscovered gem into the Emerald City. So many of the places from my youth are gone, or changed, or moved, and I guess I wanted to remember the physical reminders of those bygone days. And while Kate and Tully are absolutely Northwest girls, I like to believe their story will talk to women who grew up in vastly different, extra populated areas. Afterwards all, it's ultimately concerning friendship, and those seeds can be planted anyplace. Amazon.com: While you were writing, at any point did you locate yourself feeling extra sympathetic to Kate or to Tully? How did you keep the weight of the plot balanced between them as their stories evolved? KH: There's no way to avoid the truth this Kate is extra than a little like me. Like so, I identified together with her from the very beginning--she was the small town girl who had to get up in the pre-dawn hours to feed her horses, and read The Lord of the Rings during each family vacation, and felt lost in the first few months at the sprawling University of Washington. All of this was me, so naturally, the problem was not in feeling sympathetic toward Katie; it was much extra concerning holding her at arm's length, seeing her not as an extension of myself, but as a fully fictional woman. Tully was a different story entirely. While many readers might be surprised by this, I really fell in love together with Tully. In the final analysis, she's one of my favorite characters of all time. I recognize she's bold and selfish and myopic and ambitious to a fault, but she's in addition terribly broken, wounded by her parents, unable to think in love, and ultimately very real. I believe all of us recognize a "Tully" in our lives, and they get a lot of drama...and a lot of fire and sparkle. Amazon.com: You have a stunning way of showing together the tension and tenderness between mothers and daughters. Was it a challenge to put in writing Tully's painful history together with her own mother, and later, the conflict this builds between Kate and her own daughter? KH: Honestly, I think this the mother-daughter relationship is magical, advanced, potentially dangerous, profoundly great, and deeply transformative. To put it just, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all shaped first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to do us reassess how we were as daughters. One of my favorite parts of Firefly Lane was the circle of Kate’s relationship together with her mom. First we see her as an angry teen, slamming the door on her mother...and then later her own daughter does the same thing to her. There's a real symmetry in this, a truth this many of us have learned. I have often wished in the past few years this my mom were here to help me as I raised my own teenage son. As a girl, together with my own mom, I thought I knew it all; now I recognize better. Somewhere, I recognize my mom is smiling. Amazon.com: Throughout the novel, together Kate and Tully question the dependability of love. Is it this question this creates the rift between them and, ultimately, reunites them in friendship? KH: You're right, they every do continually question the dependability of love. For Kate, it's a self-esteem issue. She absolutely believes in love--she's grown up surrounded by it--but she continuously questions Johnny's commitment to her. I always felt this was largely for the reason that she felt like a moon to Tully's bright and shining sun. For Tully, she honestly doesn’t think this true romantic love exists, and for all of her overblown ambition and belief in herself, she has been wounded by her mother's repeated abandonment. The outcome is this she feels she's unlovable. Amazon.com: Kate and Tully are every big personalities in their own way. Was it hard to make male characters who really comprehend them? KH:The challenge together with regard to male characters was not so much creating men who understood Kate and Tully, it was rather to make love stories this equaled the power and emotional intensity of the friendship. Afterwards all, the men in the story were important--Johnny particularly--but it was really a story concerning the women. Amazon.com: When Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone first came out, many readers were shocked this a man could put in writing such an intimate portrait of a woman. Do you believe women are in fact the excellent writers of women's fiction? Would you ever consider writing a novel where men get center stage? KH: One of the excellent things concerning being a writer is this we get the chance to inhabit the minds and souls of a diversity of individuals. I really don't believe male/female is the central question in terms of the viability of a voice and/or vision. We writers can "become" murderers, animals, psychopaths, vampires, lawyers, doctors, wizards, kids. In short, our storytelling skills and character-building capabilities are limited only by our own imaginations. Until recently, much of my novels--while female-centric in vision--were equally narrated by male characters, and one--Angel Falls—was primarily narrated by men. I didn't see the writing of this any different than anything else. Amazon.com: Do you see yourself as a writer of romance or women's fiction? What do you see as the differences in these two genres--is one an evolution of the other, or is the label unimportant? KH: I began as a romance author and moved into women's fiction concerning ten years ago. While many definitions abound, mine is this: romance is a subsection of the broad, all-inclusive women's commercial fiction market. Women's fiction in general is not an evolution of romance; much of women's fiction is fully unrelated to any romantic elements. However, it is true this many existing commercial women's fiction authors began in romance. Amazon.com:Many women read fictional romance to escape the stress of usual life and locate inspiration in a happy ending. Is there a primary experience this you hope your readers will have afterwards reading Firefly Lane? KH: I am a sucker for a happy ending myself. In fact, my husband and I often go round and round concerning movies in which I hate the ending and he loves it. He always says I'm only comfortable together with happy ever afterwards, but this's not true. What I would like is an emotionally satisfying, organic ending. I would like to be totally engaged until the last page, and I would like to think each moment up until I shut the book. Sometimes I would like to laugh, sometimes I would like to cry, and sometimes I would like to scream this it can’t really be over. (Harry Potter comes to intellect on this one). The point is, I would like to be moved deeply. This's what I look for in other books and what I hope to bring in my own. Just FYI, here are some of my favorite endings: Gone Together with the Wind, Middlemarch, Prince of Tides, An Inconvenient Wife, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, To Kill a Mockingbird, It, Shadow of the Wind. Some are happy, some are sad, some are bittersweet. All are memorable. Amazon.com: If you could meet any writer, living or dead, who would it be, and what would you ask them? KH: There are, of course, dozens of choices here, and I could certainly go throughout the classics and come up together with many names and questions, but the truth is this I would love to sit down together with Stephen King and pay attention to some rock and roll, and ask him how in the world he has stayed so good for so long.
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