Which comes first for you – the plot or the characters?

A little bit of each; neither one is fully formed at the outset.  I usually start with a situation and a question.  With The Dogs of Babel, it was an image of a grieving man and a question about how far he would go to find the answers he was so anxious to know.  With Lost and Found, I started with the image of a mother and daughter thrust into the strange on-camera world of a reality show, while they’re both still reeling from the cataclysmic event of the daughter hiding her entire pregnancy from her mother.  I had two questions: how are they ever going to repair their relationship, and what effect will being on this TV show have on them?

What made you decide to include the two characters of "Team Brimstone" who were resisting their sexual orientations? Did you always plan for those characters to develop the way that they did?

Since I originally thought that Laura and Cassie would be the only major characters, figuring out who the supporting cast would be was kind of a fill-in-the-blanks endeavor.  I tried to imagine what kind of people would be chosen for a show like this one, and sticking an ex-gay married couple into the mix seemed like exactly the kind of stunt-casting reality TV producers might engage in.  I’d read articles about the ex-gay movement, and I was interested in exploring what would make someone try to change something as fundamental as sexual orientation.  The question of shame — where does it come from, how is it related to the things we keep hidden — comes up for several other characters in the book, and I thought that this married couple who are struggling so hard to keep their shame at bay would provide an interesting lens.  I didn’t think they’d be particularly important or sympathetic characters, but the more I wrote about them, the more sympathy I felt for them.  I think Abby may be my favorite character.

Which character is most like you?

It probably sounds like a cop-out, but each of my characters is like me in one way or another.  The only way I can write about a character believably is if I can find some common ground to start from; then I can branch out from there.  There’s almost never any literal autobiography to my writing—I’ve obviously, for example, never been a widowed male linguistic professor or a teenage girl who hides her entire pregnancy — but each of my characters reflects something about me.  The way Abby thinks is probably closest to the way I think, but I gave Cassie some of my sense of humor, Laura some of my worries about being a good parent, and so on.