Which aspects of the work that you put into The First Fifty Years did you find most difficult?

All that research. I’m not a Chicago native; I just moved up here less than a year ago, and even now I don’t live inside Cook County. It’s amazing how much you don’t know about a place when you try to use it as a setting for a book.

Which did you enjoy most?

Just letting the words flow from my brain to the computer screen, especially where the characters’ emotions are concerned.

What sets the book apart from the other things you have written? And, in what way is it similar to the others?

It’s the most ambitious novel I’ve ever written. I’ve got a bunch of folks out there doing wrong, and I’m trying to make them sympathetic.

It’s similar to the others in that it features an ensemble, which all of my mainstream novels have. (Think of those ensemble dramas on TV, like Grey’s Anatomy.) I find that I like writing about numerous people. I did an extended family plus multiple neighbors in The People Next Door, and three families in my upcoming If These Walls Could Talk.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

When I get letters from readers telling me the profound effect one of my books had on their life.

For example, one of my early romances, A Love of Her Own (1999) addressed the topic of infertility. I heard from many women with this problem telling me how the book gave them hope, not of having a baby, but of finding a man who will love them in spite of not being able to give them children.

In my book Love Affair (2001), which addressed the hospitality industry, I had a dozen hospitality majors ask me to help them get jobs at a real-life service, but of course that’s more of an example of seizing a possible connection than life-changing. (They recognized from the book that I knew what I was talking about and that I must have worked for a hospitality consultant service at one time, which I did.)

Do you write everyday?

I try to compose a minimum of 1,000 words a day, seven days a week. Most days I’m successful am exceed that.

As a writer, what would you say are your main concerns ?