About Therese

I was working very hard at becoming a novelist when my mother died, quite unexpectedly, in the bedroom down the hall from my own. It was March, 2004, seven months after I’d begun graduate school for my MFA in creative writing, seven months after she’d been diagnosed with bladder cancer, and seven weeks after she’d come to stay with my family while seeking treatment at the Duke University Medical Center.

Like I do, my mother loved reading, loved learning, and she was proud to see me overcoming a pretty rough start in life—which was due in large part to choices she’d made. While she was staying with me we didn’t talk about whether I held her responsible, nor whether she felt guilty; we talked, as we had before, about how great it would be if I could become a novelist.

Maybe because she was so invested in my dream, her death slowed me down but didn’t derail me completely. Twenty-one months after she died, I finished the thesis-novel and began looking for a literary agent in the weeks before my December 19th graduation; on December 24th, I got an offer of representation.

In a fairy tale, this is where Happily-Ever-After would begin. Life, though, tends not to be so tidy. That novel, though favorably received by many top editors, didn’t sell. And so, determined not to quit when I’d come so far, I wrote another one. Seven months after beginning that novel, and only four days after my agent finished reading it, it sold—first to Germany and Italy and France and the US in a flurry of pre-empts and auctions, then Brazil and Denmark and Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, Japan. I had done something right—but what?

It was more than polished prose and a readable story—the unsold novel had those. It was more than my intention to bring literary qualities to commercial fiction, because that’s a simple matter of craft. As I began to hear more from my editors and publishers, and then from all sorts of readers after the book came out in the UK, I understood: the story apparently transcends form. That is to say, readers as young as 16 and as old as 89, male and female alike, are responding to the book personally, being not only moved by the story but inspired by it.

Odd as this may sound coming from the author of a love story, I’m a natural-born skeptic, a middle-of-the-road intellectual. My bachelor’s degree in Sociology fits with my personality; I observe, I evaluate, and I try to make sense of how people act and think and behave and believe. Here’s what I know: after our needs for hunger and shelter are satisfied, we are nearly all, even the most jaded of us, motivated first by love. Love for our children, our parents, our siblings, our partners, our gods.

I suspect my mother’s death moved me closer to this essential truth in a way that changed the focus of my writing. I don’t want to only tell a story, I want to tell our stories. We act impetuously, we choose poorly, we break rules, we fool ourselves—but if we’re lucky, we get wise to our mistakes soon enough that some good can still come our way.

In the time since Souvenir sold (my first work of any kind to be published, incidentally), I’ve finished my next novel, which is also under contract. If I had to forecast today what will characterize me as an author, I’d say it’s that I’m writing stories that not only ask “what if,” as so many stories do, but that also invite you to ask yourself, “What would I do…?”

Provocative, evocative, accessible literature—it sounds like a slogan but it feels like a promise.