BACKGROUND
Morbid as it may sound, I have always known that one of the things I needed to do before I died was to write a book. I never knew what I would write about or when I would get around to it, just that it was on my major life to-do list. About two years ago, I was working at a small law firm as a litigator, after leaving a much larger corporate law firm, and thought I had the dream job: reasonable hours, fantastic co-workers, combined with sophisticated legal work. There was only one glitch—I was bored out of my mind.

When I couldn’t bear the thought of another Monday morning at the office, I knew the time had finally come to quit. And though I had never written any fiction before, hadn’t really written anything come to think of it, other than legal briefs and college term-papers, when I thought of taking a break from the law, the only option that appealed to me was starting that theoretical book I had always talked about. I quit mid-January, and about four months later, I had a rough, first draft.

Basically, when I set out to write The Opposite of Love, I wanted to explore the idea that there are real consequences to delaying grief. I lost my own mother when I was fourteen, and so I have spent a lot of time thinking about the universalities of mother loss and what kinds of details individualize the experience. Emily’s character is shaped not only by the death of her mother, but even more so by the fact that she has been left behind without a support system; her loss, is, in some ways, the equivalent of an orphaning. As a result, she fails to mourn, fails to face her loss, and as a consequence finds herself falling apart more than a decade later.