My father was a political dissident in the U.S.S.R. When I was five years old he was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation and sent to the GULAG. He was in prison three years and in exile for two. It was during this time that he decided to take his family to the new world to give us a new life. To make it happen, first he taught himself English. He said he wanted to come to America not on his knees but on his own two feet. For 25 years he worked for Radio-Liberty/Radio Free Europe, as director of the Russian Service. It was the job he had dreamed of doing when we were still in the Soviet Union, broadcasting news to the countries behind the Iron Curtain.
Inexpressible Island
The week I was hired at my first job as a financial journalist in London, I learned I was pregnant. I was barely 23. My mother said I couldn’t have both, a child and a career. I had to choose. I was reminded of this later when a reader from Russia wrote to me, saying she couldn’t believe that I had had four children. She told me having this many children caused “the complete destruction of the woman personality.” Some days, I suspect she may have been right.
I owe the creation of my first book to the time I was fired from a job I desperately needed. After I returned to the United States with my daughter, I was hired as a TV producer for a company that declared bankruptcy six weeks after I started work, though I am almost certain it had nothing to do with me. Instead of finding a new gig to support myself and my child, I saw it as a sign from above that I was being given a chance to write the book I had been talking and talking about writing. And that’s what I did. It took me two years to finish what became Tully, my first novel. I sent it to three agents. The third one decided to represent me. She sent it to one publisher. He had been looking for a launch novel for his new imprint. Tully became that novel.
It takes me just as long to revise and edit my work as it does to write the first draft. The perfecting of words is never done. It took a year to complete the first draft of Tully and another year before it was ready to be read by others. Even after 35 drafts of The Bronze Horseman, after 30 drafts of The Tiger Catcher, of Inexpressible Island, I am still finding wrong words, missing commas, missed opportunities. For me the work is never finished. Eventually, I drag myself away.
I met my second husband at the mall in 1981, at Baskin-Robbins. We were both 17. I was six months older than him, and he never lets me forget it. I taught him everything there is to know about scooping ice cream We’ve been married twenty-five years. He is the father of a supermajority of my four children. He was best man at my first wedding. I suppose he was best man at my second wedding too. He promises me that he will “absolutely” be there at my third wedding.
I love London. The East End, the West End, the river, Southbank, the Strand. The shops, the streets, the pubs, the parks, the tube, all of it. It took me twenty-five years and twelve other novels to finally set a story in this most remarkable of cities. I had to wait until I had a story worthy of messy magnificent sprawling heartbreaking London. The End of Forever saga is that story.
The entire storyline for End of Forever came to me in a two-hour period in a darkened movie theater. Not the finer details, but the characters of Julian, Josephine, Devi, Ashton and what happened to them appeared to me pretty close to its final form while watching How to Train Your Dragon 2. After nearly six years, dozens of revisions, and much handwringing, the crux of the story remains unchanged from that Saturday night in 2014. Boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl, boy sacrifices everything and turns the world upside down to find girl again to give them both a chance at a new life—and fails.
And then boy dusts himself off, and tries again.