This is the question I’m least comfortable answering honestly, and probably the one I owe readers the most honest answer to.
None of the plot happened to me. I want to say that plainly, before anything else, because I know how these questions tend to get answered around a debut novel that deals with a parent’s grief – readers assume more autobiography than is usually there, and I’d rather correct that directly than let it sit unaddressed. I have not lost a child. I have not gone looking for a weapon in Prague. The events of this book are invented, researched, and built, not lived.
What is genuinely mine is the fear underneath it. I have a family I love in a way that occasionally frightens me with how total it is, and somewhere in the ordinary business of loving people that completely, most parents carry a version of the thought that started this book: what would be left of me if this were taken away. I didn’t go looking for that thought. It arrived on its own, the way it does for most people, usually at an inconvenient hour, usually without an invitation. I wrote this novel instead of simply carrying the thought around unexamined, which I suspect is a healthier way to handle a fear like that than most of the alternatives.
The newspaper account that opens the preface is real, or as real as a decades-old news story can remain in memory – a mother and daughter struck in Copenhagen, a father’s interview afterward that I couldn’t shake for a long time. I didn’t fictionalize that family. I let the shape of their loss plant a question in me, and then I built an entirely different, entirely invented story around that question. The same is true of the two other cases I mention in the preface, Marianne Bachmeier and Vitaly Kaloyev – real people, real events, neither one borrowed into my plot, both of them present in the book only as the moral weather my protagonist is thinking and moving through.
My professional background shows up more than I expected it to when I started writing. I’m an engineer, and it turns out that habit of mind doesn’t stay contained to a career. The way my protagonist plans – methodically, checking his own work, treating every obstacle as a problem with a correct answer rather than an occasion for panic – isn’t invented from research into how a person in his position might think. It’s closer to how I actually think, redirected toward a situation I hope never to face. Writing him meant handing my own instincts to someone in circumstances mine have never had to survive, and seeing what those instincts would do with a problem that has no correct answer at all.
Hamburg and Copenhagen are cities I know well enough to write without needing to invent their texture – the neighborhoods, the weather, the particular quality of a Reeperbahn evening in the rain. Prague I researched more deliberately, and carefully, aware that writing a city from the outside risks flattening it into scenery. I hope it reads as somewhere specific rather than somewhere generic, because generic was the one thing I was most anxious to avoid.
So the honest answer is layered. The plot is invention, start to finish. The grief underneath it is not invented so much as extrapolated – taken from a fear I recognize in myself and in most people who love someone else more than is entirely comfortable to admit, then followed further than any reasonable person actually follows it. I think that’s true of most fiction that manages to feel emotionally real without being autobiographical. The writer isn’t reporting what happened to them. They’re reporting what they’re afraid could, and then, carefully, seeing it through to an ending they were fortunate enough to only have to write.
If readers take one thing from this away, I’d rather it be that distinction: between a writer chasing a plot for its own sake, and a writer using a plot to sit with a question they can’t otherwise put down. This book is closer to the second thing, and I suspect most novels that stay with readers for very long are too.
I’ll admit there’s a strange vulnerability in publishing a book like this one, even knowing the events themselves are entirely invented. Readers will assume, reasonably, that a story about a parent’s worst fear must have come from somewhere close to home, and in a way it did – just not the way most people mean when they ask that question. The honest answer was never going to be a simple yes or no, and I’d rather give the layered version than the tidy one, even if the tidy one would be easier to put on a book jacket.
