The Inspiration Behind The Shape of Family

People often ask me about the inspiration for my novels. When I reach back into my personal history to try to identify the first seed of the idea, I usually have to go quite far, a couple of decades at least. I discover there is usually a thought or question lodged in my mind by some experience which, over time, has grown and accumulated weight. It is a question I cannot answer, often because it is fundamentally unanswerable. And so, my sub-conscious brain begins to dwell on it, to turn it over and back, to view it from different angles, to posit hypothetical answers and solutions. What if? Perhaps this is why? Could it be so?

After three novels, I now understand that this act of the seeded question, and my mind’s slow but relentless engagement with it, is the reason that I write. I write to make sense of things, to understand the world around me, to answer the questions that seem impossible, and sometimes to try to change an outcome, if only on the page.

With The Shape of Family, the first spark of inspiration can be traced back to an experience in my early twenties. I was recently graduated from university, living in Manhattan and working at my first job when I received an unexpected phone call. A friend from college had been found dead, under mysterious circumstances, on the other side of the country. We were told very little; it was a murder-suicide, there were no witnesses. Days later, friends and I traveled from New York to North Carolina for the memorial service. During the eight-hour drive, the flimsy windows of the soft-top Jeep rattled at highway speeds and were pelted with heavy rains apropos of our mood, rendering any conversation impossible. And even if we could speak, how could we possibly make sense of the situation?

Our friend was an intelligent, passionate young woman, a natural leader and a bright star in our universe. She had been on the cusp of making her mark on a world that needed more people like her, and now she was gone. In time, we learned that in her new city, she befriended people who subscribed to a new-age philosophy, an appealing ethos of self-improvement, human potential, and better living. Some believed it to be the path to a better future; others called it a cult. Eventually, our friend came to share a home with these people. There were murmurs of questionable activity amongst these new roommates, unrequited love, perhaps mental illness. In the end, we never truly knew what happened. All that mattered, all that remained, was the tragic loss of a young woman, and the world was that much dimmer for her absence.

And so, twenty-five years before I would begin writing The Shape of Family, the question was planted in my mind. How could a young woman — strong, smart, well-loved — fall in with such people? Did she recognize any potential danger, and if she did, could she have extricated herself?

I became fascinated with the behavioral practices of cult-like groups: their common practices, the characteristics of their leaders. What draws people to such communities? What separates groups that are benign from those that are destructive? I watched and read everything I could find, ranging from 19th century polygamous religious sects of the American southwest to current-day pyramid scheme sex cults preying on wealthy celebrities. In fact, many groups in our society — political parties, sports teams, product brands — utilize the same techniques as authoritarian cults, and occasionally inspire the same devotion. All these groups tap into a deep and universal human need for identity and belonging, a truth I found intriguing.

After a couple of years of thinking and research, the idea moved from my sub-conscious to my active mind, and I couldn’t let it go, nor would it let me go. I knew I had to write about it. I started with the idea of a young woman who joins a group, believing it to be noble, only realizing too late it is not. And, perhaps because I write to explore alternatives, I knew this time, the young woman would escape from the group and survive to a hopeful future.

I started by writing the scene that now opens the novel: a young woman, dressed in white, alone on the beach at daybreak. As I wrote, more questions emerged and I conceptualized a backstory for Karina and her family that might have led her to the Sanctuary. I saw Karina’s search for identity as germane to her personality, rooted in her growing up bi-racial. I believed she was seeking a new family because she had once known what it meant to be part of loving one. And Prem’s death was the tragic event for which each family member could blame themselves and suffer alone. Prem’s voice came as a surprise to me; I wrote his first passage with no forethought, only longing to hear his voice myself after writing his death.  

While that initial seed and question of the story – how could something like this happen? – came from personal experience, every other element of this story, including the characters, plot points, and settings, was borne of my imagination and based on my research.

The act of writing these characters, and the process of researching their experiences — a mother who loses a child, a young woman suffering repeated trauma, a man successful but in saving his family — helped give me a glimpse of what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes. Both reading and writing are, after all, small acts of empathy. Perhaps if we better understand that deep and universal human need for identity and belonging, we can help guard against the destructive forces and groups that exploit it. If we can use our own stories, and those of others, to help bridge the divides between us, we can help change the shape of our society.