An Excerpt From Afterthoughts - The Other Widow

At readings, people often ask me how I came up with the story line. Someone posed this question to me once in a Starbucks. I kiddingly replied I’ve had a lot of affairs and killed a lot of people, but after the reaction I got from a passing coffee-purchaser, I no longer answer quite so flippantly. I believe we’re all a mix of good and bad, some of us more ethical than others; some embrace strict moral codes, some the Golden Rule. For me, there is always a struggle between thought and emotion, between sticking to the highway and wandering far afield. As in T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, “between the idea and the reality. . . between the emotion and the response falls the shadow.” It is this pause, this indecision, this moment of truth, this “shadow” that will eventually enfold us all, trip us up or propel us forward if we’re human. If we’re at all alive. The women in my book are conflicted. They are complex, humorous, fairly normal people whose realities are shattered in one unlucky moment and whose silver lining is the chance they have to rearrange their lives before the pieces fall back into place.