Daphne Grab is the guest author for this Thursday’s Author Tales. Daphne is the author of Alive and Well in Prague, New York, which was released June 3rd! She is also a member of the Class of 2k8!! I have Alive and Well in Prague, New York in my reading pile. You can expect a review soon! Don’t forget to leave a comment to be entered in the Monthly Contest!
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People often ask me if my book is autobiographical. The short answer is no, and this is true, but it’s also more complicated than that. While the story itself is made up, and Matisse and her family are very different from me and my family, there are still certain similarities.
It was an experience from my own life that first inspired me to write the book. Seven years ago my dad was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease and a year later he died. I wanted to write not about the loss of a parent but about living with a parent who is slowly losing the ability to care for themselves. And knowing that that parent will not get better. There are so many intense feelings that come with that situation and I wanted to explore them in a story. I chose for Matisse’s dad to have Parkinson’s Disease, an illness that had similarities to Lou Gehrig’s Disease but was different enough that the story wouldn’t turn into my story.
The thing about living with illness is that it is huge but it’s not your whole life. For me when my dad was sick I was also planning my wedding and going to grad school. Those things didn’t stop, they just changed a lot. So I knew Matisse needed more going on in her life and I decided to have the family move from NYC to a small town in upstate NY. Again I was calling on feeling from my own life: I have lived in both city and country. But unlike Matisse I was a country mouse so I didn’t veer into the autobiographical.
When Matisse came to me she was confident and sassy, and totally unlike me as a teen. I was always worried about what other people thought of me, while Matisse could care less. This made her a lot of fun to write and was another way to keep the story hers, not mine. But at the same time, I did call on my feelings of being a teen: frustration with parents, crushes on guys and run-ins with other girls. So as with the other things, the story is fiction but I wrote from what I know.
There is one scene in the book that actually is autobiographical. All I’ll say here is that it involves a goose- to find out what happened to both me and Matisse, you’ll have to read the book!
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Thanks Daphne for that great guest post!! You can find out more about Daphne and Alive and Well in Prague, New York at the following links:
Website: http://daphnegrab.com/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/daphnegrab
The Class of 2k8: http://www.classof2k8.com/index.php?id=54