From a Q & A with Hyatt Bass about her debut novel, The Embers:
What sparked the idea for THE EMBERS?
The Embers actually started as a screenplay. I was editing my first feature film, Seventy-Five Degrees in July, and in a restaurant one day, I saw a precocious looking New York adolescent girl wearing an oversized men’s blazer and carrying a stuffed animal backpack. I’ve
always been fascinated by adolescent girls, and thought she would make an interesting subject for my next film. So I immediately started forming this character (now split in the book between Ingrid and young Emily). At the same time, I was completely blown away by the performance of one of the actors in my film—Harris Yulin—and I thought that whatever movie I made next had to feature him fairly prominently. I began working on a story about an unlikely friendship between a teenage girl on the cusp of adulthood waking up to all kinds of things—romance and independence and fantasies of where her life will take her—and an elderly man nearing the end of his life, looking back with nostalgia and yearning, but also thinking about what he might have done differently. I liked the contrast between them, and the idea that, different as they are, they might strangely find comfort in one another.[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
