Jennifer Gilmore
Jennifer Gilmore's new novel is The Mothers:
From her Q & A with Sybil Steinberg for Publishers Weekly:
You and your husband have embarked on a similar quest to Jesse [the narrator of The Mothers, who desperately wants a child] via open adoption. How close are the events you describe to your own life?Writers Read: Jennifer Gilmore.
It’s obviously true that we’ve made a protracted adoption journey. But a lot of it is fictionalized because I wanted to examine open adoption and how fraught could be, and also to look at issues of race and class and how in our culture they are viewed and affected in the adoption process. I saw a lot of mixed couples, and I wanted to describe which of them were rejected and which were embraced.
Was it hard for you to revisit all the frustrations, indignities and heartbreaks of the open adoption process, or was it cathartic to get it out of your mind and on paper?
I really don’t feel that writing is therapy. However, to be working on the novel as events were happening --as opposed to just suffering through them--was very important to me.
Why did you fictionalize your experience rather than relate it as nonfiction?
I really feel like a novelist and I felt that I could...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
