In it, her main character Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune.
From the author's interview with NPR's Scott Simon:
SIMON: So what's this sickness?Learn more about Find Me, and isit Laura van den Berg's website.
VAN DEN BERG: The sickness is an epidemic that destroys memory. And in the early incarnations of the book, the sickness actually got a much more realistic treatment, sort of "Contagion"-esque if you will. But the more I worked on the book the longer it began to move into this surreal direction. And then when I uncovered the part about memory loss, I finally understood how the larger story of the sickness locked together with Joy's interior story.
SIMON: Joy's interior story - for example, why is she always swilling cough syrup?
VAN DEN BERG: Yes, I mean, Joy is a character who, ironically, wants to forget. She's had a childhood trauma that is somewhat repressed and over the course of this story she has to...[read on]
Learn about Laura van den Berg's 6 favorite unconventional mystery novels.
Writers Read: Laura van den Berg (January 2010).
--Marshal Zeringue