Elizabeth Marro is the author of Casualties, her first novel.From her Q & A with Jim Ruland at The San Diego Union-Tribune:
Q: What first got you thinking about this book?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I wish I could just point to one simple thing, but I think it was sort of how a bunch of things came together. My background as a journalist. My role as a pharmaceutical executive. We moved from New Jersey to San Diego in March of 2001, and we went to war the next year. My antennae were just quivering in all kinds of ways, asking me to pay attention.
You’ve probably heard this from other authors, but you know how you start with your worst nightmare and you kind of figure it out on the page? I’m a mother, a mother of a son, and I raised him by myself. I’ve thought about how people who go to war do it, but what about the parents? How do they do it? What goes on in the heart and the mind of somebody who thinks that she’s got her whole life figured out and she doesn’t? I wanted to explore that.
Q: As I understand it, you don’t have a family connection to the military.
A: Nope. I’m part of that 99 percent that’s on the other side of the fence looking across at this unfamiliar territory. I could have written about the pharmaceutical industry. I could have written about a mother losing a son in any other context. But every time I tried to do that, I came back to this.
How could I stand on one side, especially once I...[read on]