Jaclyn Gilbert's debut novel is Late Air.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Late Air, and for your characters Murray and Nancy?--Marshal Zeringue
A: One afternoon in graduate school, I was running along the Bronx River Parkway past a local golf course when I wondered what would happen if a stray golf ball hit me. All through my time as a runner at Yale I had trained for cross country on a golf course, and suddenly the threat of this accident seemed terrifyingly plausible.
I spent the next five years researching this hypothetical accident and writing draft after draft to refract its ghosts as fragments and ruptures through the point-of-view of Murray, a running coach obsessed with training his star athletes as a means of escape from a deep trauma from his past.
Developing the question of Murray’s past gave birth to his wife Nancy, someone who appeared so unlike him on the surface, but inside she was just as hyper focused and perfectionistic in her pursuits.
When I tried to imagine a plausible scenario for their falling in love, my mind circled back to my own experience...[read on]