I wanted Miriam to outgrow her mother, to come to the realization that her mother’s dictates are entirely arbitrary and based on some drama that has no basis in reality except in her mother’s mind. The problem is that when you finally shed someone else’s storyline, something you have been living within your entire life, what do you replace it with?

This is kind of weird, but I have these half-waking anxiety dreams about spiders descending from the ceiling onto me while I’m sleeping, to the point where I wake up in a panic, convinced there is actually a spider in my bed. So you’ll see spiders appear here and there in my fiction, although I wouldn’t say I’m arachnophobic, exactly. It’s just really creepy when they’re dangling on their threads, tiny legs working . . . ugh!

Many years ago, when I lived and worked in Sequoia National Park, I worked ten days and had four days off. Sometimes, I could run those four days together so I had eight days off to go hiking. I was on such a trip once when I realized I was being followed by a young couple from Germany on the same trail. We didn’t walk together, but we were in shouting distance of each other. Eventually, a man passed me going in the other direction. What was it about him? I’ll never know. He sent a cold shiver down my spine, and I remember thinking how glad I was that those other two were close behind.

So many of us think of a home as a living and breathing place. A house is witness to all of the good and all of the bad. Knowing what goes on behind our own closed doors and shuttered windows, we can only guess at what happens with our neighbors. So I wondered, if a house did have a soul and if a home is inherently good, then how would bad things affect it? How would a home exhibit PTSD? Would it co-opt the residents and use them? Was that the visible symptom?