My husband Eitan denies this, but the book was born because I was driving him nuts 🙈
When my Grandma passed away, I could not stop talking about her.
I had managed to get to Australia in time to be by her side in her final ten days. After she passed, I felt embraced in a big hug of people who knew her, knew me, knew us. I flew back to Israel and found myself outside looking around at all the people who didn’t know her. Didn’t know that I was walking around broken-hearted.
I would walk into shops and buy something just so that I could force the salesperson to listen to a story about Grandma.
Memories kept popping into my mind all day and I was so scared to lose them.
“Why don’t you write?” Eitan kindly suggested. To help me (and spare him).
Ironically, in a way I started writing this book to try keep my Grandma alive. She was gone in the day to day but when I wrote, parts of her came back. The jackets, the brooch, the chocolates in a bowl by the door.
That shifted as the characters took on a life of their own. The character, Rose, came to certain junctions and was at odds with what my Grandma would have done. Time and time again, the character won over.
Writing helped me let her go.