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I am often asked where I get my ideas. Books, and especially fiction, do not proceed from ideas. They are born from feelings, and more, from wondering. I see someone walking along the street and wonder: Who is he? Where is he going? Where does he live? I look at a clerk in a store and wonder if she is going to be happy to go home when she gets off work or is there some sorrow and pain awaiting her there. When I read the newspaper or watch the news on television, I wonder what it was like for the people who died in an airplane crash, and what it was like for their families when they learned of the death of the son or daughter they just put on the plane or were going to the airport to meet. Perhaps one of the writer's tasks is to weave himself into others' pain.
A painful and sad truth of our time is that fathers kill mothers, and when I see on television or read in the newspaper about another such murder, I wonder: What is it like for the children? What do you do, what do you feel, where do you go, how do you cope when your father kills your mother?
Writing takes place in the mind before one sits down to the computer (in my case). I write entire pages in my head while at the same time searching for the book's overall structure. After months of this (and sometimes years) there comes a magical moment when the book is suddenly alive inside me, when I have a sense of what the book is about and where it might be going, and I am overwhelmed by the feeling that if I do not begin typing, I will die.
So it was with When Dad Killed Mom. I am Jewish and do not work on the Sabbath, and that includes turning on the computer. But there came a Saturday afternoon when everything—characters, voice, place, story line—came together and I had to sit down and begin typing because such moments come only once. (I think every writer is haunted by the story of the English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, interrupting the writing of "Kubla Khan" to answer the door and never being able to finish it.) Almost as if I were in a state of possession, I wrote twenty pages in one sitting, something I had never done in my more than thirty years as a published author. But the voices and personalities of Jeremy and Jenna were fully realized from the moment I began typing. I knew them intimately and they knew me.
Usually I am dispassionate when I write—in other words, I do not experience emotionally what I am writing—and so I seldom laugh, even if I know that what I've written is funny, and I never cry. At least not until When Dad Killed Mom. I cried while writing the first draft; I cried during subsequent revisions; I cried when going over the galleys. But Charles Dickens cried when he wrote his books, so I figured it was all right if I cried for "my" characters.
However, it was obvious to me that in writing about Jenna and Jeremy, I was also writing from a sense of personal grief. Since childhood I have endured the deaths of many people, and though I've never known anyone whose father killed his or her mother, I grew up with children who suffered the death of a parent. Among my students at the University of Massachusetts there have been many who have buried a parent and others who had a parent die during the school year. And I wondered: How did they, being so young, find the way to endure and persevere? So, as I wrote and cried, I was grieving for them all—and for myself.
When Dad Killed Mom is fiction, but the emotions it explores are not. Fathers killing mothers is so much a part of the norm that we scarcely notice anymore. The most invisible victims are the children. Maybe through reading about Jeremy and Jenna, we will allow ourselves to wonder about the actual children.
Julius Lester
Belchertown, Mass.
21 November 2000
1. Why do you think Jenna and Jeremy find it hard to be together after their mom's death?
2. Why does Jeremy turn to Miss Albright? Who can you turn to in times of need?
3. Jenna and Jeremy think this experience makes them different from other kids. Are they right?
4. Jeremy says the funeral is sad but not sad. What does he mean?
5. Jenna often did things just to make her mom mad. How did she really feel about her mom?
6. Why does Jeremy keep his mom's diary a secret? Why does he reveal it?
7. Jeremy loves to spend time in his mom's studio, but his sister avoids it. Why?
8. Do you think Jenna and Jeremy should live together or apart? Their dad once told Jenna that brothers and sisters are closer than husbands and wives. Does their sibling bond help or hinder Jenna and Jeremy as they struggle through this tough time?
9. How does Jenna's opinion of her brother change after her father's trial? How does Jeremy's opinion of his sister change?
10. How are Gregory and Jenna's experiences similar? How are they different? What makes Jenna break up with Gregory?
11. Jenna contemplates visiting her dad in jail after she's grown. Do you think she will? Do you think she should?
12. Jenna and Jeremy aren't a traditional family anymore, but would you say they found a way to be a family after all?