Q: Where did you get the idea for Before I Wake?
A: I was pregnant with my son when the idea first came to me. I wanted to write a novel about “keeping secrets,” but I had no idea who would be keeping the secrets or what those secrets would be. Then one day, when I was walking back from the supermarket—waddling along under the weight of my groceries—the first three lines popped into my head:
Coma. There’s something innocuous about the word, soothing almost in the way it conjures up the image of a dreamless sleep. Only Charlotte doesn’t look to me as though she’s sleeping.
I heard Susan’s voice as clear as day, and I knew immediately that she was the mother of a teenage girl who’d stepped in front of a bus. I kept repeating those three lines over and over again as I walked home so I wouldn’t forget them, then frantically scribbled them down. I kept writing and, less than two hours later, I had the first chapter.
I didn’t write any more until a couple months after my son’s birth. As a new mom in a new town, I was lonely, and very sleep deprived, and I missed writing, so, during his naps, I started plotting the rest of the story. I finished the first draft in five months.
Q: How did your personal history inform the novel?
A: Like Susan, I was once in an abusive relationship. Unlike Susan it wasn’t physically or sexually abusive, but it was emotionally abusive, and over the course of the four years it lasted, it changed me as a person. It took me a long time to find the courage to leave the relationship, and even longer to heal from it.
When my son was born, I was overwhelmed by how protective I felt of him. I barely slept for fear something might happen to him in the night, and I watched him like a hawk in the day. When I started plotting Before I Wake, I began to wonder how I’d react if my son was in danger from something very different from SIDS or choking or falling or any of the other “normal” dangers. What if there was a person who meant him harm? I never really believed that that would happen, but I channeled those fears into Susan, who’d been through a much more horrific experience than me. What if she’d taken something precious from her abusive ex and he wanted revenge? And what if that revenge was wreaked on her own child?
Q: Why did you use diary entries alongside the main thread of the story?
A: I felt it was really important that the reader understands why Susan is the way she is. She’s nervy, neurotic, and paranoid, and without the diary entries, it would be hard to be sympathetic toward her. During the course of the novel, Susan moves from whole to broken to whole again, and I thought it was important for the reader to see—via her diary entries—how very broken she was. Both threads of the stories build at the same time, and I hope the climaxes are as satisfying for the reader as they were to write.
Q: Your main character, Susan, is a very “unreliable” narrator. Did you find her difficult to write?
A: Not really. Once I’d heard Susan’s voice in my head, the words just spilled out of me. That said, there were times—when she was lashing out at people who didn’t deserve it—when I just wanted to shake her and tell her to trust people, but I totally understood why she was the way she was and why it was so important that she discover what had happened to Charlotte in her own way.
At the beginning of the novel, Susan says she feels like she was “sleep walking” through her own life, but by the end, she’s totally in charge of it. That was incredibly satisfying to write.
Q: Did you always know how the novel was going to end? Did you ever consider an alternative?
A: No, I always knew that James would die at the end and Charlotte would wake up. I did consider Susan killing him, but I didn’t want her to become as vicious as he was. I also ummm’d and ahhh’d about whether Brian should return to the hospital room. I didn’t want him to be a “hero” and save the day, but I liked the idea that the habit that had annoyed Sue so much at the beginning of the novel (of him always returning to collect something he’d forgotten) actually helped save her life at the end. I also thought that, given how Sue had done so much over the course of the novel without Brian’s support, it would prove his love for her if he came to her aid.