Q: The loss of a child is a very difficult subject. What inspired you to use this topic as the basis for the novel?
A: It’s usually hard for me to pin a story’s inspiration down to just a couple of events, but You Came Back has a pretty clear origin.
In 1999, my first wife, Joellen Thomas, died after a long fight with bone cancer. A few years afterward, while pursuing my MFA at Ohio State, I met and fell in love with my second wife, Stephanie Lauer. When I graduated, we moved west together to Nevada and made a life for ourselves here in Reno. I have a great life—I love my wife, I love teaching at the University of Nevada, and I love the place where we live.
However, I am and always will be someone who lost a spouse; I have a great deal of survivor’s guilt percolating in me, and I’m never quite free of the understanding that I have what I have because someone I loved died. Joellen would be proud of what I’ve done; but I live every day knowing that if she had lived, I would be a different person. How different? I don’t know—but I can’t go a day without thinking about this other version of me.
I don’t want to present myself as tormented—I am a happy person most of the time. But I knew that, sooner rather than later, I’d have to write a book about this emotional paradox. I couldn’t remember any book that really addressed that state of being in quite the way I felt it. When I understood this, I told Stephanie that I thought I had to write a second-marriage book; I promised her the second spouse (as I conceived of Allie then) would be the sanest and most sympathetic character in the novel—and Steph told me to go ahead. I’m glad I did. Whatever else this book does for others, it made my marriage stronger. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in love.
Also a factor was that Steph and I recently decided we weren’t going to have children. I was well into the writing of You Came Back before I understood that I was making that decision part of the book’s emotional life. Much of the book turned into a goodbye to the child I’d decided not to have.
This was also definitely a novel written in reaction to the beginning of the Great Recession, and to the end of the Bush presidency, and to the political prominence of a vocal minority of Americans who prefer to think of the world in terms of faith, rather than reason. I was simultaneously very angry about of these things, but also curious—I am someone who tries to live rationally, but I’m also someone whose life is deeply emotional and reactionary. I don’t believe in ghosts, or the supernatural. Like Sam Fife, I’m an atheist. So I wanted to write a book about someone like me being put to a tremendous test. What would change my mind? Could my mind be changed? How do minds change, regarding matters like these?
Q: While the novel is ostensibly about Brendan’s possible return, the bulk of the story deals with Mark’s personal struggle with his grief and how he reconciles his new life with the future he once envisioned for himself and Chloe. While you were writing the novel, was it difficult to create a story in which so much of the driving conflict is internal?
A: All of Mark’s actions in the present depend on him going back and examining memories, emotions, scars. He’s a man who’s been raised to be very self-aware and thoughtful, and he’s suffered a lot of losses, so I knew very early in the writing of the book that much of it would be an internal journey for him.
I grew up avidly reading horror novels, and I still love them… but I am always a little annoyed by how quickly the protagonists of these books come to believe in the supernatural. There’s a moment of shock, and then the heroes begin staking vampires. I’ve never been able to understand that. If I was the protagonist of a Stephen King novel, for instance, I’d be eviscerated by the Thing in The Basement while standing there on the steps trying to rationalize it away. I began to think of You Came Back as a horror novel in which the protagonist does just that—he’s told about the supernatural, and he gives the issue its due, and in some ways it’s the process of trying to understand that hurts him most.
I thought I was being very original and clever about this approach, until a friend of mine reminded me about a little play called Hamlet. So now I just point to Shakespeare and say there’s precedent.
Q: Allison and Mark were both married before they began seeing each other, and Sam similarly is embarking on his first major relationship since the death of his wife. Why did you decide to put so much focus on characters that are finding love the second time around?
A: Well, as I’ve said, my own life demanded that this be a second-marriage book. The more I wrote about Sam, and about how much Mark idealizes his dead mother, the more I realized that Mark would probably be shaken by his father’s remarriage. After all, we sometimes we see in others what we’re afraid or unable to see in ourselves. Helen provides Mark a catalyst with which to look at his own relationship with Allie; he doesn’t really like what he sees.
Q: Throughout the novel, Mark looks to Sam as something of a moral compass. Even when Sam reveals his infidelity toward the end of the story, he is acting as the voice of reason in the situation. Why did you think it was important to reveal Sam to be more fallible than Mark had realized?
A: As I was making up these characters, I thought that if Mark had a good role model in his father, that he’d be faced with harder choices about his own life, especially after Connie Pelham confronts him.
All his life Mark has loved his father—but, secretly, he’s also believed that he’s failed to live up to his father’s example. It was very important, therefore, for Sam to be imperfect. Both men have been trying for years to maintain the fiction of good fatherhood. But is any parent perfect? In the end I wanted to write about the long-term effects of being a survivor, and Sam and Mark were both examples of how tragedy plays itself out over decades.
Q: Mark spends so much time resisting the possibility that his son’s spirit has returned only to discover that it was all a hoax. Why did you decide not to introduce Brendan’s spirit into the narrative? Are you, yourself, a skeptic?
A: I’m intensely skeptical. But there’s a part of me that—of course—wants to believe Joellen is in heaven, content forever. That’s an appealing idea in so many, many ways.
Many, many people believe in some sort of afterlife. In the United States our political system is being co-opted by the deeply religious. Their ideas about the afterlife, and what awaits them there, have a very real consequence for the future of human beings nationally and globally. Faith is a powerful and—I think—exceptionally dangerous instrument.
This said, my living depends on me writing successful fictions: fantasies in which people can—at least for short periods of time—believe. I ask people who read my books to take me on faith, at least for a little while. I take a lot on faith as well. For instance, even though a number of scientific minds have shot holes in the ideas of free will and love, my life—like Mark’s—depends on this poetry. I fight not to lose these illusions. So I wanted to write about the benefits of faith—the lure of it. But I also wanted to write with an eye toward all that is still mysterious to us.
Really, I wanted to unsettle anyone who would read this book. It is supposed to be a horror story.
Q: Both times that Mark and Chloe’s relationship ends, it seems to be because Chloe blames Mark for her grief. After Chloe’s suicide attempt, Mark seems to accept that they will never be together. Why is Mark able to move on this time? Is he finally over her?
A: Mark will always love Chloe. I think she loves him too. For me, the only question—and the one I want to leave with readers—is why.