Today, I’m honored to share with you a guest post by Jillian Medoff, author of I Couldn’t Love You More.

Before I share with you Jillian’s post, let me give you a little information about the book. From the synopsis on Jillian’s site, I Couldn’t Love You More:

“Which child would you save? A decision no parent can even fathom.

Eliot Gordon would do anything for her family. A 38-year-old working mother, she lives an ordinary but fulfilling life in suburban Atlanta with her partner, Grant Delaney, and their three daughters. The two older girls are actually Eliot’s stepdaughters, a distinction she is reluctant to make as she valiantly attempts to maintain a safe, happy household…

Then Finn Montgomery, Eliot’s long-lost first love, appears, triggering a shocking chain of events that culminates in a split-second decision that will haunt her beloved family forever. How Eliot survives — and what she loses in the process — is a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved a child. With hilarious honesty, wrenching depth, and a knockout twist, I COULDN’T LOVE YOU MORE illuminates the unbreakable bonds of family and reveals the lengths we’ll go to save each other, even as we can’t save ourselves.”

And now, here is Jillian’s post:

My Inspiration for I COULDN’T LOVE YOU MORE

 

I got my MFA at NYU. While I was there, I took a master class with the very brilliant writer, Grace Paley who said, “Write what you don’t know about what you know.” It didn’t occur to me until a few years ago that this is exactly what I do. I’ll take moments from my own life, from my family’s life, from strangers’ lives and I’ll look at what would normally happen—what I know—and then I’ll consider everything I don’t know, the big “what if’s.”

 

I wrote an essay about the evolution of I Couldn’t Love You More, and about my writing career called “This is a True Story.” It’s available in both the print and eBook versions of the novel. The gist of the essay is that I Couldn’t Love You More, like my other two novels, Hunger Point and Good Girls Gone Bad, evolved very much the way Grace Paley suggested. Here’s what I knew: I’m a mother and stepmother. I have three children. I love them each equally but all differently. I’ve always been a writer who tackles complex themes and risky subjects—I write about the things that people think but never say aloud. So I was looking for a challenge. If a book has a predictable storyline or familiar situations, there’s little satisfaction for me in writing it. A woman deciding which man she’ll spend her life with? I’ve read that story a million times, but a stepmother deciding which of her children she’ll save in a freak accident? Now that’s a challenge. I had no idea how I would react if forced to choose between my daughters, and figuring that out became my obsession for the next decade. In fact, even though the novel is finished and published, I still grapple with the question. I mean, how can any of us know what we would do in that situation?

Thanks so much to Jillian for sharing her inspiration today. Want to know more about Jillian and her books?  You can learn more about Jillian through her website.  If you’re on Twitter, follow Jillian here. And you can find Jillian on Facebook. So, once you’ve read I Couldn’t Love You More, let me know what you think. And look for my review soon.