Q: What was your process for writing this novel?
A: With the two novels I’ve written, the scenes haven’t come in chronological order—I start with whatever feels most emotionally resonant to me, then work around that. In the case of Lacy Eye, I began with the scene of Dawn calling to tell her mother she wants to come back home to live. In early drafts, the mother’s immediate reaction was to think You’re kidding, right?—to have an instinctive aversion to the idea. But the more I thought about that scene, it seemed to me that I needed to make her initial reaction a positive one, precisely because she is so adept at fooling herself. In the final version, I do have Hanna putting off, for a few moments, “registering” what Dawn has asked, before she tells us that the prospect of Dawn coming home makes her happy. That pause is meant to indicate her internal, mostly subconscious suspension of the You’re kidding, right? that, on some level, she wants to voice. Then I show her wariness begin to creep in on the night Dawn actually arrives. Throughout the entire writing of this book, I had to gauge the pace and level of what Hanna allowed herself to realize at any given point.
I wrote a lot of pages that didn’t make it into the final version, so finishing the manuscript took me longer than it would have otherwise. Mostly, those pages are about Hanna’s original family situation—her father’s deception of family friends, his imprisonment, etc. I narrowed the novel’s scope down toward the end to keep the focus on the family Hanna created with Joe, and the event that divided that family in the end.
Q. What would you most like readers to take away from Hanna’s story?
A: Perhaps the motivation to consider how damaging and destructive it can be when people hide the truth from themselves. And to remember that—as the wise writer Flannery O’Connor once said—“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Inferences and Conclusions
Psychological Impact
A Gesture of Modesty
Lots of Love
Chicken of Everything
Eye of the Tiger
Uneasy Lies the Head
The Truth Is Out There
Black Friday
Affinity Fraud
No More Collateral Damage
Proud Participant
Inquiry Above All
A Dissimulation of Birds
Reading Group Guide
Author Q&A with Jessica Treadway
Newsletters
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Treadway
Cover design by Kimberly Glyder
Jacket Photograph of shadow figure © David Myrtille/ Trevillion Images
Jacket photograph of woman's face © Claire Morgan/ Trevillion Images
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: March 2015
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ISBN 978-1-4555-5406-5
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