The Persistence of Memory was born seventeen years ago, when I was thirteen and writing down a daydream. It evolved from there over the next fifteen years, but the seed came from a June night and a Broadway fantasy. My muse was Michael Crawford.
The Death Clock began four years ago, when I said to my husband, 'What do you think our lives would be like if we knew when we were going to die?' It was an interesting concept, but it took a while to come up with a plot and characters for it. So I started at the beginning: a suicide dinner party, based on a striking scene from Quo Vadis. My muse was Benedict Cumberbatch.
Those are the two novels I've finished that I'm really proud of. Now I'm working on a third - working title, Masha & Vova. It's about a Romeo & Juliet type myth that has evolved around two eighteenth-century Russian lovers. This one was born in St Petersburg's Hermitage museum, and the central plot sprang fully armed out of my head like Athena. The two characters - their names, their faces, their village - are based on a young married couple I met in Siberia. They were sweet, passionate, friendly, and seemed much in love.
I came home from Russia and started writing the book - formulating scenes, a structure, over the course of a year and a half (yes, a slow burner). I decided to change Vova's name to something easier on English ears - my husband has had a number of incidents of mispronouncing it with disastrous results.
Early this year, a mutual friend told us that Vova, the real Vova, had beaten cancer a few years ago, and it had now come back.
This fall, Vova died. He was twenty-eight.
Masha is devastated, angry. She is only in her early twenties. She doesn't understand.
The character has always remained Vova in my own mind, and now I can't countenance the idea of calling him anything else. The writing is still in the early stages, but I hope one day I'll be able to send Masha a copy of a novel about two immortal lovers who bear their names.
