I started writing The Girl Who Fell from the Sky after reading a haunting news story about a young mother—recently depressed and despondent—who led her kids to her building’s rooftop, and apparently pushed the children off and then jumped.

Reporters interviewed neighbors and friends who spoke of the young mother’s fierce devotion to her children. She’d had a recent setback, but no one could have guessed that the loving mother could do such a thing. No one could put the pieces of her story together to make sense of the reason why.

I became obsessed with the miracle of that horrible tragedy: One of the children, the girl, had survived!

I searched the news for more information about her, but all I found were the barest facts of her biography: her name, her age and a photo that must have been a couple of years old. It was sad to think that the whole story of her life was now this tragedy.

In follow-up articles, I learned that the girl would make a complete recovery. After a few more weeks in the hospital, she would be healed. But then what?

I had so many questions: How would the girl grow up? How would she deal with the legacy of her past? What would her survival look like?

I hoped that she would be able to create a normal life for herself. I hoped that she would still know how to love and be loved. So I decided to imagine a future for her. I wanted to give her a voice.

I wrote the rooftop scene first. That’s when I understood the reason the girl’s story resonated with me. It had something to do with my own. No, I’m not the survivor of a fall, and I haven’t lived through a deadly family tragedy. (I always mention that up front at readings so people don’t feel like they have to treat me gently.) But what I learned writing that scene was that I wanted to write a mother-daughter story. I wanted to write a story about how a girl learns to be a woman without the help of her mother to guide her. I think it’s a reality so many women can relate to—whether a mother has passed away, or just isn’t available emotionally. And sometimes a mother just doesn’t know how to help a child navigate an unfamiliar world.

I named my character Rachel. And then I started to fill in the details of her biography. I couldn’t draw on the real girl’s story. I didn’t know it. So I wrote what I knew, as the old saying goes. I am half Danish and half African-American, and Rachel became a biracial/bicultural girl newly transplanted to a mostly black community after the accident. Her story let me write a story exploring race and identity. I didn’t know when I started to write the book that the nation would soon be talking about the same things with the election of our first biracial African-American president.

The final thread that made the book come together was the character Brick. He’s not anyone I know or have known, but I absolutely adore him. A tragedy needs a witness, and Brick became Rachel’s.

Many years have passed since I read that news story. And I still think of the real girl. What happened to her? My character Rachel is about the same age at the end of the book as the real girl might be now. I imagined Rachel growing up to be a heroic and loving young woman—I would like to believe that the real young woman is too. 

Heidi W. Durrow received writer Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change for The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, her first novel. She is a graduate of Stanford University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School.

Here’s a confession: It’s tough, close to no-way-no-how, for me to write something without first giving it a name. Why?

Names have always helped my ideas cohere (or at least transform from inchoate to an emerging form). Names have made me think about the pressing thing or things I want to say, and have helped me consider my reader: What do they need from the language, the characters, the story?

That being said, my novel has seen a few name changes. The first name I gave it was Luminous Days (there’s even a tattoo on my forearm to honor it). Not too long after I’d been released from prison, the place where I wrote the first few words of what I envisioned then as a fictionalized version of my life story, I happened upon a profile of James Salter in my local newspaper. Days later, I bought and began to read Salter’s famous novel A Sport and a Pastime, which begins, “September. It seems these luminous days will never end.”

Even when I didn’t know what literary fiction was, I didn’t want—or rather, couldn’t afford—a title that typecast my work.

When I read that line way back when, I was struck by the word luminous. For one, the title fit what I believed was the base hope of my characters—a brighter future. For two, no one I knew used the word, and because of that it had the air of intelligent diction and was writerly (it meant everything to me back then to sound like a writer). Even when I didn’t know what literary fiction was, I didn’t want—or rather, couldn’t afford—a title that typecast my work. Let’s keep it real, you’d be hard-pressed to find an urban fiction/street lit book called Luminous Days.

That title would’ve made the finish line if I hadn’t scrapped my initial idea of using a single first-person narrative. The new title was Letters to the Dead and Convicted, and the idea was that the narrator would tell his story through letters, some to a friend who was murdered and others to a fictionalized version of the godfather of crack cocaine, Freeway Rick Ross.

I was so psyched about my idea that I tracked down the real Freeway Rick Ross in federal prison and persuaded him to correspond with me. But yep, you guessed it, after drafting a few chapters of letters, I abandoned the idea. I didn’t have the skill to pull off an epistolary novel. So there I was, not only title-less, but also unsettled on how I’d tell the story.

Then one day in 2008 I was on a plane reading a GQ article on designer Marc Jacobs. In the article, Lucy Kaylin wrote that Jacobs “forges tight, obsessive relationships with people who can handle his compulsive need to share the residue years of therapy.” I must have read that line a gazillion times before I underlined it, sat back in my seat and smiled to myself. There was my title waving its hand at me, a giant neon hand.

The word residue was freighted in what I have come to call my former life. I know a thing or two about drug addiction, and a thing or two about small-time drug dealing as well. To be more specific, my mother struggled for two decades with drug addiction, and me, well, I peddled dope off and on for close to one of those decades.

Back then, when a smoker (that’s one of the things we called an addict) would get down to the last of their crack, they’d scrape the resin out of the pipe in the hope of procuring one last blast. Because of that, the word residue symbolized a sense of desperation, how addiction could fell a human being, symbolized the part I played in dozens, maybe hundreds, reaching that low.

I wanted to emphasize how the days made years, and those years were an era, the most affecting of our lives.

The other major reason why the title seemed fitting was because of my mother’s struggle. Her struggle is why the title includes the word years instead of days. Though they say addicts live day by day, it seemed such a slight to measure a battle of two-plus decades in that increment. Or maybe what I mean to say is, I wanted to emphasize how the days made years, and those years were an era, the most affecting of our lives.

Let me end with one last conceit. Soon after my novel became forevermore The Residue Years, I realized how I would tell the story, a story I had discovered was not mine, but ours: my mother’s and mine. It was then that it occurred to me to divide the novel between two characters. It’s been the story of a mother and son’s—of Champ and Grace’s—not-to-be-forgotten era ever since.

Mitchell S. Jackson was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. In The Residue Years, his autobiographical debut, he portrays another side of a town known for bicycles and yuppies with the story of Champ and Grace, a mother and son whose struggles with drugs threaten their close relationship. Jackson, who has an MFA in creative writing, currently lives in Brooklyn.

Author photo by John Ricard

Surgeon-turned-author Gabriel Weston made her literary debut with a gripping medical memoir. In her first novel, Dirty Work, she again turns to medicine for inspiration, this time investigating one of its most morally fraught procedures: abortion. In a behind-the-book story, Weston explains why she felt drawn to explore this contentious issue, and why she believes the two sides may be closer together than we think.

What would you do if you had an untellable story? Of what does a doctor’s morality consist?

What surprised me most about writing my first book, Direct Red: A Surgeon’s Story, was the reaction it elicited in some of my colleagues. I had read quite a few memoirs written by men in my profession, and although I was always impressed by their operating achievements, I felt slightly weary of reading heroic tales of life-saving antics, proud accounts of bloody machismo.

What I decided I wanted to put alongside these chronicles was a story of surgical inadequacy. I wanted to describe what it feels like to be a surgeon in those moments when one does not feel in control, when one is uncertain of one’s ability, when one is terrified, when an operation is not going well. Instead of cataloging what a surgeon can do, I wanted to talk about how we feel and what we do when we haven’t got a clue.

After publication, surgeons came to me quietly or wrote to thank me for having said and described things they had felt intensely themselves during their training but had never been able to admit. I was touched by these comments but, even more, I was interested. I started to wonder to what extent we all carry an untold version, the untellable truth of our own existence, folded tightly away within ourselves. I started thinking about what it might mean to keep aspects of our lives secret as well as the implications of suddenly having to speak out.

I started to wonder to what extent we all carry an untold version, the untellable truth of our own existence, folded tightly away within ourselves.

I also started to consider what it means to be a good doctor. Many of my colleagues claimed they were afraid to own up to feelings of uncertainty in case doing so damaged their reputation. I realized that doctors still feel, in some sense, that they should behave like paragons. I wondered where our moral core resides and what it would take to break that brittle image. What would it take for a doctor to go from being considered good to being thought of as bad?

It was from these questions that my main character emerged. Nancy is a woman with an unspeakable story, a woman physician who carries an indelible moral taint. Despite her best intentions and perhaps even by accident, Nancy has become an abortion provider. Her very existence is taboo and yet she is forced, by the circumstances of a mistake made in the operating theatre, to tell her story, to justify her actions not only to an external panel of judges but, perhaps hardest of all, to herself.

I happened upon the subject of abortion for this reason, not because I had any particular political ax to grind. I have never had an abortion myself, nor have I performed one as a doctor. But as soon as I started researching the area, something fascinating struck me. None of the books or articles that I read on the subject seemed to allow for even a degree of ambiguity. Everyone, from whichever side of the fence they were preaching, seemed so sure that they, and they alone, had the right answers. In some ways, it seemed to me that people were being dishonest in their certainty. And whenever I told someone I was embarking on a novel about an abortion provider, the conversation stopped dead. Even my agent and publisher cautioned me that if I wrote the book I intended to, no one would want to read it. It was like a red flag to a bull, and all the encouragement I needed.

It has been my experience, in the process of writing this book, that the thing that makes us all so very uncomfortable when the subject of abortion is raised, is the mysterious compulsion we all feel to have a completely absolute and watertight opinion on the subject. This seems crazy to me. I have stood on anti-abortion picket lines in the Midwest of America, and I have understood exactly why the people who wave their banners are so upset. I have also witnessed countless women gain access to the abortion services that they absolutely deserve. In Nancy, I hope to have created a character who holds all this ambiguity within herself. In writing her, I saw the room for a moral person to feel completely torn between a sense of righteousness and a corrosive guilt.

I saw the room for a moral person to feel completely torn between a sense of righteousness and a corrosive guilt.

First and foremost, what I hope to have written is a gripping, un-put-downable novel. But I hope also to show that even the most extreme positions on this thorny subject may be held within one consciousness, that the enemy camps are pitched much closer to each other than one might think.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.