Q & A With Jill Barnett
Q. Was there a particular place that inspired the idea for you to write The Days of Summer?
A. I was born and raised in Southern California, a very idyllic area along the coast, and spent time on Catalina Island, a very magical place. I remember the first time I went there and saw the flying fish. Amazing. When I was thinking about certain years for the expanse of my idea, I remembered my time on the island in 1970. It is quite wonderful to write about a place you know in your bones. I know California, how the lantana grows each spring and what the air smells and tastes like, the weather patterns and how the state has changed over the forty plus years I was there. But as with any story, once the characters exist inside any place, real or fictional, creative imagination takes over and the setting becomes a place unique to those characters and their lives.
Q. Where do your ideas come from?
A. Every book comes to me from a different place or in a different way. Sometimes something visual will spark an idea—you see something on the news or read an article and suddenly a thought becomes “what if?”
Q. Do you write about your own experiences?
A. Not really. I write fiction, like most writers I do often write what I know. Yet there is a definite line between the imagined and experience. The characters lead you down an imagined path, one that exists inside actual human experience. But the revelation of story comes to me from the craft writing itself. My stories have themes tied to my vision because I always have something important to say about relationships, the complications associated with love, human nature, and my favorite topic, inhuman nature—the things we do to mess up our lives.
Q. You write about Katherine and her daughter Laurel, whose lives are changed forever by a single moment of tragedy. Why a widow and her child?
A. I just said I didn’t write about my own experiences, didn’t I? Well, remember I write fiction and get to lie for a living. Here’s my experience: a few years ago, I said goodbye to my husband one morning and that night a policeman stood at my door to tell me he was dead. I know what Katherine had to face. While her story is fictional, made up completely inside my head, I lived with the same kind of fear, especially when it came to raising our daughter.
Q. The secrets of the characters’ pasts and their effect in the present is throughout the book. Why this theme in this book?
A. I write family dramas and all families have secrets. We all make mistakes in the name of love or let feeling color our decisions. Our heads and hearts guide us. While some secrets are born from shame and fear of humiliation, most come from love. Within families and in life, the absolute truth can damage and hurt people. Often the reason to keep a secret is to not hurt someone you care about.
Q. Destiny is an important part of how the Banning and Peyton families are bound together and keep crossing paths throughout the years. Do you believe in coincidence?
A. I believe there is no such thing as coincidence. Certainly not in my experience. Everything in human life is cause and effect. There has to be some grand plan, one that is for some people very complicated. Often in my life I’d seen things that disprove coincidence. You move a thousand miles away and meet an old friend on the street. You have a dream about someone you haven’t seen in twenty years and the next day they call. I believe all love is destined.
Q. What comes more easily to you, writing the beginning or the end of a book?
A. That’s easy. The end. I often know very early in the process what line will be the last in a book. So often about halfway through a book, the last page has come to me quite suddenly and seemingly out of the blue. Emotion is difficult to nail sometimes, particularly in the first draft or when the characters have yet to reveal themselves. So I always write an emotional scene the moment it comes to me because emotion is most honest when in its first pure form.
Q. What’s next?
A. I’m working on another California set book, Northern California this time, about a woman’s struggle to keep her family together. I have something to say about how our society treats women over a certain age, something I think women will relate to. I know the book is like a gift to me. I’ve never had a story come to me the wonderful way this book is coming. It’s great to be a writer.
