The Missing Place (47 page)

3. How did the story—two missing boys and the mothers who come to find them—evolve after your visit?

I knew I wanted to write a suspenseful novel where the stakes were intensely personal. I often write about women, especially mothers, and those who care for the young, because a threat to a child's welfare can turn an ordinary Everywoman into a warrior.

In adding a second missing son and frantic mother, I was able to bring two very different characters together. Forcing the two mothers to interact gave me interesting opportunities to explore a variety of types of tension. I've done the protagonist-with-a-sidekick structure several times, but I enjoyed the challenge of having two main characters carry the story.

4. The mothers are very different. Are they drawn from people you know?

I was talking to my agent, Barbara Poelle, not long after I had completed a first draft, trying to hammer out some inconsistencies in Colleen and Shay's relationship, when she said something that struck a chord: “They're both you.”

Sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of you. I had worried that I was writing caricatures, extreme examples of the women I knew in my struggling-waitress days in the Midwest and my more recent affluent-housewife days in the suburbs. Instead I was working out the shortcomings and disappointments, the hopes and expectations, that I'd experienced in both worlds. While it's not germane to the story, I think that in writing these two women and forcing them to work together, I was reconciling two very different parts of my past, figuring out what remains now that I'm no longer in either circumstance.

I've been asked which character I like more, and which is the better parent. The truth is that I feel compassion for both of them. Our circumstances give us tools as well as limitations, no matter where we come from.

5. In
The Missing Place
you introduce a Native American character and explore the prejudice he and his family experience. You've written about race and class before. How does this novel break new ground?

My decision to incorporate this type of prejudice into the plot came from a chance conversation I had with some men over dinner in the “man camp.” We were brainstorming about what might cause a man to go missing from a rig, and they casually mentioned rumors that white men had stumbled onto reservation land to camp or fish, and had been pulled from their trucks and beaten.

I never found anything to substantiate these rumors, but this offhand comment reminded me that racial tension exists in rural America
in a way that I don't often see living in urban Northern California. A Native American who feels exposed in a predominantly white North Dakota town would have a very different experience in a major U.S. city, and as a writer I'm interested in the emotional experience of diversity and prejudice.

6. Could the relationship between Shay and Colleen be described as a friendship? Any lessons here about relationships between adult women?

The most interesting part of writing Shay and Colleen was exploring what it means to depend on another person. They are forced to deal with issues of trust, vulnerability, honesty, and generosity, all in a very compressed time frame. I don't know how you could help becoming close to someone in those circumstances. But like many intense relationships, the line between gratitude and resentment, love and hate, is a tenuous one.

Extrapolating outward, I would say that middle-aged women are better equipped to handle the turbulence of an intense friendship than younger women in some ways: They're less apt to take things personally and more willing to take responsibility for their own feelings. Certainly, both Shay and Colleen must draw on their own life experiences to find the courage and patience to work together.

7. What are you writing next?

The book I'm working on takes place closer to home, in a gritty part of Oakland, California, where an out-of-work teacher relocates in order to recover from a terrible loss, only to discover that changing her identity doesn't keep all of her demons at bay, and that she has more to fear than the crime wave sweeping the neighborhood.

Also by Sophie Littlefield

House of Glass

Garden of Stones

Gallery Books

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Sophie Littlefield

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First Gallery Books paperback edition October 2014

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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Cover design by Black Cat Design

Cover photograph © Jamo Saren/Arcangel Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Littlefield, Sophie.

The missing place / Sophie Littlefield.

pages cm

1. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Oil well drilling—Fiction. 4. North Dakota—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3612.I882M57 2014

813'.6—dc23

2014006728

ISBN 978-1-4767-5782-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-5784-1 (ebook)