I spent nearly a year getting the hang of the Price girls, by choosing a practice scene and writing it in every different voice. I did that over and over until I felt the rhythm and verbal instincts of character: Rachel’s malapropisms, Leah’s earnestness, the bizarre effects of Adah’s brain damage, and so forth. Adah was the most challenging character I’ve ever created, starting with a lot of medical research about hemiplegia. Those long palindromes became a family project, we all worked on them. I gave not one single thought to the headaches I was giving to my future translators.
Why I framed the story this way has to do with the novel’s central question. I don’t want to oversimplify, but this novel is about presumptions, arrogance, and the terrible things one country will do to another. How, in the aftermath, do we make our peace with that?
I don’t believe there is one single answer to that question; there are many. In the four Price daughters and their mother, I personified attitudes crossing the spectrum from Orleanna’s paralyzing guilt to Rachel’s blithe “What, me worry?” I wanted to create a moral conversation. That’s what literature can do.