The theme arrived long before the word. I worked on the novel for six years under a different title, which wasn’t a very good one. I was near the end of a first draft when one day I thought about this amazing word, lacuna, with all its intertwined meanings that unlock the inner workings of my story. I typed it, stared at it, and actually may have smacked myself on the forehead. It must have been lurking in my unconsciousness for a while, because everything came together around that word, once I committed it to the page. This novel is about all the important things you don’t know – the other side of the story, the piece of history that’s been erased. The plot is elaborately drawn around this idea in dozens of different ways.
The word “lacuna” is familiar to editors, physiologists, and certain other professionals, but I suppose it’s not a word most people hear every day. For this, I make no apologies. It’s a perfectly good, solid English word (not Spanish) that anyone can look up in the dictionary. Ours is a beautiful, rich language with words for every possible concept and shade of meaning. Why not use them all?