CERTAINTY will be published on April 28. I continue to get questions from readers.
One of the central storylines in the new novel follows a ten-year-old girl named Kate who runs away from her foster parents and travels — alone — through a dangerous world.
On an emotional level, that story connects to my own childhood. It also connects to the reasons I eventually turned away from journalism and became a fiction writer.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Books weren’t a hobby — they were survival.
My father was killed when I was 12. By 16, I was basically on my own. Reading fiction gave me knowledge, meaning, and a way forward.
After college, I worked for a private investigator in New York City, searching for missing kids in Times Square. Pimps were very active in that area and they frequently confronted me. But it felt good to be a searcher, and not one of the missing.
One night, the detective and I went to the police morgue looking for a runaway. There were bodies on the floor. A skull being cut open. I tried to turn what I’d seen into a magazine article. It failed.
The next day, I wrote it as fiction.
That’s when I understood something simple: fiction can tell the truth in ways journalism can’t.