The Story Behind the Story of The Life of Glass

The Life of Glass started for me the way most of my books start, with an image. I had this image in my head of a girl, riding her bike through a desert wash in a pink prom dress. I didn’t exactly know where she was going, except, I knew she had to get to her best friend, who I also knew was a boy. I started writing the book from there, and I kept this image in my head nearly the whole time. I even envisioned it as the book cover: a blurred image of a girl in a fancy pink dress, riding her bike.

If you haven’t already read the book, I’ll tell you this: there is no such scene in the book! Once I got towards the end of the book, this image didn’t exactly fit, although, I did use the idea of the fancy dress and the image of a girl riding her bike to get to her best friend separately, towards the end. But despite the fact that it didn’t actually end up in the book, this image told me a lot about Melissa, about what kind of girl she was, about how she didn’t care much about proms and dresses, but she did care a lot about her friends, her real friends, anyway.

When I first started writing the book, it was just after my grandfather passed away, and after we’d begun to realize that my grandmother, while still physically here in every way, had lost nearly every bit of her short term memory. My grandfather had always been one of the most unique people I knew – nothing at all like Melissa’s father in the book – but just unique in his own way. He always had an opinion (and he was never afraid to let everyone know it) and he was not above singing show tunes in the shower at the top of his lungs. He was really the first person I’d ever been close to who died, and as I began to write The Life of Glass, it was something I was still trying to come to terms with, much the way Melissa is still trying to hold onto her father. Though her situation and mine were not really the same, I felt very much in the same place emotionally as Melissa while I was writing this.

I also thought a lot about my grandmother as I was writing this book, which was why I gave Melissa a grandmother in a similar situation. And I thought it was interesting to show all the different ways Melissa felt abandoned – not just by her mother who starts dating again, or her sister who won’t give her the time of day, but also by diseases, which literally took both her father and her grandmother away.

The idea of Kevin and the horse riding came to me because of this trip I took with my family when I was just a little bit younger than Melissa, when we went to ranch in Montana and rode horses for a week. I’d never ridden a horse before (or since), and suddenly there I was, riding one up the side of a mountain, having no idea what I was doing, feeling both thrilled and terrified that the horse might decide to throw me off at any second. It was an experience that always stuck with me, and it felt like the perfect situation to put Melissa in, when she’s in a spot in her life where she’s so afraid of taking chances, of dying.