Interview

Emily Chenoweth discusses her first novel, Hello Goodbye, which was inspired by a week that her family and parents' friends spent in a New Hampshire resort to say goodbye to her dying mother.

Can you talk about the real-life event that inspired Hello Goodbye?

My mother was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor during my first year of college. The following summer, my father arranged a family trip to the Mount Washington Hotel, a big, old fashioned resort in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, so that my parents and their East Coast friends could spend some time together before my mother died. I have a handful of pictures from that week, which I looked at a lot as I began to write the book. I kept a journal back then, too, but I lost it a long time ago. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know. Right now, if someone asked me to write down what I actually remember about that week at the hotel, I could do it in ten pages or less. I'm not sure if it's because I have a terrible memory, or if it's because not remembering is part of some psychic defense mechanism.

Your circumstances back then sound very much like Abby's—but this isn't a memoir?

No, not by a long shot. I had originally thought I'd write a memoir (I'd sold it on proposal as such), but then I ran into the problem above: How do you try to tell the truth about an ...