Until It Was Gone follows a woman who has left her marriage of forty years and sets out to try and reconnect with their estranged daughter and her grandchild, whom she has never met. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I was a marriage and family therapist for over thirty-five years, so all my novels focus on families and how they traverse life’s problems and demonstrate their resilience. In this novel, I wanted to show how contemporary problems interact with a family trying its best to solve their problems and move forward. Among these difficulties are COVID, marital separation, mass shooting, parent/child estrangement, adult survival of childhood sexual abuse, and abortion. Despite the weightiness of these problems, the story is often very humorous.

What character did you enjoy writing for? Was there one that was more challenging to write for?

I enjoyed writing Gretchen most. She is a tough woman with a big heart who has faced the tragic loss of her husband. She is curmudgeonly and yet tender. She also has the most important monologue in the book, a scene that took considerable time to write.

Laney was a challenge mainly because she is a lead character and is female. As a male writer, I work hard to avoid female stereotypes and, instead, emphasize strength and independence and resolve.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I am always interested in family dysfunction and how families address it. All families have some degree of dysfunction. How they draw on their basic connectedness to support one another and make it through the dilemmas they face is often what defines a family.

I am very interested in family/life transitions, periods when family members and the family, as a whole, must make adjustments and changes (often ones they don’t want to make) so that family members can grow. All transitions involve some degree of loss. Members have to let go of what was in order to discover what will be.

I find that another theme that runs through most of my novels is how we deal with the randomness of our lives, the things that cannot be predicted or prevented. A death, an illness, an unjust law, the sudden end of a relationship. How we think about and cope with the eventuality of death often defines how we will live.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

My next novel is entitled, Last Alive. I am almost finished with the first draft. It might appear in 2025. The phenomenon of roadside memorials (crosses and other objects by the side of the road, that are remembrances of loved ones lost in automobile accidents) drew my attention and plays a significant role in the story of yet another family.

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