What She Stole follows a seventeen-year-old who is caught shoplifting, causing her to spend hours alone in a mall security room where she relives painful childhood memories, forcing her to confront a troubled family history. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

This is a case of “write what you know,” and so this part is autobiographical. I really did try to shoplift a sequined purse from the mall when I was seventeen! However, I don’t recall anything else about the ordeal, and so the ensuing scenes are imagined. While a lot of Eloise’s voice and character came from my own childhood, there is also a lot that is fictional to make up her troubled world. My goal was to make a troubled teen lovable, even though her actions and things that happen to her are often unlikeable and wild.

How did you develop Eloise’s distinctive personality, particularly her sharp humor, sensitivity, and impulsive behavior, and what role do her observations of the world around her play in revealing emotions she struggles to express directly?

Eloise is based on every teenager I knew in high school, and she’s also a little bit like me. My brain is always running, and so in this way I put my own associations into Eloise’s characteristics. As a character study, I wanted the style of the novel to show the reader a “narrative of revelation,” as defined in Tracy Kidder’s Good Prose:

“The most important conflict often happens within a character, or within the narrator. The story begins with an inscrutable character and ends with a person the author and reader understand better than before, a series of events that yields, however quietly, a dramatic truth. One might call this kind of story a narrative of revelation (Kidder, 15).”

In this way, I thought revealing Eloise’s emotional arc through her own observations about the world would best reveal her quiet truth.

How does the novel examine the ways childhood experiences can shape someone’s understanding of love and personal worth?

In this novel, Eloise comes to the realization that her experiences in childhood set her up with a dysfunctional view of love and warped sense of trust. From early on, she was neglected and abused, which taught her that love hurts, and that she can’t count on anyone. But she also realizes that she can love herself, and give herself what she needs to survive, and to thrive. She starts off with low self-esteem, but she grows into her own sense of self by the end of the novel.

How do you hope Eloise’s experiences contribute to conversations about emotional needs, family dysfunction, and the lasting effects of childhood experiences?

This is a great question. Families are complicated, and everyone will come away from reading about Eloise’s family with a different perspective. Did Eloise behave badly because she was abused at home? Or was she disciplined and punished at home because she behaved badly? As the American Psychological Association points out: “We know that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as various forms of abuse and neglect, increase the risk of misconduct.” So we can see that Eloise is acting out in accordance to her adverse childhood experiences. I hope that readers of “What She Stole” gain more empathy for children and teens and perhaps judge them less harshly when they show problematic behavior. And I also hope readers see that healing is possible, as Eloise heals through her later-in-life experiences with massage, gentle-touch chiropractic, and therapy. 

Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website