Woodland settings figure heavily in your writing. Do you, like your characters, have a special connection to the North Carolina forest?
My mother teases me that when I moved to London I said, “As long as I can see one tree from my bedroom window, I’ll be fine.” I don’t know where my love of the forest comes from. Even though I grew up in an English village surrounded by open countryside with rolling fields, I had this fantasy of a bathroom with a huge window that looked into woods. The moment I stepped into our house—and saw the view—I felt as if I had come home. We live in the middle of the forest, at the bottom of a very steep hill that inspired Saponi Mountain. I love woodland gardening; I love watching the seasons change through the leaves; and I love the way the light of the gloaming makes the treetops shine gold. My original title for this novel was The Gloaming.
Why do twists of fate play an important role in your fiction?
In my mid-twenties, I was working in the London fashion industry and focused on my goal of becoming an assistant fashion editor. When I failed to snag the job of my dreams, I was devastated. My boss suggested going to work for her husband, and a few months later my new job took me to New York. Flying home through JFK Airport, I started talking with this guy. We discovered we were on the same flight and swapped seats to sit next to each other. Even though we chatted the entire way across the Atlantic, we never exchanged last names. (I know, really?) After we landed at Heathrow, I was stuck in customs for two hours and assumed I would never see him again. But I emerged in arrivals and there he was—desperate to pee but too terrified to move in case he missed me. He was a sweatshirt-clad professor living in a small Midwest college town; I was a London fashionista with a wardrobe of designer leather skirts. I was the daughter of an Anglican priest; he was the grandson of a Hassidic rabbi. I grew up in rural England; he grew up in Brooklyn. He was divorced and thirty-eight; I was twenty-four and determined to stay single. Last summer we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Now ask me why I believe in fate… .
ISBN-13: 9781460323731
THE IN-BETWEEN HOUR
Copyright © 2014 by Barbara Claypole White
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