Why did you decide to have your main character be an anorexic? You seem to know an awful lot about the disease.

When I wrote my first outline for The Bubble Gum Thief, Dagny’s character was flat and uninteresting.  In my experience, if someone seems flat and uninteresting, it usually means that I don't them very well.  I started to think more deeply about what someone like Dagny would be like, and how she might be struggling beneath her surface. Thriller novels are populated with protagonists burdened by substance abuse, or gambling issues, or problems with authority. There’s also a lot of manic-pixie depiction of women going on these days.  None of that seemed to be Dagny.  If anything, she was highly-disciplined and incredibly focused. 

I began thinking about women I knew who excelled at school and work, and who were driven to achieve.  More than one I knew were dealing with eating disorders.  It struck me that these issues are far more prevalent than most people realize.  People don’t talk about anorexia because it makes a lot of people uncomfortable.  Some think that eating disorders are a phase that girls go through in high school, but I was seeing it women in older women.  I felt that the issue was underexplored, and that there would be merit to exploring it.  It was highly presumptuous of me to think I could tackle the subject, so I spent a few months reading medical studies and personal memoirs about it to make sure that I thought I could do it justice.  I also drew upon personal observation of and discussion with friends.  Dagny’s eating habits, her obsessive running … these are things I’ve seen firsthand.

Usually, a book about a person suffering from an eating disorder is about the disorder.  That’s actually a pretty unfair way to explore the disorder.  Anorexia may be a part of someone’s life, but it isn’t the whole of their life.  Dagny Gray struggles with anorexia, but it doesn’t define her.  I hope I’ve done her justice.