When real life intersects with fiction

I had been at work on versions of YOU ARE MY ONLY for several years.  It was, at first, a book that emerged from my fascination with a certain abandoned mental hospital in Philadelphia and the urban explorers who had inhabited that place.  It was, also from the very start, a book about the ramifications of abduction. Long ago, I'd watched a woman leave an infant unattended in a back yard.  That image had always stayed with me; in time, it became fiction.



Yesterday, I was at a client office when, on the TV screen, I saw the muted news about Carlina White, who was 19 days old when she was abducted from a hospital and who, 23 years later, solved her own case.  She reports being moved from home to home, city to city, much as my character, Sophie is.  She speaks of the paranoia of the woman who abducted her, and of the faith her biological family always had that she was still alive.



I had planned to post the cover of YOU ARE MY ONLY yesterday afternoon.  This convergence of real life and fiction is, I find, eerie and haunting.  I am exuberant that Carlina White has found her home.  I am heartbroken that she had been taken from it for 23 long years.