And she would tarnish too. Always famous but always fading, the way old movie stars were, carrying ghosts of their younger selves in their faces. It was a strange thing, to know with certainty that you had peaked.
After I wrote the rough draft of this book, I discovered a few lines that felt like accidental "thesis statements"-- moments in the draft that felt like they communicated, concisely, the reasons I was interested in writing the story, the themes I was interested in exploring. This is one of them.
Anyone who has worked their entire life for a particular goal-- maybe it's going to college, or setting out on your own, or starting a family-- and then achieves that goal has to wrestle with the questions Sloane is wrestling with. Where do I go from here? What do I work toward? What do I even want, now?
But for Sloane, those questions are obviously exaggerated, because she really HAS peaked. She saved the world. There's nothing she can do now that can possibly be bigger or more important than that. That's a tough thing to deal with at such a young age. And that's what made me so curious about this story-- what do the "chosen ones" of our favorite stories DO, after they save the world, destroy the ring, take down the Dark Lord, bring peace to the realm, whatever? Do they just wash the blood off their hands and then..go to the grocery store to get more toilet paper? How do they find meaning in ordinary domestic life?
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