Goodreads asked Caroline Leavitt:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Caroline Leavitt When I was 17, a friend of mine, who was engaged to a much older man who was controlling, was murdered by her fiance because she wanted to break up. I was haunted. Ten years later, my own fiance died suddenly and I was heartstruck with grief. I felt the only way to get out of it was to plunge into a relationship. I plunged into the wrong one, with a soft=spoken guy who assured me he loved me over and over, even as he was telling me I was a little too heavy (I was 95 pounds), I dressed wrongly, and I had bad friends. I began to believe him, and it wasn't until he destroyed a chapter of my novel in progress and replaced it with Groucho Marx jokes, that I reacted. "There is no you," he told me gently. "There is just me." That's when I knew I had to leave, and when I realized I had been emotionally abused.

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