Cara Achterberg asked Katherine Center:

In researching Happiness for Beginners, did you take a wilderness trek? How did you come up with the details of their adventures? Do you know someone with the eye ailment that Jake has? Have you experienced someone stepping on a fallen log and getting injured?

Katherine Center Cara, I LOVE this question!!! I DID take a wilderness trek—but it was not specifically done to research the book! I went on a trip when I was in college—for four weeks, not three, in the Absarokas. The characters in Happiness for Beginners are all made-up, but much of what happens on the trip is just taken straight from what happened on my actual trip. We did have a mid-summer blizzard, we did get lost on our "solo," and we did have a guy who stepped on a rotten log and broke his hip. Like in the book, we made a litter out of backpack frames and carried him out to a trailhead. It was the most physically gruelling thing I've ever done, and it has stayed with me quite vividly! I'd always kept the trip in the back of my head head as something to write about, but then, one day, up in my attic, I found my old journal from the trip—and some pressed forget-me-nots from the trip fluttered out when I opened it—and I was like, "Time to do this." Like Helen, I did not bring a book, so I wrote in my journal constantly. It was very thorough and made for a great template for the story. Of course, writing fiction is always like making a collage. You pull in bits and pieces of "real" things, and you mix them together with made-up ones. Jake's eyes came from research. That whole arc came from this feeling I had that Jake needed to have a secret from Helen—something that he was facing on his own that was hard. She was trying to overcome her past, and he was staring down his future, and I liked the idea that they could help each other... :)

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