Goodreads asked Deborah Goodrich Royce:

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

Deborah Goodrich Royce I got the idea for Finding Mrs. Ford from many aspects of life over many years of living it. I am from Detroit—and Detroit was in a serious state of decline in the 1970s when I was a teenager—so I set half of the book in that milieu. In contrast, the other half of the book is set in Watch Hill, a bucolic and rarified summer community on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The two worlds could not be more opposite, yet Susan Ford navigates both of them, albeit at different ages and stages of her life. I like playing with the concept of a person's identity and whether or not that changes (or seems to change) in different circumstances.
Additionally, I have always been fascinated by the Middle East. One of my characters is a Chaldean (a Catholic from Iraq). There are quite a few Chaldeans in Detroit, though many Americans are not familiar with this group. Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister was a Chaldean. I find that extremely interesting and I like looking at how different people from different parts of this planet can intersect in one place or another. Is it fate that throws people together or places us in one location or another? And then what do we do with it?

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