Goodreads asked Mark Johansen:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Mark Johansen My wife and I used to take pregnant teenagers into our home. One young lady had a story that I thought was absolutely wild. She claimed that her father was a drug dealer, that the father of her baby had been killed in a gang fight, etc.
Then one day she disappeared. To get clues to where she might have gone we looked through things that she had left behind. And we found the death certificate of her boyfriend, with cause of death listed as "gunshot wound to the head". Eventually I went to the police to report her as a missing person. I told the police officer that I didn't know if it was true, but she had said that her father was a drug dealer. He asked for the father's name, and when I told him, he nodded and replied, "Oh yes, we know him."
(Before meeting some of these young ladies we took in, if someone had asked me if I was aware that there were gangsters and drug addicts in the world, I would have said "of course". But I didn't know any. I lived in a very safe, middle-class world. I ended up meeting many drug addicts, people who had been in and out of prison, etc.)

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