Goodreads asked Michael-Patrick Harrington:

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

Michael-Patrick Harrington The Distant Sound of Boiling Tea, out soon, involves a female teacher having sex with a fifteen-year-old boy. That just came from the headlines. But the book is really about the boy's mother, Ruth.

I don't know where Ruth came from. I workshopped this book, and that helped, but I think that Ruth came from me asking myself: what's the worse response a parent could have in the situation? Okay, it was easy to envision trashy responses, but then getting in the psychology of her behavior lead me into more subtle areas, such as ambivalence.

She became a character that is hard to pin down, because every decision has to be forced from her. For the most part, she cannot decide for herself, and when she does, the narcissism that comes with the territory leads her into almost always making the wrong choice, which in turn makes her even more ambivalent next time. I found that idea fascinating.

Sometimes inspiration comes from the most obvious places, like newspaper headlines, but often it comes from creating a character in your head and then placing him or her into a situation - just to see what happens. We are storytellers, after all.

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