Goodreads asked Laurel Saville:

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

Laurel Saville I would say that all of my books and stories start with some moment that seems resonant to me, some image, experience or scene that keeps coming back to me. The writing is a process of figuring out how that moment came to be. That’s the imaginative aspect of the work of writing. With "Henry and Rachel", it was wondering why Rachel would leave her husband and oldest son in Jamaica when she fled with her other children for New York. In “How Much Living Can You Buy,” it began with the image of a stolen jewelry box in an anecdote from a friend. With "North of Here", I had a mental picture of a young girl on the back of a snowmobile, in the woods at night, wondering about the blue light coming from the windows of the houses she passed. That scene was eventually cut from the book, but it is where it began. I wanted to know who she was and how she got there. To answer that question, I started writing about the adults that I envisioned as her parents first, and that story became the book.

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