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My friend's comment inspired me to think about the way an outsider can challenge a world like the one I had grown up in. In this community everyone knows everyone else, and most people are related in some way. People feel rooted in the city; it is a community that goes back several generations. I am a fifth generation Memphian on one side, and most of my family still lives there. My great grandfather started the Jewish newspaper; my grandparents helped found the Jewish day school there. I grew up feeling thatI had a place, that I was connected to a community and a tradition.
But I also felt that there was little room to be different. There was a strong pressure to conform to a narrow definition of how you were supposed to be, and it was considered wrong to question anything about the community. For me, this was often suffocating, and ultimately I chose to live in a place that was more open.
Writing this novel was a way to explore my own relationship to this community. Adopting the point of view of the women of the Ladies Auxiliary, I began to understand their impulse to preserve a way of life that sometimes felt as if it was slipping away. I missed the sense of kinship that I grew up with. I missed being rooted in a place and having deep connections to a city and the people who live there. But I also felt the difficulty of trying to live in such a close-knit world. I discovered that writing about the community where I grew up separated me more from it. It was as if I had broken a pact not to reveal the inner workings of this world and could never be inside of it again. But for me, part of being a writer means looking honestly at my own world and asking questions about it.
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