Photo credit: Nathan Jandl
When people ask how I came up with the concept for my second novel,
The Immortalists — four siblings visit a fortune teller who is rumored to be able to tell anyone the date that they will die — I always wish I had a better answer. The truth is that it simmered for years, condensing slowly; it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when the idea was first sparked. What I do remember, in painstaking detail, is the process of developing each sibling’s identity, which took many months and sometimes years of individualized research.
Like real siblings, they came into focus one by one — though in my case they did so in reverse, from youngest to oldest. This is the way their stories are told in the novel...