Today I was twice reminded that I have a quirk.

This morning, I received a request to speak at an event and had to ask my standard question: “Can you describe the venue to me, please?” Here is my ideal venue in which to speak. It’s a large, low-ceilinged room, perhaps a meeting room or ballroom in a hotel, filled with chairs and/or tables (and of course, an audience of avid readers). Sure enough, the request was for just such a venue, and I breathed a sigh of relief for reasons I’ll get to soon enough.

Then this afternoon, John and I visited a new health club. As part of the tour, we were taken into the gym. John admired the hugeness of the place, the maple floors, the equipment stored against the walls, while I hung back in the doorway asking, “Uh, the yoga class isn’t held in here, is it?” (It’s not. Big sigh of relief).

It’s hard to explain how I feel about huge, open spaces (Like the train station above. Shudder). If you have any trepidation at all about heights, I can probably make you understand in this way: Imagine standing on the top of twenty story building, at the very edge of the roof, no railing between you and the abyss. That’s how I feel standing in the middle of a gym or Union Station or a giant auditorium. (Now, as you stand at the edge of that roof, try to give a speech. Ha!).

A couple of years ago I was discussing my speaking venue dilemma with a friend, poet and short story writer Maureen Sherbondy, and I told her how foolish I felt about my need to ascertain the venue before accepting an invitation to speak. Maureen said something like “But you’re a writer. People expect writers to have quirks.” So now I’m into embracing my inner quirk. I much prefer that word to “phobia.”

Where did this come from? I’ve already opened up in the blog about my selective mutism as a kid, and this may have been an extension of that in some way–the school phobia leading to the large space phobia. I had many fears when I was young, and with a fascination for all things psychological, I worked through them one by one as I got older. The fear I am most proud of conquering was my fear of hospitals. I wouldn’t visit hospitalized friends or family; I couldn’t even tolerate the lobbies. In my graduate social work program, I actively avoided classes where I knew there would be students whose focus was on medical social work because I didn’t want to hear them talk about their cases. Yet, an event in my life ultimately led me to want to be a medical social worker myself. I was familiar with desensitization and other ways of overcoming fears, so I created my own therapeutic approach to the problem. Six months after making my decision to switch from being a family therapist to a medical social worker, I was working in a hospital and loving it. What an amazing sense of accomplishment that was!

But no amount of desensitization or insight or therapy has ever put a dent in my discomfort with big spaces. I’ve spoken in a few of them, managing to find work-arounds that probably made me seem highly eccentric (an odd placement of the podium, perhaps), but I guess I’m just a quirky writer and that’s all there is to it. 

So how about you? Can you stand on the roof of a twenty-story building without freaking out? Ride in teeny tiny elevators? Marvel at the colors of the snake in your backyard? What’s your quirk?

Over the next few posts, I’m going to share some of the research that went into the writing of my recently resissued novel, Breaking the Silence. I’ll write about the secret CIA Mind Control experiments in which my character, Sarah Tolley, was a participant, and I’ll talk about  my personal experience with selective mutism, which is five-year-old Emma’s affliction.   

Right now, though, I’m going to start on a lighter note as I describe my harrowing experience with hot air balloons. In Breaking the Silence, Dylan Geer makes his living as a hot air balloon pilot. Since he’s a point-of-view character, I wanted to understand what his world was like. During the time I was researching Breaking the Silence, my brother-in-law worked for a hot air balloon company, so I was able to quickly schedule a flight. The weather, though, didn’t care about my connections, and six flights were cancelled because of high winds or rain. A seventh had to be cancelled when we hit a traffic jam on the beltway around Washington DC on our way to the launch site. I was living in Northern Virginia at the time, and as those of you familiar with that area know, traffic can come to a standstill that lasts hours. And this one did. Darkness was falling by the time we gave up and headed back home.

Finally, it looked as though the eighth flight would be a go and we arrived at the launch site with time to spare. There were to be two flights that evening, and ours would be the second. My then-husband and I climbed into the chase vehicle while the first set of passengers–four senior citizens–were helped into the basket. I was excited to have the time in the chase vehicle, and I whipped out my pad and pen to take notes as we drove all over rural Maryland trying to keep the balloon in sight. The winds were misbehaving a bit. They would misbehave a bit more before the evening was over.

Part of the role of the chase crew is to find a landing site for the balloon. This was a challenge, since the balloon seemed to be flying farther and faster than anyone had anticipated. Finally, we found a field. The only building was a beautful, big farmhouse and the crew asked the owners for permission to land the balloon on their land. Then we all stood around and watched the distant dot in the sky as it grew bigger and bigger, heading smoothly for the field near the house.

Suddenly, a gust of wind grabbed hold of the balloon, lifting it abruptly into the air again and out of reach of the crew. Everyone on the ground and in the balloon started yelling and shouting (and maybe even screaming and ducking; that would be me) as the balloon headed directly for the chase vehicle. The basket bashed into the side of the van, and then the wind pulled both balloon and basket rapidly down the gravel driveway. The chase crew, my ex, and the adult family members from the farmhouse ran after the basket, trying to stop its sideways slide. The balloon itself smashed into the farmhouse, finally bringing the basket’s wild ride to a halt. Thankfully, injuries to the passengers were minor–a bloody gash on a leg and some very jangled nerves–but the balloon was not so lucky–it suffered tears that would require repair before it could fly again. I can’t say I was unhappy about that! No way was I going up that day.

But I was determined to have my flight. A few weeks later, I climbed into that same basket on a balmy evening and we rose into the air. I had one minor moment of “Ack! This is high!” before settling into the amazing sensation of sailing far above the ground. We were up there no more than ten minutes, though, when it started to sprinkle. The sprinkle turned to real, serious rain, and our pilot began searching for a place to land. In communication with the chase crew, he learned of a quarry not far from where we were flying.

When you think of landing a balloon, you think of a nice flat field, don’t you? Maybe there’d be a goat or a bull in the field, but that would be the worst of it. But a quarry? We had to land and land fast, and the quarry was our only choice. I was able to see firsthand the skill of our pilot as he maneuvered our balloon between two rock walls, dodged the jagged remnant of a dead tree trunk by–I swear–one inch, and brought the basket down with a thud on the narrow road that ran through the quarry. I will end my tale here, and only mention in passing that the gates leading out of the quarry were locked, with the balloon and basket and us on one side and the chase vehicle and crew on the other.

Dylan Geer, my commitment phobic character,  has one close call with his balloon, though not quite as dramatic as what I actually witnessed. It was fun getting to write about something as light-hearted as hot air balloons in an otherwise serious story.

I hope I get to fly in a hot air balloon again, but I’m going to wait until I’m someplace where there are wide open spaces and no wind and no chance of rain. Does a place like that exist?

I’m thrilled that Breaking the Silence has been reissued so that my newer readers get to enjoy this suspenseful story. It should be available today, November 24th, online and in stores, and you can read an exerpt from it here. (If your book store doesn’t have it, remember that they can order it for you at no charge). This book is one of my favorites and I love the new cover. I thought I’d share an interview I did for this special reissue with you. Note to readers groups: This book is a particularly great one for discussion, and a readers’ guide is available on my website. I’ll be posting a bit more about the research that went into Breaking the Silence over the next couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Q. How would you describe Breaking the Silence?

A. Like most of my books, Breaking the Silence is part suspense, part mystery, part romance, and one hundred percent family drama. The plot is complex, with seemingly unrelated threads: a five-year-old girl who suddenly stops talking, an elderly woman who was involved in the CIA mind control experiments during the fifties, a commitment-phobic man who flies hot air balloons for a living, and a female astronomer who gradually pulls the threads of the story together.

Q. Who would enjoy reading Breaking the Silence?

A. My audience is generally made up of women of all ages, including young adults, who I believe will love the intergenerational story, the mother-daughter bond, and the romantic elements. I also have a faithful contingent of male readers, and they particular seem to enjoy Breaking the Silence because of the strong element of psychological suspense.

Q. How did you come up with the storyline for Breaking the Silence?

A. When thinking about ideas for a new book, I like to wander through the nonfiction stacks at the library to see what jumps out at me. I stumbled across a book on the CIA mind control program on one of those forays through the library and became fascinated by the devastating human stories inside. As I began reading about the toll the MK-ULTRA project took on its victims and their families, the idea for Breaking the Silence began to take shape in my mind.

While the mind control experiments gave me the idea for the book, the main focus in the novel is the relationships between the characters. I try to create characters who will have the most difficult time coping with the events in a particular story in order to increase the tension. In Breaking the Silence, I created Sarah, an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Emma, a little girl who doesn’t speak. They are two people at different ends of the age spectrum who have one thing in common—they can’t communicate about the secrets each of them carries.

Q. There are some heavy topics addressed in Breaking the Silence: Alzheimer’s, mutism, suicide, mind control. Can the book possibly have a happy ending?

A. Breaking the Silence ends on a realistic yet upbeat note that I think will satisfy my readers. I personally don’t care to read books that end tragically or with too much of the story left unresolved. That’s why I try to give my novels satisfying endings. Some things—Alzheimer’s, for example—are unfixable, but as long as my characters meet the challenge of handling their problems with courage and integrity, I think readers will cheer them on.

Q. What themes do you explore in Breaking the Silence?

A. One of the strongest themes in Breaking the Silence is the value of every human being, whether he or she has Alzheimer’s, is a psychiatric patient, or a five-year-old child. The destructive nature of secrets, the bond between generations as well as between mothers and daughters, and the enduring power of love are other themes explored in the story.

Q. What was the most difficult part of writing Breaking the Silence?

A. It’s always a challenge to move back and forth between the past and present when writing a novel. Three quarters of Breaking the Silence takes place in the present, but the rest of it is Sarah’s story from her days as a psychiatric nurse. When I write a book set in two diverse time periods, I often write the entire past story first so that I don’t lose the sense of time and place or the voice of the character. I wrote Sarah’s story in its entirety. Then I built the current day events around it so that the pieces of the story flow together—seamlessly, I hope.

Q. You have a background as a psychotherapist.  How did that influence this story?

A. As a psychotherapist, my first concern was to “do no harm,” so it was hard to imagine psychiatric workers taking part in something as horrific as the mind control experiments. That was one reason I wanted to write the story of the past from the point of view of a nurse rather than a patient. I believe it’s clear in the book how the charismatic psychiatrist in charge was able to persuade his staff that his approaches were at the cutting edge of the field.

I was also interested in how the therapist in the story would work with Emma, especially when Emma and Sarah are brought together during a session. Emma and her selective mutism intrigued me, but my heart went out to Sarah. There’s a tendency to forget that Alzheimer’s patients have a world of memories locked deep inside them. I liked creating a character who was still able to give something to the people around her in spite of her illness.

Q. What do you enjoy most about being a novelist?

A. I love being able to touch thousands of people around the world with my stories. One of my Japanese readers emailed me to say, “You make me believe that life is beautiful even if it is also filled with pain and rage.” Her words mean so much to me, and that is the message I’d love my readers to take away with them from Breaking the Silence.