Behind The Book
It’s 645 miles from my home in California to my parents’ home in Idaho. I made that drive with my husband and children twice a year for a decade, hauling bikes, toys, and a mouth-breathing golden retriever across the flat desert of the Great Basin. My family thought the landscape was boring, but I found it both peaceful and haunting. Fifteen thousand years ago the Basin was the bed of a vast lake, and the earliest indigenous people made small, seasonal camps beside it. They left only the faintest traces, but as I drove Interstate 80 it sometimes seemed that time might wrinkle before me, the sand might yield to marshland and deep, blue water, and there they would be.
Not many more people live in the Basin now than did in Paleolithic times, but a hundred miles east of Reno and seventy-five miles west of Winnemucca there is a town. You can’t see it from the interstate, but we stumbled upon it one day when the pumps at the Exit 105 Chevron were broken. Its existence out there in the desert, almost a hundred miles from anything else, struck me as kind of wonderful, as if I’d found a secret pocket in the lining of a raggedy coat.
Don’t get me wrong: on its face, Lovelock, Nevada, is a town almost devoid of charm. Most of the buildings in its commercial district are soulless boxes that replaced the original Gold Rush-era buildings in the 1970s. The businesses are the sort that cater to a struggling, working-class community: secondhand clothing stores, inexpensive diners, and a disproportionate number of bars and slot casinos. The houses are small, nondescript bungalows, and there is, on the outskirts of town, a rural slum that is shocking in its poverty and filth. To the objective eye it’s an unsightly scab on a bleak landscape, and to a city girl like me it was almost impossible to imagine why anyone would choose to live there.
But two thousand people do live there. It’s the Pershing County seat. It’s the home of the sheriff’s office and the Pershing High School Mustangs. It has a half dozen churches, and two cemeteries. People grow up there, marry their high school sweethearts, and run businesses that have been in their families for generations. What they don’t do is leave, and when you ask them why, they will tell you the same thing anyone who stays in any small town in America will tell you: their people are there. Their history is there. Their dead are there.
This book is about a man who moves to Lovelock to find sanctuary, only to die a terrible death at the hands of the demons he tried to outrun. It’s about a woman who feels trapped in the town where she was born -- by guilt, duty, and her love for a father she can’t forgive. It’s about the fraught coming of age of a young boy, orphaned and burdened with a terrible secret, who just wants a place to belong. Through them I’ve tried to examine the family-centric themes that interest me most, especially the ways in which parents can fail their children without meaning to, and the ways children find to love them anyway, no matter how much it hurts. And, inspired by this tired but resilient town on an ancient lakebed, I’ve also tried to look at the meaning of home, the power of the past to shape us, and the debts we owe all our dead -- the ones with headstones to mark them, and those whose names are lost to time.