Paule Marshall and Dani Shapiro were both excellent teachers and role models for me. I appreciated their total honesty about their own writing lives, and their clear passion for what they do. I found it inspiring. But I suppose that since I already knew that I wanted to be a writer when I turned up in their classrooms, my most significant mentor came a step earlier, in college. Blanche McCrary Boyd was the writer-in-residence at Connecticut College, and it was in her class that my brain split open (in a good way). She is an amazing writer, and a larger-than-life personality. I knew that I liked to write when I applied to college, but being around Blanche and listening to her talk about writing made me want to make it my life.

I actually went to both college and graduate school with Hannah. She and I took writing classes together in college, but didn't know each other that well. But in our first year at NYU, Hannah, Helen and I were in Paule Marshall's workshop together, and then in Dani Shapiro's.

We connected because we liked each other's work, and also because we had similar dispositions. This might have been due to the fact that we came from professional families, instead of artistic ones. All three of us had a parent who was a lawyer. So we approached writing, and graduate school, with a slightly more business-like attitude than some of our laid back peers.

It was Helen, the most blunt and charming of us, who suggested in her southern drawl that we should meet over the summer break to critique each other’s work. Hannah and I quickly agreed, seeing this as a way to keep our fiction moving forward, to keep grass from growing under our feet. We met weekly at each other’s apartments throughout the remainder of graduate school, and beyond. What was initially a meeting that concerned only critiquing one another's work, grew to include dinner and wine and lots of chocolate. We became best friends.

Jealousy has never been an issue between us, largely, I think, because we were, and are, very different writers. Hannah wrote beautifully crafted, disturbing short stories. Helen wrote about the southern world she had come from with a hilarious, gothic twist. My work was always longer and seemed to concern family stories.

We have each published one book now, and are laboring away at the second. We continue to meet, and we continue to be the first pair of eyes to see each other's writing, long before agents, editors, boyfriends or husbands. My relationship with Helen and Hannah is, without a doubt, the best thing I got out of graduate school. I am extremely grateful to and for them.

The McLaughlin story is loosely based on my mother's large Irish-Catholic family (her maiden name is McNamara). I was always fascinated by the McNamara family while I was growing up – their sheer number, mute closeness, and myriad secrets that would leak out in half-sentences and half-truths when my aunts and uncles were drunk. I always knew I would write a novel exploring this kind of family, which is a dying breed.

The backstory of the family is very similar to my mother’s family. The Gram character bears a very strong resemblance to my grandmother, who recently passed away. Her background is pretty much my grandmother's history. The deaths of her children actually happened. But the present tense action in the book, and the younger generation, is (as far as I’m aware) entirely fictional.

There were several major hurdles to making this novel work, and I always felt fortunate that POV wasn't one of them. When I finished a chapter from Gracie's point of view, I would hear a different family member's voice. It became a matter of following the voices, rather than choosing one and forcing it to exist. And I was interested in telling different sides of the same story from six separate points of view. I think it's fascinating that a group of people, even within the same family, will view a single event completely differently.

Yes. I'm mid-way through the second (translation: 20th) draft. All I can say definitively at this point is that it involves peacocks, New York City, a famous short story writer and misspent lives. I am alternately enjoying and hating writing it.

Sting did read Within Arm's Reach, and was very complimentary about it. He told me he loved it, and that he was glad I was doing what I was meant to do. This was, of course, lovely to hear from someone I like and respect a lot.