Are there autobiographical elements in City of Light?
LB: I think it’s inevitable that concerns from a writer’s life seep into the work. For example, one day I picked up my son from school with another child who was coming to our house to play. On my way home, my son’s friend shocked me by saying, “I wish I was dead, I want to kill myself.” Of course I spoke to the child’s teacher about this, and the school began a successful intervention. The incident haunted me, however, and I transformed it in to the opening scene of City of Light, when young Grace Sinclair tells fellow student Millicent Talbert that she wants to kills herself in order to be with her dead mother. BT: A number of actual people from the period figure prominently in the story. How did you go about blending these historical figures with fictional characters? I made a decision early on that the main characters in the book (Louisa Barrett, Grace and Tom Sinclair, Franklin Fiske) would be fictional, and the historical figures would exist around them. This way, I could let the
