What is the significance of the title of Vinegar Hill?
From the start, I knew that I wanted to name the book after the street this family lived on, but even after I’d finished the manuscript, I wasn’t able to come up with a name that set an appropriate tone. I wanted something with a bitter connotation-this is a book about a difficult year in the life of a family-but I wanted to modify that bitterness with a sense of motion or transition as a means of suggesting, even if subtly, the promise of transcendence and hope. I was living in Ithaca, New York at the time, where I was finishing an MFA in Fiction at Cornell University. One day, driving to nearby Trumansburg for a conference with my advisor-a wonderful teacher and writer named James McConkey-I happened to glance up and see a street sign that said “Vinegar Hill.” It was perfect. I had never turned onto that street before, and I made a point never to do so afterwards. I wanted it to belong solely to my characters. And it does.
