Inspiration for The Widower I come up with most of my ideas when I’m out running or in the shower or vacuuming the floor. Then I try to find a piece of paper or I keep the idea in my brain long enough to write it down somewhere. I was living in Florida when the image of a man lying on very white sheets came to me. I saw him floating on a lake—as if the bed were a raft. I think I jotted the image down and put it away somewhere, but I kept thinking about him after that—wondering what might have happened to him, wondering how he had ended up floating on his bed, drifting and dreaming, half-dead. As I thought about this guy—while running or driving or watching a boring movie—I started to see that he had been in a bad car accident and that he wasn’t floating on water, but lying in bed on the second floor, floating above the rest of the house, listening to someone moving around downstairs, a woman who loved him. A little while after that, the first sentence came to me, fully formed, which is the way I tend to work. I can’t begin unless the first sentence is perfectly in place, so I think my mind keeps working on it, even when I’m asleep. One morning I sat down and typed: Grace Blackwater is downstairs, saving his life one small gesture at a time. He can hear her straight through the worn wood floor beneath his bed, going about her business as if she owns the place. She doesn’t own the place. He hadn’t called her, but she had come---” Some mornings you get lucky and several sentences come lined up, all ready to go. That’s how the novel began. I was also thinking about how much time we spend in the present remembering the past or imagining the future. I wanted time to be fluid in The Widower because that’s really how it works in our minds. People and things and experiences never leave us; often they are more alive, more lively in our imaginations and memories than anything taking place in the present. I love what Eudora Welty said: “The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.” This is how it is in fiction and, I think, in our everyday lives. We get second chances in life, through luck and grace, even when we might not always deserve them, and we live in the fluid memory of the past, dreaming about the future.