Lindsey Forrest, author of, All Who Are Lost, has been so gracious and kind enough to agree
to be featured on the blog for a short Q & A. Below are some of the
questions I asked her based on my reading experience of the book and what I was
curious to know. Let us know your thoughts in the comment box below!
Q: What inspired you to write this book
centered on the dramas of two families?
Lindsey Forrest: In my
mind, there are really three families: the Ashmores, the St. Brides, and the “bridge”
family, the Abbotts.
I am always interested in the dynamics of family
relationships, particularly the relationships between sisters. My sister and I
are seven years apart in age, and as we grew up, we had very little in common.
She was in fifth grade when I went to college, so we shared no life
experiences. Laura has that same relationship to Diana and Lucy, who were
considerably older than she was.
Just as my sister and I developed a close relationship once we were adults, Laura is able to begin to establish adult relationships with her sisters once she returns to Virginia. She is no longer the “little sister”; she is their equal. Add to that her love for Diana’s estranged husband – a young man who was always out of reach before, due to the six years that separated them – and even an adult relationship seems impossible. So how do they overcome that? How does loyalty co-exist with a rival love?
The other thing that intrigued me was the contrast
among the families. The Abbotts comprised an impoverished hodgepodge family
dominated by an obsessed man with no parenting skills and a dead woman with a
history of instability and adultery. It was a family that all of the daughters
desired to escape.
The Ashmores, on the other hand, were a close and
loving family with long-standing ties to their land. The “tent pole” of that
family was the great love affair of Philip and Peggy Ashmore that gave Richard
and Lucy a secure childhood and allowed them to remain close to their parents
as they matured. Quite different environments in which to grow up!
Even the St. Brides are a more united and stable
family than the Abbotts, with their shared interests in money and business. Meg
thrives in the St. Bride family, and even Laura finds a stability that allows
her the breathing space she needs to recover from Dominic Abbott’s complete
lack of parenting skills.
Q: In revealing so many secrets in this
first book, what message were you trying to send to your readers about
families?
Lindsey Forrest: Families have layers. The same woman can be wife, mother, sister, aunt,
daughter; a man is husband, father, brother, son. And that’s not even
considering the relationships we acquire through a spouse! The familiarity we
feel with a family member can lead us to believe that we know that person
intimately and can also make us discount that person’s experiences outside the
family circle. But we can be wrong. We really don’t know that person at all.
Richard, a loving son, loyal foster brother, and
protective father, harbors a secret that he never wants his parents, foster
sister, or daughter to discover. Julie conceals her true self because she is
afraid her father won’t approve of her. Secrets exist between Diana and her
husband, Diana and her sisters, even Diana and her father. Laura keeps secret
her plan to escape; later she keeps the secret of her actions on Ash Marine and
her rescue of Meg. Even Cam keeps the secret of Meg’s birth from his family
until he writes a letter to his trusted brother.
Because all these people keep secrets that go to
the heart of who they really are, do their families truly know them? And if
their families don’t know them, can they really love them? Laura, an enigma to
the rest of the Abbotts, feels unloved and unwanted, partly because no one
really knows her well enough to appreciate her remarkable strength. Cam risks
being thought a complete cad by his family to protect Meg, where the truth is
that he was a knight in shining armor to a scared girl. Do the St. Brides
really know him, or do they see him as a source of cash? They certainly don’t
know Laura, whom they see as a gold digger, until Cam lets Mark know why he
married her. Richard didn’t want to risk losing his father’s respect, but by
doing so, he cut himself off from earning Philip’s respect for his real
achievement, overcoming his great folly and rebuilding his life after failure.
Even Dominic Abbott keeps a secret that, if known,
might have changed the dynamics of the Abbotts. What really happened that day
in Ireland when his beloved mistress drowned?
By keeping so many secrets, the characters all
isolate themselves from acceptance and love. Only Lucy, who keeps secrets only
for other people, is secure in the love of her family, and thus only Lucy seeks
to keep the family intact.
Q: Who was your favorite character and
why?
Lindsey Forrest: It is difficult to pick a favorite character – it is likepicking your
favorite child (although I only have one, so that’s an easy pick for me!). That
being said, I do have a favorite character to write – I enjoy
being in her head and writing from her point of view.
So here it is. My favorite character to write is Diana
Ashmore. She has a very strong voice, and even though she is snarky,
she is also passionate, profane, and opinionated. She’s the contrast to Laura’s
initial adolescent hero worship of Richard Ashmore, as no one can cut Mr.
Perfect down to size better than his wife. The real fun, of course, is that
Diana is an unreliable narrator. After all, the first thing she says about
herself is that she is no good with the truth.
The other reason I enjoy Diana is that I get to
write in first person. The book originally was in the first person point of
view, but it didn’t work. It’s too necessary to know at times what other people
are thinking, so I couldn’t write the entire book through Laura’s eyes. If the
book was in Laura’s first person viewpoint, we wouldn’t know why Richard has a
change of heart after he rejects her, we would never know what really happened
in the Ashmore marriage, and we would not know that Meg stumbles upon her
father’s letter at the end. So the story itself had to be in third person, but
I had to tell the story of the Ashmore marriage through Diana’s eyes, as
Richard was never going to tell anyone anything.
Q: Which character do you think had the
most potential to win the reader over chapter by chapter?
Lindsey Forrest: Richard Ashmore is reserved and defensive throughout most of All Who
Are Lost, as he knows he screwed up royally as a younger man. He is well
aware of his responsibility for the demise of his marriage, but he has put that
in the past until Laura returns and the past intrudes into the present. He has
to defend himself all over again and start admitting what he always wanted to
keep secret. During the book, the reader gets to know Richard and learns what
really happened in the Ashmore marriage, why he turned to the last woman in the
world he should have been with. The reader also sees Richard being charming and
light-hearted, such as the evening he and Laura spend in the B&B in
Charlottesville (the night before the visit to Monticello). As his defenses
drop away, we get to know Richard as he really is.
Q: Which character do you think the
reader disliked as the book progressed?
Lindsey Forrest: I think this is true for Cameron St. Bride and his siblings. Mark, who
starts off as a source of strength, turns into a delusional pest. In the second
book, Emma’s jealousy will morph into a threat. Cam himself starts off
favorably and begins to lose sympathy, as his manipulations and past misdeeds
begin to emerge.
I suspect, however, that most people lose all
sympathy for Dominic Abbott, who starts off a victim and emerges as someone who
should never have had children. By the end of the first book, it should be
clear (I hope) that his daughters existed in his mind as a means to achieve
greatness – an ambition thwarted when the two talented daughters slip out of
his reach by very different means.
Q: What does the absence of Francie
symbolize in the first book?
Lindsey Forrest: Francie leaves a big hole in the family, as only she could explain why
she did some of the things that she did to Laura, to Diana, and to Richard
himself. More than either Laura or Diana, Francie symbolizes the terrible
damage Dominic Abbott did to his daughters in his drive to recreate his lost
muse. As Diana cattily remarks, Francie had a “nice little voice” and would
have done well in a church choir. Dominic, a professional musician, certainly
knew who had the talent and who didn’t; he let Francie’s practices slide while
he pushed both Diana and Laura to the point where Diana escaped into a bad
marriage and Laura vanished. In the Abbott family, Francie was the
afterthought. The only time she succeeded in winning anyone’s attention, albeit
briefly and for the wrong reasons and with the wrong person, was during her
affair with Richard.
Q: Does the absence of Francie allow Cat
Courtney to take over?
Lindsey Forrest: Francie’s absence made a big difference to Laura, personally and
professionally. Although Laura was by far the more talented of the two, she
tended to hang back and let Francie have the limelight. She felt she could
never compete with Francie, who had the personality and vivacity to eclipse
her. With Francie gone, all her ties to the past cut, Laura’s own ambition
begins to emerge. She always was the stronger and more resilient of the two, as
seen in the events surrounding Meg’s birth, but she no longer has to hold back
and wait in the shadows while Francie gets all the attention. She is able to
shine.