About the author… Katherine Heiny

She lives in Washington DC with her husband and children, and used to live in Boyne City, Michigan, where this novel is set.

This is her second novel. This novel was inspired by… I wanted to set a novel in Boyne City, and I wanted that novel to include lots of sunsets and my favourite beaches and parks,and lots of dinner-parties-gone wrong, which is my absolute favourite thing to write about. I chose teaching as the main character’s occupation because my son’s second grade teacher told me that once the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) had raided her house by mistake (they got the address wrong). It was Pyjama Day, and she and her husband, also a teacher, had to go home and deal with the DEA while wearing their pyjamas. That joke opens the book and everything else pretty much flowed from there.

The most fun/challenging part of writing it was… I didn’t know when I started writing Early Morning Riser that it would include my love of thrift stores or the time my younger son had a meltdown on the local news, or the time I had to bribe him back into the car with marshmallows, or the worst-ever field trip I ever went on as a parentchaperone. Those stories found their way into the novel and now they belong to Jane. The hardest part was reaching the end – I’d grown so attached to all the characters.

What’s next for me is… I’m working on a story collection right now. One of the stories is about a woman who gets really drunk at the airport, and everyone I’ve told about it looks nervous and says, “Is it about me?”