Everything to Lose by Andrew Gross
EVERYTHING TO LOSE
A common question for all novelists is from where do you get your ideas? In my case, each book always seems to be a sort of triangulation of three, sometimes four, completely separate elements or themes that, married together, germinate into the nucleus of plot and character. They can be newspaper articles, TV clips, personal stories. Many times they are things that felt interesting to me a long time back that I didn’t know what to do with then, and put “in the vault” so to speak, to hopefully come to life and fit into something years later.
In EVERYTHING TO LOSE, there were four of these original, but completely separate, elements. The first was a question– how far would you go as a parent to protect your own child? Would you cross the line and do something that you knew was wrong? Even criminal? And which could put you in danger? And then, does doing a bad thing for the right reason make it right? Or at least, forgivable? So I created a gritty, devoted, but desperate mom, whose life has taken an unfortunate turn, and a son with hardships. And a deadbeat dad, and ultimately a tempting twist of fate that lures her over the edge. It’s just a small step from the moral high ground to total freefall.
