– where she now spends part of each month – Rouda says maybe, but not quite yet. There’s a lot of similarities between the types of people that are in the suburbs.”Īs for whether a future book might set amid similar communities in and around Washington D.C. Because it really doesn’t matter so much whether you’re in Southern California or an upscale suburb of Columbus, Ohio or Dallas or Boston or where ever you are. “I think that to me is hopefully where the truth lies. The one thing I’ll tell you is when I’m on a book tour and I’m talking about whatever book I’m talking about, people will say, ‘How did you know my suburb so well? That could be set here.’ “Now we’re in Southern California but we spent a lot of time in Columbus, Ohio as well. “I grew up in suburbs all around the country,” she says. While the book is set in a facsimile of Laguna Beach, Rouda says it’s more generally about any suburb anywhere in the country. “But my browser history is really scary at this point,” Rouda says, and laughs. So when Jane started doing that” - talking about unusual ways to die - “as I was writing her, which is a weird thing to say, I thought it was really interesting. “I’ll probably have a character and a title, and then the characters kind of take over from there. “I don’t have things worked out when I start a novel,” she says. Rouda says she’s not a plot-and-outline writer like some novelists. “And she may be going in that direction to inform you, or she may be throwing you off the path of what she’s actually up to.” “All of a sudden something will pop into her head about how many people die because they leave knives faced up in the dishwasher,” Rouda says. She is, as a result of her loss, also morbidly obsessed with unexpected tragic death. “I’m not a psychiatrist but that would probably be a good diagnosis for her.”

“She is, as you said, perhaps a narcissist,” Rouda says. Jane, who seems clearly to be a narcissist, is ready to take part again in the lives of her family, husband David and daughter Betsy, but as a memorial service for Mary takes place and Betsy’s graduation approaches, is her family still there for her? And if not, to what lengths will Jane go to not be their victim?

Those days mark a coming out for Jane, who has been grief-stricken, medicated and mostly housebound since the tragic drowning death of her oldest daughter Mary a year earlier. “So while she’s grieving she’s also still a full person who brings her whole life’s experiences to the four days this book covers.” “Any kind of character, especially when an entire novel is told in the first person, you’ve got to have more than a one-dimensional character,” Rouda says.

Rouda has focused on writing novels for the last decade or so, with “The Favorite Daughter” her second in a two-book deal with Graydon House Books, an imprint of HarperCollins that specializes in women’s fiction, a perfect fit for Rouda’s unreliable narrator Jane.

Kaira rouda the favorite daughter