The new book cover

This is the new cover for my novel, which will be published by Random House on April 14. The book follows Lacey Brennan, a 30-something woman forced to redefine love, family and career after her young marriage falters. It takes place over five years, and she goes through a lot, but the story has a happy ending, which I wrote the summer before last while living in a sublet apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Every day I sat at this dark wooden dining table in a straight backed wooden dining chair and wrote with the air conditioning on full blast and music on in the background, four stories up from the ground, and I didn't talk to anyone and I didn't leave the apartment (except to get lunch) until 6 pm, when I'd go to yoga around the corner. It was a strange time because I was missing Los Angeles, and when I did leave to get lunch or take a walk, I'd walk around with my Ipod on, listening to songs about L.A. and missing it, but sort of enjoying the missing. I wore that Ipod everywhere. I didn't feel I was really present in New York. I felt like a voyeur, but not in a bad way. The whole experience helped my writing because I was in my own zone -- it was something like being on my own writers' retreat in New York City. I was living alone and not really socializing and I'd been doing that all summer, just holing up and writing, because almost no one knew I was back in New York and I didn't really tell anyone.

The day I wrote the ending, I'd been writing all day, and I had this concept for the ending that had been building in my mind, so even though I wasn't done with the novel, I decided to try to write the ending scene. So I began, and I wrote the ending paragraph in this sort of dream state, the kind of state you're lucky to get into and always want to get into when you're writing, when the words flow like they should, and then I sat back and I read it again and again and I edited it again and again and when I was satisfied I printed it out and I read it and I thought, Holy Shit, I just wrote the ending of my novel. And, it works. It's a good ending for the book. It felt momentous, and it changed everything to have an ending that I was so pleased with. After that I felt like I could write the rest, like I could fill in the blanks, like I could do it, so I could get to that ending.