Wish You Well

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

David Baldacci’s Inside Story: “I’ve been into the south-west Virginia mountains where my mother grew up many times. It was a hardscrabble, awful life where starvation was the norm. My mom was the youngest of 10 and oftentimes would be left to live alone by herself when she was a small child as my grandparents would disappear for long periods of time. Being in that country and seeing how people lived back then just really struck me so I had always wanted to write a story about that.

“This is a fictional story. It’s not about my mom’s life, but the environment portrayed—how these people grew up—that is very much my mom’s life. So this book was a very personal endeavour. I interviewed my own mom. These were events that happened to her 50 years ago but her she would tell me the most vivid recollections in such tremendous detail. I would write everything down and ask her, ‘Mom, I can’t even remember where I was yesterday. How in the world do you remember events so vividly from half a century ago?’ My mother was very plain-spoken and she looked at me and said, ‘Honey, when you grow up like that, you don’t forget.’

“When I sent her the book, I cannot tell you how nervous I was. And I don’t get nervous about anything. But she was a person I greatly looked up to and respected, and this was in so many ways her story. Thankfully, she read the book and loved it and after she was finished, we just held each other for a long time and shed some tears. She told me, ‘It brought me back to a place that I never wanted to go back to, but now I’m so glad I did through the pages.’ That alone was worth the time I spent writing the novel.”