My Novel's Heroine is Doing Better in the Publishing World Than I Did | Literary Hub

Strange as it may seem, writers pray for recalcitrant characters who refuse to follow the author's dictates. They usually turn out to be better company for the writer and, one hopes, for the reader. The daughter of a French publisher, my protagonist, Charlotte Foret, had run a bookshop in Paris. Now she was determined to find work in a publishing house in New York.

As I look back on the writing process, I have no idea which came first - the logic of her continuing in the same field or my memories of working in a New York publishing house several decades after she did. I do know, however, that once I began writing about her days at a fictional house, which I called Gibbon and Field, my memories became increasingly vivid.