Last Night at the Blue Angel 

One never really knows the story one is going to tell.  In life and art alike, I suppose. In both, I’ve been surprised, more often than not, by the characters who have turned up out of the blue, by the twists and reveals, by the trade-offs and losses and delights.

I didn’t know the story I was about to tell when I started Last Night at the Blue Angel. I was seized by a voice in my head, this plucky, angsty kid, caught in the crosshairs of her mother’s insatiable need for attention, intimacy, obliteration, celebrity.  Whereas the kid’s desire is simple. She wants to be the one her mother chooses, the only one.  It seemed a simple question posed me: Can the mother choose her? Or will her other hungers win out?

It took me years to collect all the information I needed to answer this question and for all the complicated players in this drama to reveal themselves fully.  And in the end, I would end up writing a story about family, having learned that our desires are not exclusive to us, they reverberate and engage everyone in our orbit, for better or for worse.