I was thirty-seven, living in Nova Scotia when I got the idea for this first novel. I had heard about a terrible accident at sea. A father was out on his Cape Island boat with his five-year-old son, who was killed when a rough sea knocked him into the engine box. The father, drunk, had left the cover off the engine box. The accident possessed me — the terror of parental negligence, how a reckless father could let something like that happen to his young son. A father drunk, like my own father during my childhood.