The Mechanic's Daughter

When I had a teenage daughter, I began to think of things she should be warned about, things I myself didn't know as I went out into the world. I thought of myself as invincible, as the narrator Brenda does in The Mechanic's Daughter, and it was only exposure to seamy experiences, by myself and others, that got me thinking more deeply about how unsafe the world can be for women. I remembered the scary or disturbing things that happened around me when I was in my late teens and 20s and how I myself felt powerless in the face of them. And I thought about the changes that came about since the 1970s, how it became possible to talk about sexual assault and why that change happened. That is what inspired this novel.