How A Spark Becomes A Story: Guest Post by Jacqueline Faber

The girl’s face began haunting me months before I started writing about her. I remember the first time she appeared in the foggy, post-dream haze of early morning. I’d just woken up, still dark outside, and there she was, alive in my mind with details so distinct, I felt surely I must know her. Her image came to me on a missing person poster. Long, dark hair parted in the middle. A stare that seemed at once settled and agitated. Young and old beyond her years. Who was she? I didn’t know. I would have to write about her to find out. 
 
Ask any author and they’ll tell you that ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes they lurch into being from dark and dismal headlines. The real world offers up fodder more disturbing than our psyches can conjure. Other times, ideas creep up slowly, pulling themselves into existence as amalgamations of our own histories, memories, and cognitive landscapes. For me, Lucia Vanotti sprang into existence in the form of her absence. A college girl, already missing, her fictional presence asserting itself in the murky no-man’s-land of predawn hours. Lucia arrived with her own demands. Her own story to tell, one that I would unearth from the recesses of my imagination, but that felt like it came from elsewhere. Truly, it did. 
 

In a way, the process of writing the character of Lucia Vanotti, a college girl who disappears from her Southern university campus, felt like excavation. What was she up to in the year before she vanished? Who were her friends? Her enemies? What were the contents of her mind? For me, the writing process began with these questions. I envisioned her at a frat party, hooking up with a boy from class. When she exits his bedroom, she heads downstairs in search of her boyfriend. Her boyfriend! What? He was downstairs the whole time!? How could she? Why would she? Each question demanded an answer. Each answer gave rise to a new question. 
 
Lucia’s story is one half of my thriller, The Department. Her narrative traverses the events that lead to her disappearance. The other half is told through the perspective of Neil Weber, a philosophy professor who becomes obsessed with her after she’s vanished. I felt his story take shape as a counterpoint to hers. He discovers pieces of her past, which he interprets in certain ways. Yet when we witness the events through Lucia’s eyes, they reveal themselves in more complex terms, challenging our facile beliefs that we ever fully understand what it is we are seeing. 
 
Thematically, this novel asks big questions. About loss, what it means to have and to lose. What it means to bear witness. What it means to mourn or to fail at mourning. And above all, how to live with the traumas that demand we simultaneously remember and forget in order to survive. 

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Jacqueline Faber holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and has taught at New York University. Her work explores questions about memory, loss, language, and desire. Steeped in philosophical, psychological, and literary themes, her writing is grounded in studies of character. She lives with her family in Los Angeles. The Department is her debut novel. Connect with Jacqueline online at jacquelinefaber.com and Instagram at @jaxfaber.