About Rhiannon Navin


Knopf Publishing&nbsp;

Knopf Q&A: A conversation with Rhiannon Navin









Q: I imagine parts of this book were difficult to write, especially the opening pages. True?

A: Very true. Many scenes were incredibly hard to put down on paper. Because I always had my own family in mind, the emotions I felt were so real and so forceful that they often knocked the wind right out of me. I was petrified for Zach in that opening scene he had to spend hiding in the closet. I was crushed for him as the story progresses and he is largely left alone to navigate the traumatic experience he went through and the terrible loss he had to endure. And I was profoundly sad, for Zach and his parents, too. Melissa was such a difficult character to write, because of course I had to put myself in her shoes, imagine myself in her place. What if one of my children were taken from me in such a horrendous way? I felt her devastation and her inner struggle like it was my own. I often emerged from a writing session feeling completely gutted and disoriented. I had to pull myself together and splash some cold water on my face before my kids came home on the school bus. Writing that last scene left me a complete mess. I cried through the entire time it took me to write it.



Q: You paint a very real portrait of a marriage—one under great stress even before tragedy befalls the Taylor family. Can you tell us a little about the marriage in ONLY CHILD?

A: Zach’s family is an ordinary family living an ordinary life before the unimaginable happens to them. My goal was to paint a picture of a family that I can relate to and that many readers will be able to relate to. Marriage means two flawed people coming together and trying to make a life together. That’s incredibly hard, even under the best of circumstances. Add children to the mix and it can sometimes feel like a Herculean task to find the time and energy to work on your marriage. I can speak from experience. I’ve been married to my husband, Brad, for almost fifteen years, and we have three very, ahem, lively children. You have your ups and downs, your good times and inevitably some difficult ones. Jim and Melissa are no different. They struggle in their marriage. Jim is a man with high expectations for himself and his family. He feels the stress of a man trying to provide a good life for his family in a competitive environment, and his desire to portray the image of the picture-perfect family to the outside world causes a lot of friction. Melissa struggles with her role as a stay-at-home mother and is overwhelmed by some of the particular challenges of her family. When they face an unimaginable loss, their relationship is pushed beyond any reasonable limit. They are forced to dig deep within themselves to rediscover their foundation as a couple in order to save their family.



Q: You tell the story of more than one family here, including that of the gunman’s parents. I think this is a form of loss people don’t often focus on in the wake of such tragedies. How did you approach these characters?

A: Whenever I hear about a tragic event like a mass shooting, my first thoughts are always with the victims and their families. They were going about their everyday lives and suddenly their whole world changes in an unexpected, awful instant. But as much as my heart breaks for them, I do also think about the shooter’s family, especially if the gunman is young, like Adam Lanza, and in my novel, Charles Jr.

So, I tried to put myself in Charlie and Mary’s shoes and I found that I felt a lot of empathy towards them. While the victims’ families have to deal with their unspeakable losses, the perpetrator’s family is dealing with guilt and shame over their child’s actions in addition to having lost a child. A community comes together and rallies around the victims’ families, while the shooter’s family is ostracized and completely alone with their grief. As a mother, the only thing I can imagine that would be worse than having my child killed in a school shooting would be my child committing one. During his first encounter with Charlie after the shooting, Zach is able to feel and express compassion for him: “I thought about how Daddy was wrong when he said Charlie didn’t get hurt, because he did. His son died, too, so his feelings were hurting about that, like ours because Andy died, except it was worse for Charlie because his son killed his angels and that was worse than just dead.”





