Rachel A Goss

The cookbook started it all...

Writing a family cookbook got me to thinking about the past, our roots and what framed our lives. Several years ago I started writing short essays for my mom because she was getting old and I thought I could draw her out by what I wrote. I hoped she would remember things from her youth that she wouldn't ordinarily think to tell me. The first essay I wrote, about when our house was robbed, became part of my novel Driven By Conscience. It's smack in the middle of the novel and so I guess you could say the book was written from the inside out.

My stories became a novel and it took three years to build. During that time both my sisters and my mom passed away. My sisters died before Mom did, and I tried to write to address her grief, but it didn't work. I ended up writing for myself - to recreate the spirits of people, places and feelings from where I grew up in the pages of my book. The book is a work of fiction, and except for references to historical figures, the characters are not actual people.

A funny thing about the book was that while I thought I had the themes worked out beforehand, the over-arching emergent theme was the matter of conscience. When it was all done I realized that even though I had not planned it, the characters struggle with decisions, some bigger than others. The book is about growing in the time and place where you're born; that while you can't change where and when you are born you can control your actions.