Inspiration Like a lot of novels that deal with a violent crime, The Liar's Diary began with a story from the headlines that I couldn't forget. An adolescent had committed a particularly gruesome murder in his neighborhood. The community rose to his defense. He was a "good boy" from a "wonderful family." There was no way he could have committed such an act. The evidence, however, proved otherwise. It was a story that drew on many of my personal obsessions as a writer: the way the face we present to the world often hides a different reality, the frequently unreliable mask that respectability makes, and most of all, the secret lives of families. Did these parents really know so little about their son? Hadn't there been signs? Surely, a thoughtful, well-balanced child doesn't wake up one morning and kill. Or does he? In the end, the novel I wrote had nothing to do with the case that first inspired it. Why? Because the hearts and minds of the teenager involved remained as closed to me as it was to the many neighbors and friends who stepped forward and testified to his gentleness. I can never know why he did what he did; or what his parents may have known and concealed. I cannot enter their kitchen and listen in on their dinner table conversation, or penetrate their late night dreams and fears. It would be a travesty to pretend I could. But as a fiction writer, I can build my own house and invite a family to live inside it—a mother who's fiercely organized and eager to please, a father admired by everyone but those who know him best, and a son with a crippling assortment of insecurities beneath his outward confidence. And then I can sit back and wait for them to tell me their story. Every startling detail.