Stephanie Kegan Unravels a Bomber’s Family in Golden State
Photo by Jennifer Hartling“The Bay Area was in the midst of an autumn heat wave, hot, dry and unnatural. The air electric against my skin, I had the sense that a single match could ignite us all…”
In Golden State, Natalie Askedahl has a charmed life. A happy marriage. Two sweet daughters. A career she loves. But her perfect life shatters when a bomber targets universities across California, and the bomber’s manifesto reads like the last letter she received from her estranged brother, Bobby. Torn between family loyalty and protecting others, Natalie finds her life spiraling out of control as is accused of orchestrating the violence.
Paste caught up with Golden State author Stephanie Kegan to discuss her inspiration for the book, mental illness and capital punishment.
Paste: What sparked your imagination to write this novel?
Kegan: It was more like several sparks that ignited into one. I’ve always been interested in sibling relationships, especially when brothers and sisters who share the same childhood grow up to be radically different from each other. Over the years, I’ve found myself drawn to media stories about ordinary people who wind up in the news because of a something horrible a family member has done. I couldn’t help imagining what it might be like to be in their shoes. On another track, I was thinking about how hard it is for kids today to pay for college compared to my generation, when Californians supported tuition-free higher education. Somehow those threads worked their way together in an idea for a novel that would touch on the loss of the California dream through the shattered dreams of one California family—a family with a son who does something awful.
Paste: Why did you choose to tell the story from Natalie’s point of view?
Kegan: I was never interested in getting inside the mind of a killer. I wanted to live in his sister’s head. What would it be like to have your privacy destroyed overnight? To have the press camped out on your doorstep? To have strangers in the media analyzing your family’s supposed pathology? What would it be like to face your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors? How would you explain the situation to your children? In terms of my characters, no one else in the novel shares the relationship that Natalie has with her brother, or is as torn as she is between helping her brother and protecting her children. Although I could have written the book from Natalie’s point of view without using the first person, I wanted the immediacy and the honesty of the voice inside her head. I didn’t want to let myself off the hook from having to deal with her anguish and her isolation by placing her at even a slight remove.