When writing Wherever Would I Be, it was really important to me that Lucy’s adopted family be loving and as trauma-free as an adopted family could be. This family was to be a safe haven for these children.

Lucy’s father, Luca, was a foster child himself, bounced around from home to terrible home before he was finally adopted by Grandma Fran (who is named for my own adopted grandmother – a woman who showed me SO MUCH love and support, especially in times when others told me not to expect her to). In the story, Grandma Fran believed that kids needed to be kids – and in order to do that, they needed love, safety, and support. And that is exactly what she gave to Luca. Because of this, it’s always been Luca’s wish to pay that forward. Luca is a social worker; his wife, Donna, is a professor at the University of Chicago (where the two met as students). Together, they create a big, beautiful family.

Along with Lucy, four other children have joined this family before we get to page one of the story. Lucy is the first adopted – but not the oldest. Her first sibling is an older brother (Terrence). For a while, it’s just the two of them, and they are kindred spirits. Three years before the story begins, the family adopts a set of five-year-old fraternal twins (Samuel and Marie). And then a year before the story begins, the fifth child is adopted at age seven (Ciro) – so when the story starts, he is still feeling his way into this world, learning to trust it.

Unlike Lucy, all of her siblings know their birth families and the situations from which they were adopted. Because of their previous experiences (abuse, trauma, neglect), Lucy can’t help but wonder if it is indeed best that she doesn’t know where she comes from. (But, of course, she can’t help but be curious.)

With the decision to self-publish, I thought I would dedicate at least one post a month to this book – in this instance, introducing you to the main character. The idea for Lucy first took hold maybe five years ago. I had a flash of a young girl, adopted, who was in search of her birth family – and innocently stumbled upon the fact that she can see her dead ancestors. (Well, imprints of them.)

When I sat down to actually start writing the story, I opted to “cast” Sophie Skelton as Lucy (I like having a solid idea of what my characters look like for consistency purposes, so it’s helpful to have a specific image to refer to). She had the right look of what I had been imagining for Lucy, right down to the wavy, red hair. It was around this time that I also realized that Lucy’s story would land her in Scotland (for anyone who knows me, it was only a matter of time before Scotland showed up in a story somewhere). I just didn’t know yet how the pieces would all tie together.

It was important for me that this story not be about the trauma of being adopted in the sense that she would be taken into a truly loving family – the curiosity about her birth family wasn’t going to be a search for a “better” family. Instead, it’s a search for understanding herself. 

In this story, Lucy’s adopted father was a foster child himself, and he was given a life (as he tells it) when he was adopted by Grandma Fran (named after my own grandmother – technically an adopted grandmother, but we never thought of her that way – she was just Grandma), who let him finally be a kid. It was his life’s goal to do the same for other such children. He even went into social services as a career, which was how he first encounters Lucy as a one-year-old child.

Even so, she just can’t help but wonder what her life might have been like, what her birth family might have been like. She struggles throughout the book because she’s afraid that admitting this curiosity will make her adopted family feel that they weren’t enough for her when they absolutely have been.

But then she runs into a dead ancestor while in New York city – and she feels she has no choice but to discover whatever she can about the family she lost.