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I've already talked about how I set out to write Lev and Sima's
marriage: forty-six years together, and for all their intimacy a loneliness between them.

And then into that marriage that classic novelistic device: A stranger comes to town.

A stranger with perfect breasts.

Who happens to be Israeli.

Readers often express surprise that I chose to write from the perspective of Sima, a much older woman. That wasn't a difficult choice: I was sick of reading fiction written by twenty-somethings about twenty-somethings (I happened to be in an MFA program at the time), and Sima's voice felt very natural to me.

Writing an Israeli woman, however, felt like a leap. And of all the many things I beat myself up on when I first started writing Sima, Timna herself may have topped the list.

Given the political situation in the Middle East, I often wondered whether what I was doing was, well, kosher. I mean: the character is Israeli—just out of the army, and waiting for her own boyfriend to finish his military service—and yet the setting is entirely divorced from any kind of political reality.

And yet, the more I wrote Timna, the less I worried.

I'd made a conscious choice to make her Israeli. Partly practical: a stranger in a strange land. But I was also motivated by my own experience of American Jewish perceptions of Israel and Israelis—frankly, the sexualizing of the Israeli "other."

Long story short: follow a group of American Jewish teens on an Israeli summer tour (trust me here, there are hundreds to choose from) and you'll know what I mean.

So I stood on a bit of a soapbox when I began writing Timna. And I tried, too, to allow her to make long, nuanced speeches about Middle East politics and the relationship between the United States and Israel.

And then I got to know her. And none of the speeches felt necessary—or remotely true to who she was. Which was just a twenty-two year old who was a little lost, and a lot looking.

And it wasn't her fault, after all, if she had perfect breasts.

And then one afternoon Timna left Sima's store, where she worked as a seamstress, and got on a bus to connect to the subway to Manhattan.

And in doing so, she opened up the whole story for me.

I just had to get down from my soapbox and follow her for a bit. And it was well worth the journey.