This week, Diana Gittins interviews Zoe FitzGerald Carter about her new book, Imperfect Endings, about the struggle she and her two older sisters had coming to terms with their mother's decision to end her life after living with Parkinson’s disease for many years. The book was published by Simon & Schuster on March 2. It was excerpted in O magazine last month and is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.

1. I love your book, Zoe, and find it incredibly moving. It seems to be getting a huge and welcoming response, to my mind totally deservedly, and I was wondering whether, when you first decided to write it, you thought the theme of assisted suicide was something that would interest the wider public, or if you just needed to write it for yourself?

Assisted suicide is one of those lightening rod issues that get people riled up. But I really had no idea if other people would find my particular story compelling. The interest and the press that the book has generated have been incredibly gratifying and I think it’s because so many people relate to the subject. There are 75 million baby boomers out there and most of us will go through some kind of end-of-life negotiation with our parents.

2. Much or most of the book is written in the present tense. Could you say something about why you chose that rather than the past, and what problems it might have caused at times while you were working on it?

Maybe it’s because I read so much contemporary fiction, but present tense is my preferred tense. It gives the writing an in-the-moment immediacy that is harder to accomplish with past tense. It’s tricky, however, when you’re writing about the past in the present tense and then you refer to an earlier event. I kept wanting to use “had” (the pluperfect) even though -- in the logic of the present tense—it needed to be straightforward past tense. So I continually found myself going back through the manuscript and plucking out the “hads.”

3. In your opening Note to the Reader, you say "certain events and scenes have been compressed in order to better meet the needs of the story." This always strikes me as one of the major issues when writing memoir. Did you often need to veer from the "factual" for the sake of either the overall narrative and/or a greater truth, and what issues did that raise for you?

I tried to stick to moments and scenes that were seared into my memory. But there are details—especially dialogue from the recent and the distant past—that were inevitably “made up.” I also condensed the story by focusing on the last six or seven months of my mother’s life. In reality, she talked about killing herself for well over a year so in a sense I sped things up. I did that for narrative cohesiveness and because—frankly—I couldn’t remember exactly what she said when. It was a conversation that went on between us for a really long time.

4. Memoir seems to be becoming increasingly popular, perhaps even more than fiction. Why do you think this is, and why did you choose to write this as memoir rather than as a novel?

I am such a reluctant memoirist! Originally, the book was going to be a novel about three sisters, based on my experience as the youngest of three, with two powerful, warring older sisters. The idea was to place these three “characters” in a crisis situation that ratcheted up all their old childhood dynamics.
My mother had taken her life two or three years earlier and I suddenly thought—well, there’s a compelling crisis. It sounds kind of unbelievable now, but my mother’s suicide wasn’t even going to be the main drama. My agent at the time asked if the part about my mother was true and when I told her it was she strongly encouraged me to start over and write it as memoir. With much trepidation, I did and immediately the writing—both the tone and the voice—fell into place.

5. Did writing the book help you understand your mother’s death, and your part in it, more fully, or had you worked through it before you started?

My understanding of her death and my reaction to it was utterly transformed by writing about it. I struggled so much with what it meant to be a “good daughter”—talk my mother out of killing herself or help her do it—and revisiting this dilemma was illuminating.
And talking about the book in interviews and at readings—and hearing other people’s stories—has shifted my understanding of events again. I have a whole new appreciation of how strong-minded my mother was in taking her “end” into her own hands and I feel quite proud of her.