My Heartbeat

My Heartbeat is a book that did really well. It got very nice reviews, won a prize, and made my publisher happy with me (they sent flowers). All of which made me quite grateful, but also rather astonished. I had set out to write a novel of loyalty and betrayal, and to examine how little we know the people we love. Since several of my teachers, many of my parents' work colleagues, and three of my best friends in college were gay, I had never really thought about homosexuality as something other than a fact, albeit one with its own history, culture and struggle. It didn't strike me as being central to the book, and yet it was the novel's treatement of Link and James' sexual desires that most readers found interesting.

Quite often there is a gap between the book that is written and the book which is read.