Quinn Braverman had two secrets she kept from her husband. One was that the real reason she chose him over Eugene, her neurotic, self-loathing, semi-famous ex-boyfriend, was to prove her mother wrong. She could have a relationship with a normal, stable man.

The other was that Quinn knew another life existed in which she had made the other choice. The two lives ran in parallel lines, like highways on opposite sides of a mountain. There, on the other side, the Quinn who had stayed with Eugene was speeding through her high-drama, emotionally exhausting, childless urban life. Here, the Quinn who had married Lewis lived in the suburbs of Long Island, drove a Volvo, and was pregnant with her second child.

But the important part of the secret—the part that terrified and thrilled her—was that she knew it was possible to cross from one life to the other. There were portals.

Today, Quinn picked up the basket of laundry, telling herself she would not go through the portal, despite her state of mind. She knew, though, that her resolve to resist the temptation had diminished. Between the situation with her brother and the truth about the baby she carried, her whole life felt like an extenuating circumstance.

She set the basket of dirty clothes on the dryer and opened the washing machine. As she dropped in items of clothing, one by one, she could feel the fissure behind her like a human force, calling out to her.

No, she thought, as she tossed in a pair of Isaac’s jeans.

No, she thought, as she threw in Lewis’s gray T-shirt.

No, she repeated, as she balled up her purple blouse.

She turned to the fissure. Don’t you see what I’m doing? she wanted to say to Nan, her mother, who was dead in this life and alive on the other side of the portal. I’m staying with my family! They need me. Just like I need you.

She knocked the basket of clothes onto the floor and kicked it. It felt good to unleash her anger, but she needed something more. If her strength had matched her fury, she would have ripped the washer from the plumbing and hurled it away. She would have pulled the cabinets off the walls and smashed them to pieces. She would have kicked holes in the drywall and smashed the lights. She was as infuriated with her own impotence as she was with her mother. She knew it wasn’t Nan’s fault that her brother was in the hospital and that her baby was damaged. But, damn it, she should be there to help her through! Quinn stood in the center of the room panting and sweating. Was there no outlet for this rage? No outlet for a woman whose mother had made the most selfish decision of all?

There was, of course. There was one perfect outlet, and Quinn knew it.

At last, she pulled open the ancient ironing board and crossed through to the other life.

Excerpted from the novel, THE OTHER LIFE (Putnam/2011), by Ellen Meister

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KF: Ellen, can you talk a little about pushing the envelope of the imagination as a writer, going to the wilder places in terms of plot? The Other Life does this and I believe your upcoming novel does as well.

EM: Thanks, Kathy. For me, going to those wilder places in my imagination is always a leap of courage.

It starts by paying close attention to stray thoughts that pass through my head as story ideas. If a concept strikes me as something I’d like to read, I examine it closely to determine if it’s worth pursuing. And if it scares me a bit, makes my heart beat a little harder at the thought of writing it, I know I’ve struck upon something that might be able to carry a whole book.

When I got the idea for my current novel, THE OTHER LIFE, it captured me immediately. I was intrigued by the thought of a pregnant woman who could slip through a portal from her happily married life to the one she would have lived had she made other choices. But when I got to the emotional core of the story—the pull between the life with her husband and son and the life where her mother (the one person she thought she had lost forever) was still alive—I felt a mix of fear and exhilaration. The fear came from two places: the challenge of pulling it off and my compulsive need to write it. No matter what anyone thought, I simply had to do it.

My novel-in-progress, FAREWELL, DOROTHY PARKER, scared me in a different way. I loved the idea of bringing Dorothy Parker’s ghost to life as the mentor of a timid, modern-day woman movie critic. But I didn’t know if I could pull off recreating Dorothy Parker as a fictional character. I feared that it might be pure hubris to think I could capture the voice of America’s most notorious wit. Ultimately, I decided I had to try, and that felt like the wildest risk of all. The good news is that my editor at Putnam loved the manuscript and it’s due out early next year.

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