My mother, my sisters (Valerie and Heather), and I. I am the littlest one seated by my mom.

Readers often want to know if my novels are based on my real life. The Girlie Playhouse is my new novel, coming out by Heresy Press in April.

One’s earliest experiences can leave indelible impressions.  The above photo shows my mother, my sisters (Valerie and Heather), and I at the end of a fishing dock at Log Cabin Estates Lake in Gun Barrel City, Texas. Shortly after this photo was taken, my parent were held up at gunpoint when they walked back to our cabin from the lake. They were not harmed because my dad acted fast and heroically, kicking the gun away and telling my mom to run. My sisters and I were terrified when she came running down the dirt driveway, without our dad, screaming about a gunman.

The trauma burned the memories into my brain.  I couldn’t have been more than three or four.

The narrator of The Girlie Playhouse is called “Pixie.” I imagine her to be the kind of person I seem to be in this photo, a little frightened, nervous, very naive.  In Chapter 20, at the dead center of the book, Pixie, who is lonely and not very good at making friends, describes her traumatic backstory, the day her mother, who was a cabaret dancer,

was shot in the stomach on a Sunday as we walked home from the general store. She bled to death under the noonday sun on dusty, lime-coated Farm Road 7 while mad swarms of cicadas screamed in the old gnarled oaks.

My imagination must have come up with the details of the terrible scene by ransacking my memories, distorting them, much in the way any brain does when it dreams.  Here is the opening scene in Chapter 20, loosely based on some random details about the setting that I remember from that summer,

The lake near Runaway Stay was artificial. It had an abbreviated shoreline of imported sand surrounded by gray-green live oaks, huge rough trees over a hundred years old with low wide-spread canopies. There was a fishing dock—about the length and width of a good strip club runway—where drowsy, beer-bellied men in floppy hats nodded at the water. Mom walked to the end with a proud, lewd swing in her hips. Knock-kneed, I waited with my inner tube and sand pail on the shore, admiring her. My soul, she was something. As I stood watching, what I felt, even at that age, was a little more than awe, something like envy. She wore a ruffled bikini, like mine, low on her hips. …

At the end of the dock, she stopped and looked at the horizon, shading her eyes with one hand, and, strangely, standing on her tiptoes. Then she returned, twisting the soles of her feet on the wooden planks with each step; big painted mouth smiling at the sound of a half dozen cat-call whistles…

In the photo, my sassy sisters are posing like cabaret dancers. Valerie is pretending to smoke a cigarette. Heather has what we called a “pixie” haircut. My mother, Tricia, is serene in her beauty. The main heroine of the novel is a dark-haired cabaret dancer called Trixie. I didn’t create these echoes on purpose. The details emerged unconsciously and got shuffled as I invented the scene. I only realized that my novel was based on my memories later when I happened upon this old photo.

The answer to the question, Is the novel based on your own life? is never simple.

The audiobook for The Girlie Playhouse is now available for pre-order. Here’s a sample read by Hannah Church.