There are always stories that come directly out of the ether, places that the author has never visited, people that he has never known. There are also those books that have their beginnings in the real events and real people.
The Girl Who Remembered Snow is something like a dream I might have had -- a
blend of people, places and things, some pure fantasy but some very real.
The book begins on the Sausalito Ferry, which I actually took somewhere back in the early 1980s. San Francisco must have made more of an impression on me than I realized at the time, because more than a decade later I found myself remembering the skyline, the steep streets, the feeling of being on the transcendent Bay. Though I never stayed at the Fairmont or any of the other great hotels on Nob Hill, I found myself recreating my impressions of them, my dreams if you will, as stage sets for this book.
Added in were my memories of the six weeks or so I spent working for a 20-year-old magician when I first arrived in New York in the late 1970s. He had been cast at the age of 16 in some show in Chicago and had what I thought was an insanely inflated opinion of himself and his prospects. As far as I was concerned even his name was ridiculous.
David Copperfield, indeed. We did a television show, Magic at the Roxy, in Pittsburgh, where David levitated a young woman, made host Peter Graves pop out of a box and performed an illusion quite similar to the one Emma Passant performs in THE GIRL WHO REMEMBERED SNOW. I was the guy with the toothpick legs, dressed in a jazz jump suit (which I had to purchase myself), who cued the stage hands when to pull the ropes backstage.
Somehow the magician's world that I learned from David, San Francisco, the Sausalito Ferry and a Chevy salesman named Big Ed (I don't where the hell he came from), ended up in a story about a young woman whose beloved grandfather has been murdered.
After another inexplicable murder, Emma journeys to San Marcos, an island in the Caribbean that is much like the Dominican Republic, which I visited in 1981.
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