All things Amelia and not

It's taken me a great many drafts to realize that this novel is of course about . . .me.
Why do the turns a novel takes end up mirroring the turns in one's own life? I suppose because we know ourselves best of all and are fascinated with ourselves, even those of us who aren't completely insufferable. I always knew that Muriel was based on my own mother, an aging woman who has had to live through multiple losses and find a reason to re-engage with the world. In my mother's case the losses came too late for her to find a compelling reason. However in my novel I practice a little wish fulfillment. I create a character who wants to live and finds pleasure in doing so.

Life is so full of loss, and as we age I think we come up against that more and more. I think the question is how to grapple with these losses and how to still look around and see all the things that compelled us to love life once. It's perhaps all in the details. I think that now as we suffer through a particularly miserable winter. Walking the streets of the city I'm more and more taken by the way strangers interact, curious about each and every one of them. I have the urge to make up stories about them, to give them histories. I think of my own mother walking these streets for years and years, she found pleasure in that. She roamed the city as did my father. Those were their streets too.
Now they're mine. And of course Amelia's.