Photo by Stephen Friedgood
Reyna Marder Gentin is the author of the new novel Jessica Harmon Has Stepped Away. Her other books include Unreasonable Doubts. She is a former criminal defense attorney, and she lives in Westchester County, New York.
Q: What inspired you to write Jessica Harmon Has Stepped Away, and how did you create your characters Jessica and Cynthia?
A: I’ve always been drawn to the stories we don’t fully know—about ourselves and about the people we love.
Before I turned to writing, I worked for many years as an appellate attorney representing people convicted of felonies. It was fascinating work, but one of the most frustrating aspects was how limited the narrative was—I often knew what my client had done, but not who they were.
I didn’t know about their childhoods, their dreams, or what led them to that moment. Fiction gave me a way to fill in those gaps.
In this novel, I wanted to explore the power of secrets and how the stories we tell—and don’t tell—shape our relationships.
Cynthia, the mother, has hidden a critical part of her past from her daughter, Jessica. Her motives are complicated, but the result is that Jessica both yearns for her mother’s approval and blames her for her own lack of self-esteem and direction.
I made them both writers to heighten the tension: Jessica wants to write but feels paralyzed by her mother’s towering success and the way she has never encouraged her.
I hope I’ve created a compelling mother-daughter dynamic, where the reader is drawn into watching how each woman comes to understand her own story—and how Jessica begins to rewrite hers.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between them?
A: Jessica and her mother have a strained and emotionally distant relationship. They don’t interact often, and when they do, Jessica finds her mother to be cold and self-absorbed.
Cynthia has never shown much interest in Jessica’s writing, her friends, or her romantic life, and she’s always given vague, evasive answers about Jessica’s father. Cynthia has long prioritized her career, colleagues, and students over her own daughter.
Still, Jessica continues to long for her mother’s approval. So when Cynthia invites her on a book tour, Jessica agrees—seeing it as a last chance to connect. But when Cynthia suffers a medical crisis during the trip, the power dynamic between them begins to shift in unexpected ways.
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Q: The writer Allison Pataki said of the book that it “explores the complicated intersection of family secrets across the past and present, and the ways in which mothers and daughters might deceive one another--and themselves.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think it’s a very perceptive description because it gets at the complexity of what is going on in the relationship.
There are Cynthia’s outright deceptions that impinge on Jessica’s ability to trust her, even though Jessica only has an intuition that she isn’t being told the whole truth. Cynthia has built her whole adult life around a set of untruths that affect her ability to create meaningful connections with not only Jessica, but others as well.
And Jessica’s more nuanced unwillingness to face some of her own shortcomings and her tendency to view herself as a victim are the legacy of the secrets that underlie the relationship.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: While I was writing the book, an acquaintance of mine lost an adult child in an accident. A friend of mine was spending a lot of time trying to comfort this acquaintance, and I worried about the toll it was taking. When I asked my friend how she was holding up, she said something that really stuck with me: “Sometimes you have to step away from someone else’s grief.”
I thought the line about “stepping away” fit the novel so well that I gave it to one of the characters to say as advice to Jessica. The title captures that moment—but it also suggests something broader.
Jessica needs to step away from Cynthia’s grief, but she may also need to step away from other parts of her life to move forward. And “stepping away” has another connotation; it doesn’t have to be permanent.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I love writing short stories, and for a long time, I’ve wanted to put together a collection of linked stories. I’m getting close to finishing a first draft of one now. It’s called Open Twenty-Four Hours, and it centers on a diner on Long Island in 1984.
The main character, who appears in many of the stories, is Kiki—a 21-year-old waitress working the overnight shift. Other stories revolve around the other staff, their families, and the customers who come through the doors. The inspiration came from Scobee’s, the diner where I spent a lot of time as a teenager.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just a quick note that this mother/daughter relationship is purely fictional! My two sisters and I were very close to our mother, who passed away in 2010. And my daughter and I have a wonderful relationship as well.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Reyna Marder Gentin.
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