Years later, this novel is my version of the assignment. One reason I dropped the garden part was because it made the title sound too much like my first novel, Rima in the Weeds. The story of an unhappy marriage is a familiar one, but Francesca's response to her own despair is strikingly original. She acquires phony documents and plans to fake her own death while in Greece alone. Yet, while her husband and son think she is away, she returns and, in disguise, becomes a fly on the wall in her own life.
Novelists are, indeed, voyeurs.
And it may be the case, too, that novelists are spying on themselves more than on anyone else. By telling stories that seem not to be literally true, that seem to be about other people, we may be creating a relatively safe way to examine those parts of ourselves that are difficult to look at. Writing is a mysterious process and all pronouncements about it are suspect. That sounded claustrophobic to me. So, instead of a character who imagines what it might be like to be someone else, I give her the means to assume another identity.