“So, is it autobiographical?”

When you write a novel that has its inspiration in reality, I guess you have to expect that question. But I have to admit, I’m already getting tired of it. And the novel’s publication date is still almost two weeks away.

Let me be clear: the answer to the above question is “no.” Yes, there are certain characters whose roles in the fictional Mother Daughter Show correspond to the roles real people played in the real show. And yes, the main character’s role in the show is similar to the one I played. But that doesn’t mean she’s me, any more than any of the other characters are “supposed to be” real individuals.

As a consumer of literature, I understand the impulse to try to match up fiction and fact. A few weeks ago I saw a production of Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall, which was written not long after the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe. The most arresting character in the play is Maggie, a sexy, needy, ultimately self-destructive young singer who seduces and then torments the play’s narrator. Reading the program notes, I noticed that Miller denied any parallels between Maggie and Monroe, and protested that this play was no more and no less autobiographical than The Crucible.

My reaction? Yeah, right. But when I think of how I feel about The Mother Daughter Show, I realize I have to cut Miller some slack. Regardless of where he started, by the time he was done writing he may have honestly felt that Maggie was essentially a creature of his imagination. (Although I have to say, it seems to me Maggie is a lot closer to Monroe than my characters are to any real individuals I know.)

There’s a weird, mysterious alchemy that goes on when writers create fiction. You may start with some seed of reality, but then it grows and spreads and branches out in ways that in your mind bear no more resemblance to that seed than an oak does to an acorn. But you can’t control what readers will see in your oak. To them, it may still look a lot like the acorn.

For a long time, I felt inhibited about writing fiction, fearing that it would in some way be too revealing of myself. I had no problem writing extremely personal essays, because I felt I knew what I was revealing. But writing fiction seemed too much like telling people about my dreams: you never knew what they might think they were seeing.

I managed to get past that inhibition when writing my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, and it turned out not to be a problem—probably because it was a historical novel, set over 200 years ago. Nobody asked me if that one was autobiographical. And yet, there were definitely parts of that novel I drew from my own experience. I won’t go so far as to pull an Arthur Miller and protest that The Mother Daughter Show is no more and no less autobiographical than A More Obedient Wife. But I will say that it’s more complicated than most readers seem to assume.

What really bothers me is the idea that people with some knowledge of the real Mother Daughter Show will assume that my portrayals of the characters reveal what I really think about the presumed real-life models. Not that any of those portrayals are malicious—I have tremendous sympathy for all my characters, and I hope readers will as well. But, this being satire, the characters are each flawed in some way—you can’t write satire (or fiction of any kind, for that matter) with a cast of perfect people. So, for example, one character has a hard time saying no to people, and another has an impulse to exercise control over whatever situation she’s in. Were there people who worked on the Mother Daughter Show who exhibited these flaws? Of course—I was one of them. But to create an engaging and, I hope, humorous story, I magnified and exaggerated those flaws well beyond anything I actually observed or felt.

But, as Arthur Miller no doubt learned the hard way, you can protest till you’re blue in the face, and readers will still draw their own conclusions. When I showed an advance copy of the book to one friend of mine who had participated in the real Mother Daughter Show, she homed in on a detail: in describing the daughter of one of the characters, I had used an adjective that shared a syllable with the name of the daughter of one of the real-life mothers involved in the show. My friend concluded that I had done this deliberately, to signal the connection between the fictional daughter and the real one. When I finally figured out what my friend was talking about, I was appalled. I insisted that I had no intention of subliminally conjuring up this girl, whose name I had actually forgotten, but I don’t think my friend believed me.

Just to be on the safe side, I took the adjective out. But that’s no guarantee that someone else won’t see some other “clue” that I haven’t anticipated. I just hope that readers—especially those who may initially be attracted by the idea that the book is some kind of roman a clef—will ultimately look past all of that and get drawn into the story. I hope they’ll forget about who Amanda and Barb and Susan are “supposed” to be, and begin to see them as independent, three-dimensional beings who came to life in my imagination and can now take up residence in theirs.

The biggest news that’s happened lately around my neck of the woods–Chevy Chase and Bethesda–is what may have become known as the Lululemon murder. Not that I’ve actually discussed it with that many people, but I’ve been following the story like a hawk, and I’m sure others have as well. The verdict in the trial came down yesterday, and today it’s on the front page of the Post.

For those of you outside the area, some background: one morning last March, a 30-year-old woman named Jayna Murray was found, brutally murdered, inside the Lululemon Athletica store on Bethesda Avenue, where she worked. Also discovered there was her co-worker, 29-year-old Brittany Norwood, bound and gagged.

Norwood’s story was that two masked men had entered the store just at closing time, raped both women, and murdered Murray. As the news broke, fear and disbelief gripped the community.

You have to understand what this block is like: there’s a Barnes and Noble at one corner, and the Apple Store is at the other end, next door to the store where the murder occurred. In between are high-end boutiques and restaurants, including an Aveda and a Sweet Green. Like many others, I go to this block frequently for one reason or another. The only thing I’ve ever been afraid of there is not finding a good parking place.

But then Norwood’s story began to unravel. It was full of holes and oddities, and after a while it became clear that there were no masked men. It was Norwood herself who had killed Murray, apparently after Murray had discovered a stolen pair of yoga pants in Norwood’s bag.

In a way, this news was reassuring: there were no murderers and rapists on the prowl in cozy downtown Bethesda. But at the same time, the idea that Norwood had committed the crime was even more unsettling.

As was revealed during the trial, Norwood attacked Murray savagely and repeatedly, leaving 331 wounds on her body. She apparently used anything that came to hand: a hammer, a knife, a wrench, a rope, and even a metal peg used to hold a mannequin. Then, in a cover-up attempt, she used a pair of size 14 Reebok sneakers, drenched in blood, to create large bloody footprints, so it would look as though male intruders had been there. She then bound and gagged herself (although not very well), and feigned grave concern for her “friend” Murray in the hospital the next day, where she was recovering from her “ordeal.”

Why have I been so fascinated by this story? Part of it certainly has to do with the fact that it occurred in a place so familiar to me–and, frankly, in a place where violent crimes are virtually unknown. It goes without saying that murders are tragedies wherever they take place. But, as with the archetypal “man bites dog” story, things that are unexpected are more likely to get people’s attention.

The murder is also a reminder that evil really does lurk in the hearts of men–or, as in this case, women. I never went into the Lululemon store, but I certainly could have. And I could have been waited on by a smiling Brittany Norwood, without having any idea that she was capable of brutal murder. I’m struck by the fact that the merchandise she apparently stole was a pair of yoga pants. I suppose I have a certain image of what a murderer is like, and I just don’t see that person in the lotus position, concentrating on her breath, or even holding Warrior Two.

The incongruity between the attack and the rest of Norwood’s apparently normal life was her only defense. Her lawyers called no witnesses, and they didn’t dispute the fact that Norwood had killed Murray. They just said she’d “lost it,” hoping to convince the jury to convict her on a lesser charge–2nd degree murder–rather than 1st degree murder, which requires evidence of premeditation. The very flimsiness of Norwood’s cover-up story, they said, shows she wasn’t thinking clearly.

The jury didn’t buy it. It took them less than an hour to convict Norwood of 1st degree murder. Since Maryland law doesn’t require much time for premeditation–only a few seconds is sufficient–and since the attack went on for probably 15 minutes or so, Norwood’s argument was a hard one to make. As one of the jurors said, “How do you hit someone 300 times and not think that you’re going to kill them?”

I have to agree–although at the same time, I’d have to say that in a sense Norwood did “lose it.” Something in her–something lying dormant through her years in college, her days waiting on Lululemon customers, perhaps even her hours spent in yoga classes–just snapped. And which is scarier, the idea that a savage murderer goes around looking wild-eyed and threatening all the time? Or the idea that she can look pretty much like the rest of us–until she snaps?

I think it will take a long time before I can go past that Lululemon store–which I do once or twice a month–without feeling a shudder. It’s now a silent reminder that nothing–not high-end stores and restaurants, not college degrees or yoga–is a guarantee of safety.

I have absolutely no complaints about my recent trip to Paris. Really, how could I? It’s Paris! (Okay, I don’t understand why it’s impossible to find a restaurant that’s open for dinner before 7 p.m., but that’s just a quibble.)

But in some ways, as others have remarked, there’s no place like home. One of the things I did regret, just a bit, about my trip to Paris was that it forced me to miss two of my weekly yoga classes. As hardships go, I’ll admit that this is not in the major leagues. And I did actually see a yoga studio or two in Paris where I suppose I could have dropped in (yes, they do yoga now in Paris, and they even jog, although they still smoke). But it wouldn’t have been MY yoga class.

Some years ago, a neighbor of mine opened a yoga studio literally around the corner from my house. I was overjoyed. I’d been taking yoga for years, but my class wasn’t in the neighborhood and … well, let’s just say it left something to be desired. I quickly signed up for a Friday morning class at the new studio, imagining a roomful of students–mostly women on their day off from work, since Friday is a frequent day off for part-timers. It would be cozy and chatty, and there would no doubt be familiar faces from the neighborhood, perhaps even a few actual friends.

So I was surprised when I showed up for the first class and there was just me and one other student–a man. The teacher was a man, too. Okay, I told myself, nothing necessarily wrong with that. Just give it a chance. But the teacher had a weird affect, and his idea of background music was nonstop Hare Krishna chants. And the other student, who claimed he’d never taken yoga before, was somehow able to hold downward dog for what seemed like ten minutes straight. Adopting an extremely un-yoga-like attitude, I felt I had to keep up with the guy—after all, I’d been taking yoga for years. My arms ached for days afterwards.

I didn’t go back to the yoga studio for quite a while after that first class. But when I did finally decide to give it another try, four years ago now, I found at last the Friday morning class of my imagination—-and a teacher who would have been the yoga teacher of my dreams, if I’d had one.

I’m not by nature a spiritual person, and I’m basically looking for stretching and exercise, but Anne is somehow able to make the more Zen aspects of yoga appealing to me. Her yoga class is a much-needed oasis of calm in my week, a place to pause and reflect as well as to stretch and bend.

This morning Anne talked about having gone to a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen spiritual master who spoke earlier this week in a large downtown theater. It was a very un-Washington event, Anne remarked: very simple, very quiet. And yet, there in downtown Washington, it was sold out. There must be a sizeable number of Washingtonians who are craving an un-Washingtonian experience.

And our yoga class—which is packed wall-to-wall with students every week—might be considered un-Washington as well. Oh, it has its Washington aspects. Getting into the class is in some ways like applying to kindergarten at one of those private schools where there’s room only for siblings and alumni kids: it’s so popular that only those students who are already enrolled can sign up for succeeding sessions, since they get priority. By the time enrollment is open to the general public, the class is full. But at least no one is required to ace a standardized test.

And I confess that I’m not entirely able to shed my Washington (or perhaps it’s just Western) self during yoga class. It’s a constant struggle to remain present, to not let my mind go wandering off to my to-do list or whatever else is weighing on me (this morning I was starting to write this blog post in my head). And try as I might, I can’t quite ignore the gradations of ability in the class, secretly feeling inferior to the student who effortlessly propels herself up to a headstand, and superior to the one who can’t quite touch her toes.

But as I know Anne would tell me, that’s okay. One of her recurring messages is that you need to just accept yourself and move on. If your mind wanders from the moment, just observe where it’s gone and bring it back to the breath. Don’t beat yourself up about your imperfections. I sometimes repeat to myself the mantra she once gave us: “Ah, this too.”

One of the nice un-Washington things about the class is that—unless you know one of the other students independently—no one knows what anyone else does. For a living, I mean. That “and-what-do-you-do” question is one that generally gets asked within seconds of an introduction in this town, and I confess I’ve asked it myself—it just seems natural. But in yoga class, all we do is yoga.

We also chat and laugh, of course. It’s hard not to, when our balancing poses sometimes threaten to knock us down like a row of dominoes, or we find our faces just inches from our neighbors’ posteriors. I barely know the names of most of the others in the class, but somehow our shared experience there—-our mutual struggles and support, and our appreciation of Anne—-have made us a community.

The name of the studio is Circle Yoga, which I always took to be a reference to Chevy Chase Circle, a block away. But it occurs to me that our class—-like the studio itself—-is a kind of circle, too. And it’s one of the things that makes me feel lucky to live in this neighborhood.

Seems like in my neighborhood—the Upper Northwest quadrant of D.C.—all the college-age kids have fled to other countries. My own daughter, a junior, is doing a fall semester in Paris, where she can rub elbows with the kid who lives across the alley (doing a gap year) or the twin brother of one of her best friends, who lives a few blocks away (in D.C., that is). Not all the neighborhood kids are in Paris. Yesterday evening I ran into a neighbor who casually mentioned that her daughter, a senior, had spent the summer in Madagascar.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t limited to my neighborhood. It’s become de rigueur for college students to do a summer, a semester, or even a year abroad. My daughter could easily hopscotch around Europe bunking with her high school and college friends (actually, this does seem to be her plan). I suppose I could adopt the curmudgeonly attitude I heard expressed the other evening by an acquaintance, who complained that his daughter had “wasted” her time in Paris and Florence while she was an undergraduate. On further inquiry, though, it was revealed that her sloth had consisted largely of wandering through museums, which, given the fact that she was an art history major, was perhaps not a total waste of time.

So far my daughter seems to have spent more time on walking tours and at wine-tastings than she has in class (although I’m sure that will change), but I’m not one to begrudge these kids their fun. Living in another country—even a highly developed Western European country—is often an education in itself. And taking college-level classes in another language while living with a non-English-speaking host family, as my daughter is doing, is no piece of cake.

My generation, including that curmudgeonly dad, may be a bit jealous. When I was in college in the seventies, the administration’s attitude was, “You want to go abroad? Fine, have fun, and maybe there’ll be a place for you here when you get back.” No academic credit, no programs providing support, certainly no fifty-page handbooks warning you about going down dark streets alone at night or advising your parents on how to Skype. (All we had back then was snail mail—and in Europe, the postal carriers were more often than not on strike.)

I did manage to go to Europe for a year after college, on a fellowship, but I chose the least exotic country of the bunch—in fact, it’s not even clear it’s really in Europe. Having majored in English history and literature, I embarked on a master’s program in … England! I thought it would be like coming home. Instead, that year taught me (in addition to some stuff about English history) how truly American I was. A valuable lesson, even if it wasn’t part of the curriculum.

I’m even more in awe of the kids who head off to places like Madagascar (feel free to substitute Mozambique, Mongolia, or any number of places it never occurred to me to go to when I was in college), often to do community service. I do take a little dig at such programs in my forthcoming novel, The Mother Daughter Show. One of my high-school-age characters asks her parents if she can go on a summer program where she’ll stay in a Ghanaian village hut with no running water or electricity and help build a school. When her parents ask how much it costs, the girl says vaguely that it’s “something like four thousand dollars,” or maybe five—plus airfare, of course. Her cash-strapped parents are aghast.

It’s true that there may be more efficient, and cheaper, ways of building a school in a Ghanaian village. (Such as maybe sending money to pay some Ghanaians to do it. They could probably use the jobs.) But there are also valuable intangible benefits to such programs, like fostering cross-cultural understanding. I imagine that a privileged American kid who spends a summer, or even a few weeks, living in a Ghanaian village will emerge with a different perspective on the world.

But in The Mother Daughter Show, the girl’s father suggests that if she wants to help people she doesn’t have to travel farther than Southeast D.C., where she could, for example, tutor some needy kids. (To make the experience more exotic for her, he offers to disconnect the electricity and put the bathrooms off limits.) And the sad truth is that there are parts of this city that are almost as foreign to the denizens of Upper Northwest—in language, culture, and general standard of living—as certain underdeveloped countries. Some very talented people are working hard to close that gap, to make us all—as our Mayor’s slogan would have it—“One City,” but there’s a long way to go.

There’s another way to have a cross-cultural experience without leaving home. Washington, like many other American cities, has seen a huge influx of immigrants in the last twenty or thirty years. Residents of my neck of the woods may not cross paths with them often, and we may not notice them when we do—they tend to be busboys and hotel housekeepers and other people we often take for granted. But I’ve been teaching English to immigrants for the past eight years or so, and getting to know them and hear a bit about their lives and customs has been as valuable an educational experience for me as I hope learning English is for them.

But while it’s true that you don’t need to go to Ghana—or Paris—to have a meaningful experience of another culture, it’s also true that it’s fun to go to Paris. Or Ghana, I suppose. But my daughter is in Paris. And even though I’m now way too old to pass for a college kid, in a few days I’m going to join her, at least for ten days or so. And I won’t be surprised if I run into one of my neighbors there, doing the same thing.