Arielle Zibrak is a book editor and freelance writer who lives in New York City.

Arielle Zibrak: You were living in Texas at the time you wrote A Blessed Event, and the story is set in Texas. Was this writing what you know, or do you think there is something within this story that needed to happen in Texas?
Jean Reynolds Page: The story, I hope, has universal themes of friendship, family, and redemption. I don’t think it needed to happen in Texas, but the Texas landscape and culture are so rich. I felt that particular setting would offer wonderful possibilities. I need to place my characters somewhere specific and identifiable. That way, I know who they are and how they became who they are. Where you live
shapes you in so many ways. In Texas, the heat, the open sky, and the special qualities of light that occur define life on a daily basis. Then you have the disparate cultures—the Cowboy identity, the Southern identity, along with all of the influences of Mexico that have now become Texan too. These characteristics have melded into a unique environment. I loved living there and I loved imagining there.

AZ: You began with a vivid scene of Joanne’s car crashing into Cal and Darla’s bedroom. Did the whole story grow out of that image, or did it come after you formed the idea for the story?
JP: A few months before I began writing A Blessed Event, I saw a newspaper article about a car that had crashed into a house. It was a different scenario entirely—the woman driving had been drinking and an elderly couple lived in the house—but the drama of that image stayed with me. I started with just that single snapshot in my head and began to ask questions surrounding it. What if the woman in the car had some connection to the people in the house? What if some element of mystery surrounded her motives for being out on the road so late at night? The idea of the baby came later, but really, I started with that one moment—a single event that changed lives in an instant.

AZ: What parts of the novel were easier to write, and what parts came more slowly?
JP: I feel fortunate that, for the most part, the writing came consistently. However, I did tend to skirt around a couple of scenes in the first draft because I felt shy about writing them. For instance, the scene where Cal and Joanne are “together” at Darla’s request. I initially alluded to the scene without actually writing it in a flashback. My writers group, friends I met through writing workshops at Southern
Methodist University, called me on the omission. They basically said, “We’re not buying that this could happen unless we see what led up to it and how it came about. We need to see the conflicted emotions in Darla as she allows herself to put this in motion.” They were right, but it was a difficult scene to realize because the characters had to walk such a thin line of credibility. The truth of the entire narrative
rests to some degree on the reader believing that Darla could be desperate enough in that moment to ask this of Jo and Cal, and that those two could each love Darla enough to go along with it.

AZ: As a teenager, Darla feels her endometriosis is a punishment for her behavior. As she gets older, she feels guilt connected to her infertility. How did Darla’s reproductive problems shape her character as you wrote the novel?
JP: In the flashback scenes, Darla’s medical problems define her early sexual experiences: It hurts, so it must be bad. As she grows older, she sees herself as flawed, or damaged, because of the baggage that comes with making love. In some ways, she lives vicariously through Joanne. In terms of sex, Jo has none of Darla’s physical or emotional pain. Then later, of course, Darla realizes that the medical condition has taken away her ability to have children. All of her resentment and anger at life and at God become channeled in this single-minded obsession to have a child. So in many ways, the illness chooses the most disastrous paths for her. Leaving Sean, asking Jo to sleep with Cal . . . so many wrong turns come as a result of the confusion and pain from the condition.

AZ: Sean is a priest who was once a hormone-driven teenager, Peggy is a lawyer who was once a pot dealer. How do you think these transformations add depth to the characters?
JP: I feel that the truest picture of any human being comes when you look at the contradictions in that person and then reconcile them somehow. Sean and Peggy, while completely different in their paths, possess compassion that comes from having had lives outside the sanctuary and the courtroom. Sean, in particular, needed to be a fully realized character. His counseling needed to be more than platitudes. My hope was that in showing the different periods of Sean’s life, he would become three-dimensional, a true citizen of Darla’s world rather than an archetype. However, I wanted to keep his nature consistent throughout his transformation, and the one thing that remains the same—from Sean’s adolescence into his adult years—is his ability to love fully, with genuine commitment. First with Darla, and then later with God, Sean offers himself completely and with integrity.

AZ: The strength of Darla and Joanne’s friendship is a driving force throughout the novel. What were your inspirations for these two connected women and their relationship?
JP: People ask me if I had a friendship that was anything like Darla and Jo’s. I had good, close friends throughout high school, college, and after, but I never had that intense kind of friendship that continued and deepened through all the phases of my life. I watched people who did, and I was always fascinated and a little envious. I speak of Darla and Jo in terms of twins. And like twins, friends who are that close
seem to have their own language, a private place where only they exist. In some ways I always wanted to have that when I was growing up, although, as with any genuine commitment, there are conflicts and limitations that occur when offering that much of yourself to one person. I finally found that kind of bonding and friendship with the man I married—which came with far less baggage and fewer conflicts than Darla and Jo experienced!

AZ: Darla worries that Cal only loves the part of her that was shaped by Joanne. This fear is so great that she hesitates with her answer to his proposal. Do you think friendships as close as Darla and Joanne’s compromise the friends as individuals?
JP: I believe we are all shaped by the people in our lives. If you’re lucky, the people you allow close to you—the ones who define you the most—bring out your best qualities. I see Darla and Joanne as filling in gaps for each other that would have been there anyway. That’s what makes their relationship strong and intense. I see them completing each other in a number of ways. For example, Darla has a crisis of
faith, but also a very close relationship with her father. Jo is estranged from her father, but maintains a strong sense of herself spiritually. By the end, I wanted the women to resolve these aspects of life for each other. Even after Jo is gone, Darla is able to achieve a certain reconciliation for her with Larry. On the other hand, Jo’s faith, which continues throughout the turmoil of her life (and later continues through
young Joe), begins to bring Darla full circle with her own spirituality. Throughout the book, the women fill in the missing parts of each other.

AZ: There are a lot of issues raised in the legal battle that occurs in A Blessed Event during the custody trial. Did you consult with lawyers while writing the book? What did you hope to accomplish in this particular part of the narrative?
JP: I have always been intrigued by the law, how it is really more about perceptions than about absolute rules. I talked with a couple of wonderful lawyers as well as with a writer friend, a clinical psychologist who has testified in cases having to do with domestic disputes, and they all suggested that Darla’s case had wide open possibilities. One lawyer said, “This is one where the judge would shake his head
and say, Why did I get this one? In the end, I wanted the courtroom scenes to reflect the damage done to all the individuals involved, win or lose. Darla wins, but is subjected to hearing her life described in very cold and negative terms. This happens in front of her mother, her husband, and everyone else. At that point, she has to confront what her obsession has cost the people she loves.

AZ: Cal is a wonderful character because we, as readers, never quite know how we feel about him. Do you see him as sympathetic? Did you envision him as a good husband?
JP: I think Cal wants to be a good husband, and he believes for a while that giving in to Darla’s obsessive need for a child—at any cost— will ultimately make him a better partner for her. He didn’t factor in the damage that, in hindsight, was inevitable. I’ve had wildly varied responses to Cal from readers: Some people see him as the victim, while others see him as the cause of the entire mess. One reader went so far as to suggest that Darla was weak and driven to have a baby—
essentially, not in her right mind—and that Cal took advantage of this in order to sleep with Jo. Other people see Darla as horrible and manipulative, leaving Cal to sort through and make sense of her mistakes. I felt sympathetic to all the main  characters in the book. This only deepened for me as the story progressed. I felt that, through some terrible lapses in judgment on everyone’s part, they stumbled into an awful mess, and then had to find a way out of it with their souls intact. I believe they all succeeded in doing that—even Jo. To me, this represents the essential hope of the story.

AZ: When Joanne and Darla are young, they blame Mr. Timbro entirely for Joanne’s problems, while his wife is handled as a timid bystander. How did you envision Mrs. Timbro’s role in Joanne’s childhood? Why do Darla and Joanne not criticize her for her failure to intervene?
JP: Early on, Darla is surprised by Mrs. Timbro’s failure to step in on Jo’s behalf. Joanne, of course, already knows what Darla finds out by the end of the book: that Joanne had a major role in aggravating the conflict with her dad, and that Mrs. Timbro felt torn and tortured when the two people she loved continued to hurt each other. As children, we assume that the way our parents behave is normal, because
it’s all we know. As Jo gets older, I think she wants to protect and change her  mother, to make her more assertive. She becomes determined never to remain passive like her mother, and this fuels her disputes with her father. Both Darla and Jo underestimate the love and devotion that the Timbros have for each other, and the fact that their marriage actually works for them on their own terms.

AZ: When Sean tells Darla that Joanne was considering entering the order, Darla marvels that she led the two people closest to her to contemplate full-time religion. What place does religion hold for Joanne and Sean? Why did you choose to use it as a haven for both of these characters?
JP: For people who have been raised with religion in their lives, it seems that the response to huge problems elicits either a tighter embrace of those beliefs or an angry rejection of them. If, in your very center, you’ve been taught that God plays a role in what occurs in your life, you have to do something with that notion when difficult things happen. For Sean, who had a basic optimism about life, Darla’s rejection brought him face-to-face with larger questions of purpose and existence. He needed to find a positive channel for the hurt because that was his essential nature. Joanne reached the same kind of faith by walking backward into it. Her need for a consistent, loving, forgiving authority led her to trust God in ways that she had always wanted to (but never could) rely on her own father. Religion is ultimately an extremely personal path, and I believe people can arrive at the same place with completely different stories to tell about how they got there.

AZ: Why did you decide to end with a scene of Darla waiting for Joe to come home, instead of ending with Joanne’s funeral? What did you want this last scene to communicate to the reader?
JP: Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, I saw a lot of lives from a very close perspective. Small towns allow that in a way that cities don’t, in my opinion. I saw people go through things in the course of normal life that should have destroyed them. The loss of children, marital affairs, businesses that went under, and some instances of widespread humiliation and embarrassment from private
mistakes that became very public. Then I went off to college and moved away. When I came back I saw those same people, still living, going to work, with various kinds of family put together or kept intact under all kinds of circumstances. Some of them had found happiness and most had found some balance in life. The resiliency of life began to strike me as a remarkable occurrence. I wanted to end Jo and Darla’s story with the most positive thing to come out of all the pain and the mistakes: Joe. I wanted to demonstrate the resilient qualities that kept Darla from being destroyed and that kept Jo from being completely gone from her life.