Kristen Bird
Bird, a Sugar Land resident and teacher at Kinkaid School, was teaching a journalism course when she ran across a New Yorker article about Hannah Upp, a woman who had gone missing for weeks in Manhattan, only to be found floating in New York Harbor, alive. “My mind started circling the idea, and I started saying ‘what if, what if, what if…’ and here we are,” she says.
Bird spent several years teaching at O’Connell Preparatory School in Galveston, while studying for a master’s degree in literature at UH Clear Lake. “I got to know the culture of the island, which has deep class divides, and I wanted to explore how a disappearance of a girl might impact the community.”
The story revolves around the roles three mothers take in investigating what happened: Emily’s mom Catherine, a member of one of Galveston’s founding families (in this case, the fictional Callahans, who run the prep school); the mother of a football player, who’d previously been accused of rape and was seen leaving a party with Emily the night she disappeared; and the mother of Emily’s friend.
That Emily, when she’s found, has a new tattoo and is pregnant only deepens the mystery. Think The Lovely Bones crossed with Big Little Lies.
The novel is actually Bird’s third; the prior two are still in a drawer. A mom of three pre-teen daughters, with a husband who is a pastor, Bird finds time to write “on school holidays, weekends and during the summer” — though this novel was finished quickly, and she found both a literary agent and a publisher almost immediately. A second book, set in her native Alabama, is under contract. “It takes place near the foothills of the Appalachians where I grew up,” she says. “It opens with three sisters, all with dirt under their fingernails, standing around a grave. The question for me to answer is: How did they get there and who is in that grave?”
What if, what if, what if…