by Jesse Steele

Plot Summary: Since the love of her life betrayed her, Meg has had a hard time putting into practice her Hokey-Pokey Theory of Life, which demands that you put your whole self in. What’s the point of opening yourself up if your heart comes back a little more broken each time? These days, Meg and her nine-year-old son Henry are taking on the world in their own lively way, and it’s enough.

Then Meg unexpectedly finds love in the form of an exotically handsome Iranian-American who befriends her and Henry over a game of chess in a coffee shop. When Meg takes another leap of faith, she begins to discover that in order to heal you have to hurt, but most of all you have to live your life and put your whole self in.

Each chapter opens with a prologue, each prologue linking to the prologue before in their own little story.  Each is connected to the prologue before and loosely connected to the main story.

Opening line of prologue: It’s easy to look at men and think they’re idiots.

Chapter 1: We meet Meg Clark, Kindergarten teacher in Tucson, Arizona, and the light of her life, her son Henry.  Meg is a single mom, a little lonely but largely happy with the life she’s made for the two of them.  In chapter one, Meg and Henry are getting ready for Friday night movie night, their own special tradition.

Chapter 2: We learn that Meg and Henry live happily in the Golden Arms apartments in mid-town Tucson.  They have befriended a motley collection of residents that Meg affectionately calls “the loop group” who spend their off hours gathered around the pool.  We also meet Clarabelle, Meg’s overbearing, demeaning, dramatic quirk mother, who has been saying for years that her husband (Meg and her sister Amy’s dad) is having an affair.

Chapter 3: As the prologues move along, we learn tiny bits about Meg’s background.  In the prologue to chapters one and two Meg talks about men and midlife crisis—as chapter 3 begins, we start to learn about Meg’s ex husband Jonathan and what happened to their marriage.

It’s also in this chapter that we meet Ahmed, the handsome and kind stranger Meg and Henry befriend on their regular Saturday morning trip to Lulu’s coffee shop.  Meg and Ahmed are instantly attracted to each other, but we learn here that Meg has a definite no dating policy and that Henry thinks her policy is dumb.

Meg’s son Henry likes Ahmed and offers Ahmed “their” phone number.  Meg deflects, restating her no-dating policy while fighting with herself about it.  This is the first time Meg has been tempted to break her policy, because Ahmed is so open and kind and is unflinchingly honest about who he is and where he comes from, not to mention that Henry responds to him so positively—but Meg is protective of the happy routine she and Henry have and ends up leaving the coffee shop without exchanging phone numbers with Ahmed—on the way out, Henry tells Ahmed they come to Lulu’s almost every Saturday and he hopes they’ll see him again.

(At the start of chapter 4 the prologues disappear)

Chapter 4: We meet Meg’s dad, Phillip, at the baseball stadium.  We see that Meg’s relationship with her dad is as close and loving as her relationship with Clarabelle is not, and immediately get the sense that Meg is prepared to take her dad’s side in whatever argument ensues.  We also find out that 9-year-old Henry is upset because another boy likes his friend Violet.

Chapter 5: Meg is concerned that Henry has made Ahmed into a fantasy father figure, Meg’s sister Amy is convinced Meg’s dad really is having an affair, we learn that Meg’s husband, Jonathan, left her when he found out she was pregnant so Henry doesn’t really know his dad at all, and Meg realizes that her father probably really is leaving her mother.

Chapter 6: Meg realizes she is thinking about Ahmed constantly and her resolve about not dating him starts to crumble a bit.  We also meet the mean soccer mom who is the team parent for Henry’s soccer team and learn that Henry got into a fight with the woman’s son the week before.

Followup interview with author Laura Fitzgerald

With Dan Gibson

DG:  In general, how did you approach the first fifty (or so) pages of the book?  There's a lot of characterization happening, but it's right around that part of the book where the action really kicks in.  Which came first:  the characters or the situation they find themselves in?

When I start a book, I focus on building to the "inciting incident," which is the event after which nothing will be the same for the main character, and which kicks off the story's main problem. It usually occurs about 10 percent of the way into the book, and in ONE TRUE THEORY OF LOVE, it occurs when Meg meets Ahmed at the coffee shop. Life changes forever after she and her son, Henry, meet him.

Before Meg meets Ahmed, she's at a place in her life where she's happy - she's got her little world, her routines - she's not asking for much - just that nothing change (which, of course, is an impossible goal). In designing the opening, I wanted to show the reader what her world was like, who the other characters were going to be, what motivates her and why, and to set things up so that when the reader sees Meg meeting Ahmed, the reader thinks, "I see trouble ahead." Because that's what really hooks a reader - trouble for the main character. We don't like it in our own lives, but we sure like to see it on the page.

As far as which came first, the characters or the situation, I'd say the situation. The idea for the story came to me as, "What happens when a woman who's sworn off love finds herself wildly attracted to someone who might just be the love of her life. Can she overcome her baggage? Can she summon the courage to take a second chance at love?" And then I build the characters around that idea.

I knew I wanted to write about a single mom whose marriage had failed, and I very clearly saw her in her kindergarten classroom and at her apartment complex. Meg came to me very easily. Her parents - her father, especially, did not. In several of the earliest drafts of the story, he was dead - and then in later drafts, he and Meg were estranged. What I constantly do wrong when I'm writing a story - and I'm only now beginning to realize this - is I don't question my starting assumptions. Why did I make her father dead? How did that help the story? It didn't, at all. In fact, by making Meg extremely close to him, it opened up all sorts of thematic issues I wanted to explore.

DG:  How did the idea of prefacing some of the chapters with a thought/idea introduction come about?
You know, I can't really remember how the idea came about, and it's not a device I generally like as a reader. But these first-person sections kept coming to me and so I'd put them in without quite knowing why. I mean, I sort of knew why - I felt Meg needed an outlet to express why she was doing some of the things she was doing - to justify her behavior, if you will. And I also liked the idea of compressing everything that was important thematically into them, so that if you read the book and then go back and read the first-person sections again, you read them with a whole new richness, which then elevates the entire story. And, in the end, you see exactly what the first-person writing is - it's actually a love letter to someone.

DG:  As someone who grew up in Tucson, the book's setting seems very familiar and comforting, in a way that helped me feel like I knew the characters immediately.  Now that the book is out, how have local Tucsonans and those from "out of town" reacted to the very specific setting and the various local landmarks featured in the book?

It's been quite fun to hear people's reaction to the setting. When I write early drafts, all I care about is getting the structure right and figuring out the characters. I'm also big on dialogue, but I ignore setting completely. Ross, who I worked with throughout the writing of the story, is really laid-back and yet persistent in making a point until I get it. So he kept saying things like, "A few details here would be nice..." (he said that about a thousand times) and "This story could pretty much be happening anywhere, did you want the reader to feel a sense of place?" And I'd always be like, yeah, yeah, I'll get to it. I just don't think in terms of details on the page. I have them in my head quite clearly, like a mental photograph, but I seldom offer physical descriptions of people or places on the page until prompted, because it just doesn't occur to me. I think I kind of assume people will fill them in for themselves.

And yet -- people always tell me that my stories are a visual experience for them. That they "see" the story as much as they read it. The same thing happened with my first novel, VEIL OF ROSES. And what I do is a quirky thing - I call it "Four Details," and it's pretty much an exercise in which to every single setting and scene, I add four concrete details or lines of description. I try to capture all the senses, not just sight.

The result is that people from Tucson have a blast reading my books, because I write about their neighborhoods, their grocery stores, their parks - I'm writing the setting of their lives. I get emails from people who say, "I lived in that apartment complex you wrote about," or "My kids play soccer at Himmel Park." (The big question I get with this book is, "Where is LuLu's Cafe?")

I've had people tell me two years after my first book came out that they can't drive through central Tucson or pass by Ike's Coffee and Tea without thinking of VEIL OF ROSES. And I love that. When I speak with book clubs outside of Tucson, they feel the setting is deliciously foreign - because Tucson is really unique in terms of not just physical setting, but in terms of the spirit of the people.

DG:  Along with the richness of the descriptions of the setting, I found that from the very beginning of the book, I felt captured into the story by the depth of the various characters (both major and minor).  How did you go about creating both the community at Meg's apartment complex, in her classroom and the characters in her family with detail without detracting from the focus of Meg, Henry and Ahmed?

With the exception of Meg's father, virtually every "minor" character came to me fully formed. Opera Bob. Crazy Kat. Harley. Lucas and Marita. In my head, they really exist.

They don't detract from the main plot because I'm very clear on why they're in the story in the first place and what purpose they serve. Nothing in a novel should be extraneous. Lucas and Marita, for example, show the power of simple kindness to get a person through. Meg sees them and wonders who was there for Ahmed when he was a child like Lucas is there for Marita, and she wishes she could have been the one to help him through his hard times. That's a sign her love for him is very deep.

The other love relationships in the book are there to give Meg the opportunity to show what went wrong with her first marriage and how she can avoid the same thing from happening with Ahmed. In the case of her parents, Clarabelle says early on, when Meg asks what her father ever did that was so horrible, "He stopped thinking I was someone special." I happen to think that's the great crime in most marriages, and it's what Meg did in her own failed marriage - she could only see her husband in terms of who he was in relation to her. As a result, he was living a life that didn't reflect who he was, and he quit it in a very hurtful way.

In the case of Meg's sister, Amy, she's at a place where she's a caretaker for everybody in her family and feels like she's lost herself. This manifests itself in frustrated, petty, cranky behavior, which then starts this vicious tit-for-tat cycle in her marriage ("If you want to have sex with me, fold the damn laundry!") Throughout the course of the story, Amy figures out that to make it work, she's got to spend time on herself - in her case, indulging her passion for poetry. If she can just have that, she'll be okay, but if she can't, she'll forever live one of what Thoreau called "quiet lives of desperation." That's why Jonathan jumped ship - to avoid that. It's what Meg's parents suffered through for thirty years. It all links thematically.