Family is at the core of this book. My grandmother and her three siblings grew up in Carbon Hill, where my great-grandfather was a coal miner. So I grew up hearing anecdotes about life in the coal-mining town. (Let me take this chance to say that I did not hear a single story about a baby down a well—that part of the plot is purely fiction.)

Mostly these stories involved the details of childhood during the Great Depression. I heard the most embellishing from my grandmother and her sister—when they were together, a story became a dialogue. There was the time the two of them made ice cream, and my great-aunt accidentally put cough medicine in it instead of vanilla. (Sugar was precious, so they ate the ice cream anyway.) There was the weekend when my grandmother wore a dress that shrunk in the rain, and the trip to the city when my great-aunt counted trolley cars for an hour before she realized there was only one trolley car going around in a circle.

So I heard all those stories and stored them away. I never intended to use them in a novel. I liked the stories for their own sake. Years later, I started thinking about the possibilities for a story set in an early 1900s mining community. I’d read several nonfiction books that touched on the mining strikes and struggles in the northeastern United States, and I thought of the brutality and danger of everyday life in the mines … and of how the moments of beauty or joy in the midst of all that ugliness would be all the more striking. I thought of how that constant threat of death or disaster—from mining or hunger or poverty or illness—might sharpen your perspective. I thought of how black men and white men worked side by side, and how that companionship inevitably shifted racial attitudes, even in the otherwise-segregated South.

Eventually I found myself thinking of a little girl sitting on the back porch of her house, staring out at the night. I knew she would see something come out of the darkness, but I didn’t know what. Or who. As the story of the Well and the Mine began to rise to the surface, I found that even as I tried to see the mysterious Well Woman more clearly and figure out why she would drop a baby down a well, I didn’t have to strain too hard to see the Moore family. Virgie has my grandmother’s sense of propriety. Tess has my great-aunt’s sense of fun. Leta has my great-grandmother’s pragmatism, and Albert has my great-grandfather’s belief in clear-cut right and wrong.

Although the Moores are not my family, they are built with bits and pieces of their real-life counterparts, fleshed out and fictionalized. I know the bonds between Virgie and Tess—I see them even now between my 94-year-old grandmother and her 87-year-old sister. Some of the same family stories I grew up hearing find their way into the Moores’ lives. The sights and smells and sounds of life in Carbon Hill—the red dust in the air, the smell of coffee in the morning, the slick sticky feel of floor cleaner—are details I couldn’t have found in a library. I found them in memories.