By the time I finally reached some kind of equilibrium, Jess was around six months old. I was able to brush my teeth, shower, and get dressed all before noon. I was learning how to become a functional person at the same time my son was becoming a person. He was a lot of work, but with that work was the joy of seeing a human being develop. He was a happy little guy-amusing and engaging-and we had a really good time together. As he grew older, he was very responsive and made my life easier by being an early talker. I decided to put off my illustrious career in dentistry in favor of motherhood and I kept telling myself that I’d soldier on with dentistry just as soon as Jesse was in school.

But then I got pregnant again. By the time Rachel came around, I had come to grips with the fact that I was not just postponing dentistry, I was shelving it. It was an easy decision in some ways, but a very hard one in others. I felt I was wasting years of education and letting my profession down. But at the time, dentistry wasn’t calling my name, and honestly, no one from the ADA has ever phoned me and asked, “Where the heck are you?” It seems that dentistry has gotten along just fine without me.

So I went about the business of raising a family. Now, anyone who has ever spent long periods with a child knows that there’s a lot of down time-pushing a swing, taking a walk, watching your child play at the park.

The mind abhors a vacuum.

Presented with blocks of time without speaking, my brain began to spark and fill in the blanks. In my head, I listed chores that needed to be done. I planned dinner menus. I considered baby gyms and music classes. I was expected to be thinking about all those things. What I didn’t expect was to be making up stories again.

My imaginary friends awoke from the dormancy caused by twenty years of education. They began to make their big-screen comebacks in my head, only this time they materialized in adult form. I began to invent new adventures, more daring quests, more racy and passionate love stories, darker fables, and elusive murder mysteries. Once again, the chief protagonist in all my stories was some kind of Faye Kellerman facsimile, but at twenty-six, I knew better than to act out the stories aloud as I had done as a kid. They put adults away for those kinds of things. I kept all my buddies inside because I felt that there was something a little off with me: making up stories when you’re a wife, a mother, and supposedly a sane person. I firmly believe that I would have left my tales deep inside my gray matter if I had been married to anyone other than Jonathan Kellerman.

Unlike me, Jonathan was a natural-born writer. I think he emerged from his mother’s womb with pen in hand. When I met Jon, I was eighteen. We married a year and a half later, both of us still wet-behind-the-ears kids and very much unformed. Jonathan not only saw me through college and dental school, but elected to go to graduate school in Los Angeles because I didn’t want to move from there. Jonathan graduated with a PhD in clinical psychology from USC at the tender age of twenty-four. My husband was a true Renaissance man, with many interests and hobbies, and one of his extracurricular passions was writing. If he saw me through college, I saw him through nine novels, all of them eventually relegated to boxes in storage. His attempts taught him a lot. They taught me what it meant to persevere and how much fun it was to write. Yes, he cared that his novels weren’t getting published, but it didn’t deter him a whit from writing. It was almost as if writing were an addiction.

Then one day it suddenly dawned on me what he was doing. He was taking his imaginary friends and putting them down on paper and calling himself a writer. If he was brave enough to do that and strong enough to suffer through one rejection after another, what in the world did I have to lose by putting my imaginary friends on paper too? And the timing was perfect. He was on the brink of breaking through into the publishing business. Had he been the monster bestseller that he is today, I would have been much too intimidated to try to write.

Another husband might have been outright discouraging. Another husband might have been encouraging in a discouraging way. Jonathan, bless him, was only encouraging. As the premier author in the family, he was helpful and straightforward, straddling the difficult lines between tutor, critic, and husband. The nights weren’t always easy, but the conversation was always honest.

As with a lot of neophyte writers, my first attempts were competently written but went nowhere. The stories dragged, the characters didn’t develop, the sense of place was wanting. It was good that my initial forays into fiction never saw the light of day, but all those hours of writing bad stories weren’t for nothing. I considered the four-to-five-year experience a protracted course in writing fiction. I had Jonathan’s input, but I still had to act as my own student, teacher, editor, and critic.

The main thing was that I discovered my love for writing. It was cathartic, it was an outlet for my zany imagination, and it gave me something to do. I wrote notebooks full of novels, stories, and plays, but deep inside, I knew I was spinning my wheels. It’s certainly okay to indulge in creative outbursts, but if I had any hopes of getting published-of having my works out there to be read and critiqued-I had to be a little more thoughtful about what I put down on paper.

I began to think about what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. Equally significant, I began to wonder what I wanted to write about. That meant structure.

I needed a plot.

In the ’70s and ’80s, to have a strong story line was somewhat anathema and was eschewed in modern literature. Plot was for chumps, a crutch used in genre writing. But since I wasn’t an English major in college and since I didn’t follow the vagaries of the literary world, I didn’t know that. Plot just appealed to my sensibilities as a mathematician. Well-crafted stories had beginnings, middles, and ends, and propelled the reader forward from the first page to the last. I considered plot to be a good thing. This revelation dovetailed nicely with the kinds of books I liked to read-mystery and suspense novels.

Jonathan had introduced me to Ross Macdonald. He had found The Zebra-Striped Hearse in a used-book store near work, and we began to systematically devour many of the best “hard-boiled” writers-Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett… the list was long and impressive.

My choice was clear. I decided to write crime novels, and my timing couldn’t have been better. There was a growing renaissance of mystery writing in the ’70s and ’80s. Joseph Wambaugh and Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain were pumping out some of the best police procedurals in the business. Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake had switched over from Westerns to capers and mysteries. There were others: Arthur Lyons, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Linda Grant, Stephen Greenleaf, all of them giving the murder mystery their unique spin.

To me that was the key: to make the murder mystery genre my own, I needed to give my book a voice. I needed a narration that told the reader that this was a different kind of suspense novel from a new author named Faye Kellerman. I felt that I could put my imprimatur on my story only if I wrote from a point of expertise, i.e., if I wrote what I knew. The problem was, at thirty-two, I didn’t know all that much. I had gotten married at nineteen and had spent most of my adult life being a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a student. I could probably figure out a good plot, but who would my characters be? What could I take from myself that would give my novel an exclusive punch? Who was I and what could I do to set myself apart?