#58 – Life on the Refrigerator Door

Alice Kuipers’s new novel, Life on the Refrigerator Door, is a quick, easy and heartwarming little book about a single mother whose relationship with her daughter and subsequent illness plays out over a series of Post-It notes left on the fridge door. In all honesty, I read the book in about twenty minutes, which isn’t necessarily a comment upon the quality of the prose but, rather, of the shortness of the notes and their ability to pull you along seamlessly.

However, after interviewing Alice via email for work (you can read it here), I wanted to share this:

1. What was your inspiration for the novel?

Two events inspired the writing of this novel. One was a note that my boyfriend left me in our house. If someone else had seen his six words, they would have known so much about us and our relationship. I wanted to explore the idea that so few words could reveal so much. As a writer, this idea was quite compelling to me: how little can I write and how much can I say. The other event was witnessing my friend lose her mother to breast cancer. The way she coped was a true inspiration.

Now, I’m totally hooked and kind of fascinated by those six words that inspired an entire book. And I’m interested in trying to sum up my own life in six words, like the six-word stories that were all floating around the Internet a few month’s back. But I don’t think I could do it, I mean just typing up Wegener’s Granulomatosis seems like a lot, let alone fitting four more words around it.

I know it’s a pretty timid question that I asked her, but I do find the idea of actually writing less to reveal more pretty inspiring. I mean, has anyone else been watching Mad Men? (Sorry, I know, I’m obsessed!).