An excerpt from Cari Wade Gervin’s interview with Gentry:

I’m curious, what made you come up with the idea of this weird family with children growing up in isolation in this strange house?

Well, I was trying to capture a mood at the outset. But I guess the explanation for the idea is when I was in college, I’d go home with friends from college. And when I’d go visit other people’s families, I was aware of how uncomfortable I was, or could be, because I didn’t know the rules of the family. Which I think is a fairly common reaction. And I went to visit one of my friends in upstate, rural New York. She was part of a large family, and I guess I had some stereotypes about large families where I expected them to be boisterous and loud, but they were in a relatively small house with one bathroom, and probably as a result they had firmer boundaries than I had witnessed. They all seemed to be fairly introverted, there was not a lot of touching, that kind of thing. So the long answer is it just made an impression on me—the mood made an impression on me because it was so different from my family, which is pretty loud. So I guess I just like to think about the rules of family culture. That’s where I got started.

Read the rest HERE.