"Ever have a party with people from different parts of your life, who don’t know each other and they all get together and WOW there’s this snap crackle pop thing happening. People are sparking. Your yoga teacher hits it off with your uncle the sharp shooter. Even the pets are getting along. The same thing can happen or fail to happen in your novel. I don’t know about you, but I’ve thrown dud parties too. Every person looks at his or her watch and has someplace else they have to be. I had a very polished draft of Al Capone Does My Shirts finished when I realized that my group of secondary characters—the kids on the island -- didn’t have enough chemistry. It’s not that they were bad characters. They were funny. They were original. I liked them. But they didn’t gel with each other. So I kicked them out of the book. It was a huge amount of work. It just about killed me. But out of that came the funniest character in the whole novel, Theresa Mattaman. I didn’t plan her either. She just showed up one day."

Q: What kind of challenges, if any, did you come across while writing this book?

The main reason Al Capone Does My Shirts means so much to me is because of the relationships in the book. Like the main character Moose, I grew up with a sibling who had autism. And though I am not Moose and my sister is not Natalie there’s no doubt that this experience fueled the book.

But the fact that this book is "close to home" gave it some additional baggage as well. It was extremely confusing and terribly frustrating to grow up with a sibling who had autism. I really wanted to reach out to other children who are the siblings of children with problems. It was very important to me that the book ring true to those kids.

On the other hand, I felt like I’d be doing the subject a great disservice if I wrote a dreary-downer-dealing-with-disease kind of book. I thought I’d do the topic greater justice if I wrote a more universal book – a fun book full of unexpected plot twists—a book everyone would want to read.

© 2005- Gennifer Choldenko. All rights reserved. If you would like to reuse or reprint anything on this website, please ask the author's permission.