My mother was a teetotaler and my father was into a variety of recreational chemicals, so their marriage was probably doomed from the start. In the story's illustrations my older sister looks suspiciously like the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones. The first story I ever wrote in pre-school was a thinly veiled autobiography about a family of aliens. Later I found out it really doesn't matter whether something's true, as long as it's a good story.

When I was little, my family often accused me of being a storyteller, which is a polite way in Kansas of calling someone a liar. Not even all the presidents, because Hugoton at the time was only ten blocks by ten blocks. They were gravel and named after presidents. I grew up on the mean streets of Hugoton, Kansas, where the only traffic light in town went to flashing red at dusk. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Reckless Oath We Made, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Last Will, and Lie Lay Lain. She earned a MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University. We know what she thinks, because it's what we think when we read terrible things in the news.BRYN GREENWOOD is a fourth-generation Kansan, one of seven sisters, and the daughter of a mostly reformed drug dealer. For example, I skipped Wavy's Aunt Brenda, because she essentially stands in for us as a society. Conversely, I passed over the POVs of some of the central characters, because I feared they would derail the story I was telling, or because I felt their narrative was one that most readers could imagine on their own.

Who could give me a new or unique perspective on the central story? Some of them are people who know the main characters well-like Wavy's cousin or Kellen's business partner-but others are strangers who meet Wavy and Kellen in passing. That's how I chose many of the secondary narratives for All the Ugly and Wonderful Things. I like to pivot to characters on the periphery of the main story, because they frequently have perspectives I want to see.

Every character who shows up in my novels is somebody with a story, and because I'm a compulsive writer, I tend to write down those stories, just in case I need them later. BG: I'm not sure I even believe in background characters.

Bryn greenwood