On the morning of September 11, 2001, Stacey Kade, working as a copywriter in a Chicago area insurance company, noticed her colleagues gathered around the television in their media center. She joined them as the horrors at the World Trade Center unfolded. Nine months later, in June of 2002, they were gathered around the television again, and she felt an awful sense of dread as she went over to join them. Kade says, “It turned out to be the Elizabeth Smart case—she had just been abducted from her bedroom the night before, and they were detailing search efforts. A lawyer I worked for said, ‘Well, they never find them alive.’ It was this horrible, chilling moment. I couldn’t help thinking about this poor girl, who, even if she was still alive, people were already writing off. They were already condemning her to whatever fate, and that just stuck in my mind.”
Over a decade later, Kade, now a popular YA author, finally decided to take that idea and write her first adult novel, which showcases a teenager named Amanda Grace who escapes an abduction after being kidnapped for two years and eight days, hence the title, 738 Days (Forge, June). Several years later, as Amanda struggles to gain normalcy in her life, she encounters down-and-out actor Chase Henry, whose poster from his television heyday was the one thing in the room where she was kept that gave her hope. The book explores how these two disparate people come to rely on each other in ways they never imagined possible.
In addition to researching Elizabeth Smart’s story and others like her who survived their abductions, Kade used her own diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, about which she is very outspoken, to bring added depth to Amanda’s character. “Obviously, Amanda’s experiences are very different from mine, but I was able to write about things that I have felt—what it feels like to go into a panic attack, and how the rational part of your brain does not control the panic-driven side. I really appreciated being able to write about it from a descriptive standpoint because that’s something I’ve never written about before. And I hoped to show people what it’s like to live with that anxiety.”
Reflecting on her young adult novels compared to her current book, the author notes, “I like to write about identity, and here there’s definitely a strong theme of figuring out who you are and who you want to be in the face of challenges. That’s a very strong theme in everything I write, but in this book particularly, as well.”
Today, Kade’s galley signing is at the Macmillan booth (1958, 1959), 3:30 p.m.
This article appeared in the May 12, 2016 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
