In Irreplaceable, Stephen Lovely maps the web of connections made after a heart transplant.
How did you get the inspiration for this novel?
When I finished the Iowa Writers Workshop, I spent a few years flopping around, writing a story or two with no luck. At the time, I was working at the University of Iowa hospitals and clinics, in pediatric intensive care. I was up there one night when this little boy was killed in a bicycle accident. His parents decided to donate his organs. I was casting about for a subject to write, and I started to think about all the kinds of relationships that would be formed when his organs went out into the world. But I didn't really have a novel in mind.
What was the hardest part of writing your first novel?
I think the main thing was being patient during all those years when I really had nothing to show for all my work. Other writers were publishing and getting awards and prizes. I sequestered myself and just concentrated on my book, putting aside any immediate need for reward or encouragement or anything like that.
There is a lot of technical jargon and medical information in the novel. What kind of research did you do?
Some of it I picked up, other stuff I learned by interviewing physicians or surgeons or people involved with organ transplantation, people who had received heart transplants and people who were waiting for them.
Part of the joy of reading this novel is the different perspectives, including that of your villain, Jasper. How did you get inside each perspective?
That was really tough, and it happened over a long, long period of time. The main character, Alex, is similar enough to me that I could build him out of my own life. Bernice was based on a woman I used to know in Iowa City. Janet I made up from scratch. I didn't know anything about her. Jasper was put together from three or four different people that I had either seen or met or knew somewhere who all had interesting characteristics. It took me a long time to calibrate him on the good to bad spectrum and decide just how genuine he should be, how malicious, how misguided, how obsessive, even how pathological.
What are you working on now?
I'm interested in relationships between small groups of people and all of the complexities and things that go into them; the physics of the emotions. It'll probably be a long time before I have anything to show.
