Part 3 of 5

Part 1: Adoption Fiction Book Review: Beyond the Blue


Part 2: A Chat with Author, Leslie Gould


Is Lan, the birth mother in "Beyond the Blue," based on a real person?

There are some similarities in circumstances, from the little I know, between Thao’s birthmother and Lan, but Lan is definitely a fictitious character who is so real in my head that I feel I should be able to go to Vietnam and find her. Some characters take months to develop, but Lan arrived in my imagination quite whole.

How did you get into the mind of Lan so thoroughly and realistically?

While I was writing Beyond the Blue, my husband’s army reserve medical unit was deployed, my mother was diagnosed with stage-four cancer, and my then thirteen-year-old son had an emergency appendectomy. I felt very overwhelmed, BUT I had enough money to feed and care for my kids AND I had the support of good friends and family. I took my emotions and exaggerated them for Lan, for her hopeless predicament. How did it feel to be responsible for an aging mother and multiple children with no resources? What would push a birth mother to the point of relinquishing her children?

I also read extensively about life in Vietnam and any accounts I could find from the perspective of birth mothers, both domestic and international.

After I completed the first draft of Beyond the Blue, my sister-in-law, who was adopted from Vietnam at the age of thirteen, read the manuscript and offered insights into daily life in Vietnam and into Lan’s situation.

How about Gen (the adoptive mom)? Do any of her experiences reflect what you went through?

While I was growing up my family had missionary friends, Archie and Betty Mitchell and their children, who lived in Vietnam. Archie was captured by the Viet Cong in 1962 and although there were sightings of him along the Ho Chi Minh trail for several years, he was never rescued. Betty was captured at the end of the war in 1975 but released after several months.

I grew up praying for the Mitchell family and for the people of Vietnam. Then through elementary and junior high school, I closely followed the Vietnam War. Walter Cronkite’s CBS News was my favorite show—I was drawn to both the Vietnamese people and the American soldiers and finally to the chaos at the end of the war. I was heartbroken about what transpired, including the Operation Babylift crash. Then as a high school student, I read everything I could about the boat people and the refugee camps in Thailand.

I drew on those experiences and interests to shape Gen’s story. I also drew extensively on my husband Peter for Gen’s husband Jeff. Peter, like Jeff, is a very optimistic, can-do, and dependable man.

In the next post: a review of Leslie Gould’s new novel, Scrap Everything.