Every March, my friends and I make our yearly pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the first weekend of the NCAA tournament. Part of it is that we love basketball, but we also love the glamor, the adrenaline-fueled ambience, and that feeling that anything - ANYTHING - is possible. In Melissa Senate's new novel "Questions to ask before Marrying", Ruby Miller heads to Vegas to find the father of her sister's unborn child and learns the answers to all of life's little questions along the way.

Here's our interview with Ms. Senate:

 What was the inspiration for your book?
A: I was inspired by three things: The first was my love of the movie Sideways. Oh, how I wanted to write a road trip book after seeing that wonderful film.  The idea of two very different people trapped together in a car, being on the road, really gripped me. Enter my estranged twin sisters, one a conservative school teacher from Maine, newly engaged but with serious feelings for another man, and the other a professional muse and face reader from NYC who is searching for the father of her unborn baby (would help if she knew his first name). These two hit the road with many questions and get to know each other—and themselves—very well three-thousand miles later. The second backstory is my divorce, which I went through while writing this book. I wanted to go “back to the start” and explore what you know when he slips that ring on your finger. The third was a New York Times article, the most popular of 2006, a simple and practical list of questions couples should ask before marrying or (wish they had). The article gave me my title and honed the theme for me, which is that asking questions, even questions without answers or answers you don’t like, is the most important thing you can do.

Are you working on something right now?
A: I just signed on with a new publishing house, Simon and Schuster’s Pocket Books, for my next two novels. The first is about an unmoored New Yorker who discovers she has a half-sister she never knew existed in a small town in Maine. Off she goes. At this very moment, I’m finishing my second YA for Delacorte. It’s called: The Mosts and the Most Nots, about a Most (most popular) who is recruited by a Most Not to change her into someone who won’t make the Most Not list this year. Both girls go through a major emotional transformation. I was neither a most or most not in high school, but for some reason I love to write about girls on either end of the spectrum who change each other’s lives. This is pretty much the core of all my noves, YA or adult.

What is something about you that would surprise your readers?
A: That I used to dream about being a forensic scientist. In college, I was obsessed with true-crime novels, especially those by Ann Rule, like The Stranger Beside Me and Small Sacrifices. I don’t think anyone who knows me can see  me as FBI Agent Senate, but I secretly could!


 


    

 

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