A Thrum of Joy: A Guest Post by Alyssa Sheinmel

Secrets and lies line the walls of Rush Recovery, a rehabilitation center for society’s elite, in this gripping psychological thriller. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Alyssa Sheinmel on writing Such Sheltered Lives.

A few years ago, I read an article about an exclusive recovery center near Zurich, Switzerland.  I couldn’t stop thinking about the path that might lead someone to a place most of us haven’t even heard of.  Before long, three characters were taking shape in my mind’s eye: Amelia Blue Harris, the grief-stricken daughter of a Gen-X rockstar; Lord Edward of Essex, misunderstood son of a British earl; and Florence Bloom, an under-appreciated popstar determined to prove her worth. 

At first glance, I don’t have anything in common with Amelia, Edward, and Florence, but each was pulled from threads that weave the fabric of my own life: my abiding affection for nineties-era music and fashion, my fascination with British aristocracy, my history with disordered eating, my love for the east end of Long Island, my grief for my beautiful and brilliant mother.

As these characters took up residence in my imagination, so did the exclusive rehab center where all three would come to find themselves.  When I began writing, I initially placed the center in Zurich, like the one in the article I’d read, but after a few chapters, something didn’t feel right.  It wasn’t only that I’ve never been to Zurich, though certainly my unfamiliarity with the terrain played a large factor in my discomfort.  (Even as I entertained fantasies of a trip there for “research.”)  It was that I had no personal connection to it.  Every book I’ve written has taken place somewhere that I feel deeply connected to—whether Big Sur, my favorite place to visit, where A Danger to Herself and Others and RIP Eliza Hart take place; the North Bay region of California, near where I grew up, where What Kind of Girl and Faceless take place; even the woods of Maine, where The Castle School for Troubled Girls takes place—not somewhere I’ve lived, but a place that loomed large in my imagination long before I began writing.  Zurich had no such hold on me.  Eventually, I relocated the center and my characters to Shelter Island, off the East End of Long Island, a place I love.  Though my cozy home bears little, if any, resemblance to the glass houses that scattered across the acres of Rush’s Recovery, this new setting was crystal clear in my imagination.

I’ve always been a research-happy writer, so I began reading memoirs on addiction, recovery, and institutionalization.  I followed endless Instagram accounts about nineties celebrities and trends.  (To be honest, I’d have followed those accounts anyhow.)  I read books and articles about the British royal family.  But as so often happens, the research that had the biggest impact came from unexpected places—not only when I picked up a memoir on addiction and its narrator also had insight into disordered eating, but when I watched a special from one of my favorite stand-up comedians, and heard the stories of his own time in rehab.  Not only perusing pictures of GenX celebrities in their hey-day, but browsing through stores and discovering how many nineties-era trends have come back into fashion.  The decision to include song-lyrics in the novel came not only from listening to hours of nineties-era rock (again, something I’d have done anyhow), but from reading a novel that integrated song-lyrics beautifully, as well as from listening to some of my favorite contemporary musicians.  My research was both deliberate and unexpected—my favorite combination. 

Researching and writing Such Sheltered Lives was perhaps the hardest work of my career—getting to know the distinct voices of my main characters, balancing the plot’s twists and turns, inhabiting such rarefied air—but it was also a great deal of fun.  Such Sheltered Lives deals with loss, addiction, heartbreak and isolation—but I hope readers will be able to detect a thrum of joy between the sentences, too.