SARA GRUEN: There were a few reasons for wanting to include him, but basically we have a lot of longevity on both sides of my family, but we don’t actually have anybody in a home. But I think this frightened my husband a little bit. I seem to have 93-year-old men on tap. But he was just there when I wanted to write the story and I started thinking about how I was going to end it. I realized I would be leaving this character, if I didn’t include the older Jacob, I would be leaving this character right on the cusp of World War II and us not knowing what happened to him or his family. So, I didn’t want to do that. I think that was one of my main driving factors. And really, there was this old guy in my head just wanting to talk. So I let him.
ECM: Well, I loved those parts of the book just as much as the circus parts.
SARA GRUEN: Oh thanks. I reached those with relief because in the circus portions I had to keep so many details straight and when I got to the nursing home I knew what things were made out of. I didn’t have to double-check every single detail.
ECM: Animals have been important characters in all your novels, and I noticed on your Web site that you donate a portion of the royalties from your books to animal related charities. Have you always been an animal lover?
SARA GRUEN: Yeah, and I don’t think I realized I was any different from anybody else until really pretty much the start of this book tour when people started asking me that. And I was thinking, “Yes, I have, isn’t everybody like this?” And I think maybe now I realized I’m a little bit further over the edge of the spectrum in the animal-loving department.
ECM: Who was your first pet?
SARA GRUEN: My first pet was a Maltese named Molly but she coincided with Alice the cat. So I had Molly and Alice for a long time and then we had fish and Annie and all my other childhood dogs up until the point when I started getting my own pets.
ECM: And tell us about some of your current pets.
SARA GRUEN: My dogs are Ladybug and Reba. They are nine years old and they’re funny because they are littermates but one of them looks like a Chow and one of them looks like Old Yeller, so I have no idea what kind of dogs are in there. They are nine and we got them from a Texas sanctuary a year and a half ago, so they spent seven years there. So, they are extremely grateful to have a home. They are just the most loving dogs you can imagine. And we have 17-year-old Katie the cat. And Mouse who is six. And Fritz is our most recent cat addition, and he’s also nine years old and he was rescued from a house that had more than 100 cats, and his ears were so badly infected for so many years that we had to have his ear canals resectioned. So his ears stuck up at different angles and he always looked like he was angry even though he wasn’t. And actually we could never get the second ear to clear up, so we got a CT scan done and they discovered he had a growth in his middle ear, so he had to have that ear basically closed up. So he’s still got a cosmetic ear, but it’s just skin all the way over where there used to be an ear. He’s pretty funny looking. But he’s really sweet and he’s happy now at least.
ECM: And you have horses?
SARA GRUEN: Well, right, I have horse. I have one horse and two goats. My horse’s name is Tia and Pepper is my goat and Ferdinand is my accident goat because a farmer moved across the road from our goat pen and they brought a goat with them, but they didn’t have a goat pen yet. And their goat was a buck, and by the time I noticed, Pepper was pregnant, so now I have Ferdinand.
ECM: Your Web site says you live in an environmentalist community. What does that mean?
SARA GRUEN: Our houses are 60% more energy efficient than other houses. And I think we have 680 something acres and there are four hundred some families, but we all live on fairly small, personal lots so that we have a lot of common area and restored wetlands. We share an organic farm and we have a charter school and some of our neighbors have prairie grass instead of lawns. We would have as well, except our house was already built when we moved in and it has a lawn. But that eliminates the need for spraying and using chemicals on your lawn. All you have to do is burn it off once a year and it is sort of knee-deep wildflowers. It looks really great.
