So, The Fourteenth Goldfish is a little bit of a departure from what I’ve traditionally written in my novels. I usually write historical fiction. And this is really more science fiction. And the premise is it’s about a girl whose grandfather comes home one day, and he’s actually found a way to reverse aging.
And so he’s turned himself into a middle schooler, and he had to then live with his granddaughter and his own daughter, and it’s about the limits of science, and the family dynamics when that sort of situation would happen with three generations. And, you know the world of possibility.
So, the character of Melvin, Ellie’s grandfather, and he’s the scientist who, he’s in his 70s and he turns himself into a 14 year old, he was actually inspired by my late father who was a doctor, and loved science, used to run science experiments at our house when I was a kid. He kept Petri dishes with blood agar in the refrigerator to culture bacteria, like next to the cottage cheese, I thought that all kids had parents that did that.
So, I grew up with a lot of science, and he was a big fan of Doctor Jonas Salk, who develop the polio vaccine. And so, I based a lot of the Melvin characteristics on my dad, like my dad was very firm about putting the trash out at night, you know because if it didn’t get picked up then you’d have two weeks of garbage in your driveway, so he had a lot of funny quirks.
Yeah, so it was a big departure to go from writing historical fiction to more science fiction. But I used the same process that I do for historical fiction. I kind of actually thought of the book a little bit as a history of science because I do, I mention a lot of, you know significant sciences in The Fourteenth Goldfish.
And I think honestly the book was inspired because my father had died a few years ago, and after he died I really struggled with trying to figure out what are the limits of life and death? How should you extend life? Should you not? And all those things were going through my head, so it was kind of therapy for me to try to work my way through those situations and questions.