Then I showed it to my wife, Debbie, and my older daughter, Elena, and they both exploded with excitement about Lucy. She peppered me with ideas and notes of encouragement until I had completed a first draft. When she heard it, she insisted that I press on. But in the summer of 2007, my younger daughter, Amelia, was home from college and I told her the premise of the novel.

I nearly quit working on Lucy at that point because it was so discouraging. I told him that I was writing a novel and he asked why I would want to do that, since there hadn’t been a really good novel written in decades. A few years ago I was talking with Cormac McCarthy and he asked me what I was writing next. It took me the next 14 years to work it out. I was working in Hollywood at the time, writing screenplays, so my first attempt to write Lucy was actually a screenplay. Once I had fixed on the idea, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. And I thought: This is really possible now. Something about her appearance made me think that she was a cross between a human and an ape. It struck me that she was half human and half something else, something very ancient. As I was walking out there all alone, looking at those eerie pictures that someone had made maybe 1,000 years ago, I had this vision of a girl coming out of the rocks from an ancient time-this beautiful creature emerging into sunlight. There is something deliciously spooky and mysterious about that country. How did you come up with the idea of a girl who is part ape?Ī: I was studying petroglyphs in the high desert country of New Mexico around 1994.

Lucy by Laurence Gonzales