Author Sarah Mueller on Home in a Hundred Places

MIXED ASIAN MEDIA - December 17, 2021

By Bri Ng Schwartz

They say art imitates life. This has been especially true for Sarah Mueller, who recently published her sophomore novel Home in a Hundred Places. This story follows the real experiences of her father’s transnational experiences growing up. Sarah wrote and released this book in a swift six months during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We bonded over our shared roots in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn and Illinois and got into the nitty gritty of her writing process and inspirations.

What made you write Home in a Hundred Places now?

This has been something I've always wanted to write. A lot of my family members have always wanted me to write my dad's story of coming to the United States. He traveled so much, he basically lived a lot of lives in one.

Everybody always told me it would be a very fascinating story to write... I just never did it. Then, I don't know, it was one of those days, let me just start doing it. Let me stop putting it off and start doing it. I actually began right when the pandemic started. Since I was home a lot, I took that time to really focus on it. 

I think “COVID time” has been fake, but all things considered, that's a quick turnaround. So you probably had a lot to say. 

Yeah, I think I basically wrote it in six months. I took a break in between and then went back to it and finished it up.

Wow, that's snappy! In Home in a Hundred Places, Raymond is suffering from Alzheimer's, and in your first novel, Greater Than The Still, Juliet has a career in mental health counseling. Is psychology and mental health an intentional through line in your work, or is it something that's sort of come about?

So, a few years ago, I was actually a mental health counselor. That's where that stems from, and I like to write what I know. So, yeah, that was my career for a few years, then I kind of switched, and now I'm doing the author thing. Then of course, in Home in a Hundred Places, my dad did have Alzheimer's, so I wanted to write about that. So both of them are true parts of my experiences.

As we've talked about a little bit, Home in a Hundred Places is based on real events in your dad's life. What made you decide to write a book in this narrative format, as opposed to a biography?

My background is writing fiction. And because there are some parts of this book from his childhood, from his upbringing, that I don't know, I wanted to kind of sprinkle some of my imagination into it. So that's why I chose narrative, versus the biography. I just felt like it would be a little bit more exciting for me to write, and also for readers to read.

I assume you knew a lot about your family history going into the work. How did your dad share these stories with you growing up? What did that look like? 

He was actually a pretty private person, so it was more of me asking him questions about everything. I would hear other stories though from family members, so I pieced things together a bit. If I asked questions, he would answer, but he would never start a conversation.

My dad grew up mostly in Asia. My mom grew up in the Philippines. I love to hear how they grew up in different cultures and ended up meeting each other. It was always something that I loved to hear about, so I just continued that, and now writing this story is important for me to give that to my family too. So that they can, you know, hear all the stories in one place. And for my son to, later on, be able to read this kind of story and know his family history.

You talk about your mom being from the Philippines, your dad in Egypt, and then the book kind of jumps across a lot of places in the world. How much writing was knowledge passed down to you, and how much (if any) historical research did you have to do when writing the book?

I actually had to do a little bit of historical research, especially for the parts that take place in Egypt. He was growing up in the late 1930s, 1940s. During that period, there was a lot of nationalism going on in Egypt. There was a big Jewish community there at the time, probably close to 80,000 in Cairo, at least. I had to research a lot because I knew general stories from my family, but I didn't know timelines and exact events that were going on. So, I actually ended up learning a lot. My family would tell me we had to leave Egypt because they didn't want the Jews there anymore, and I just left it at that before, but doing the research, I found it very fascinating. This is the first story I ever wrote that was historical fiction, so I have a new appreciation for the genre. 

Do you see yourself writing historical fiction at all in the future?

Possibly. I never realized I liked history so much until I started doing this. I've been reading a lot of historical fiction recently too, so yeah, for sure. I think I could.

What have you been reading, historical fiction wise? 

One that my book club read recently was The Four Winds, set during the dust bowl era in the United States. I felt like I was in that time period and was sucked into it, so I really like that genre now.

Did current events inform your world when you were writing this novel at all?

More so when I got to the later parts of the novel... because it's current. You know, some of these events happened within the past few years. I think one of the events that I briefly mentioned in the story was September 11th, because we were in New York, and he saw the whole event happen. I guess it's not too current, but I just remember that part being very real when I wrote it. It's still very fresh in my mind, even if it's 20 years later.

The book is sort of a coming of age story. These characters, they're not young, but they're not fully adults yet. How did you bring youth to these characters under the extreme circumstances that they're going through?

I think it comes back to hearing my dad's stories. In the beginning of the book, he's riding a bicycle with his cousin, and that's the very first picture we have of him when he was little. We have little tidbits of, you know, his youth and the kinds of things he did growing up in Egypt and in college there. I tried to put that in there to, you know, show that it's not all serious. He still did have these, you know, youthful experiences.

Obviously there are some key differences in the way that you and your dad grew up, but in him sharing stories with you over the years, were there any similarities that you were able to draw between your childhood and his?

It definitely was very, very different growing up in Egypt versus growing up in Brooklyn. Honestly, I think it came down to being with family. That was a main theme that I had in the story. Family was the most important thing. He would drop anything for his family. It didn't matter what was going on or who it was. And for me, I feel like that's how I was brought up too. Even if we grew up in different parts of the world, and totally different time periods, that component stayed with both of us.

What has your family's reaction to this book been?

They love it so far. My family has been very supportive. Some of them were the ones who were telling me that I should write something like this, so I think it's nice for them to finally see it. I think, for my mom, she could see how my imagination played into the parts when he was younger and in Haiti and Egypt and traveling, but then when her character got into the book, that was really special for her.

What do you hope readers take away from Home in a Hundred Places?

One of the main things is that even though he had Alzheimer's disease later on in his life, and it played a part in the story, the story is a lot more. One thing I want people to understand about the disease is that it doesn't define who you are. It's a very sad time when it happens, and while it's happening. I think a lot of people lose sight of the life that was lived before it. So much happened in my dad's life before he had Alzheimer's.For me, I think it's important to show that dementia is not the defining part of somebody's life. It's everything that happened before that.

Absolutely. Do you have any advice for emerging writers starting to engage in family stories in their work?

Have fun with it. You might not know what you're going to discover if you're interviewing family members. You know, finding out stories that you never heard before, but I really enjoyed the process. I think anybody who wants to write a family story of their own should try to really enjoy the process because those are memories that you can take with you and share. If you have children or nieces and nephews, they can learn about the family history. Don't take it too seriously sometimes and just learn as much as you can.

This is my last question. What can we expect from you next?

I'm currently working on a novel, a psychological thriller. So it's way different than this past novel. It's called The Lies on Their Lips, and it's about a sketch artist for the NYPD. A crime comes in, and she has to sketch the suspect, who ends up being her estranged twin brother. She doesn't know what to do. 

So that's in the works. Hopefully that'll be done within a year or so. That's my next release.