<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t want you to murder her -- we want you to marry her.&amp;quot; Why she wrote the last line: This line is from an untitled novel I&amp;#039;m currently working on about a Jewish Civil War assassin. He&amp;#039;s a soldier in the Union army when his commanders find out that he has relatives in New Orleans, including a cousin who&amp;#039;s a Confederate spy. After he agrees to assassinate his cousin for the cause, his commanders tell him that they&amp;#039;ve found another spy for him to go after -- the daughter of one of his father&amp;#039;s business partners. When he protests that he doesn&amp;#039;t want to assassinate a woman, they laugh at him, and give him the line above. Suffice it to say that this marriage isn&amp;#039;t going to work out the way anyone expected. The book uses the conventions of a spy thriller, but it&amp;#039;s very much about loyalty, about how we decide who deserves our devotion, and why. The idea for this book probably first found its way into my head a few years ago. I was in New Orleans on a book tour, and while I was wandering around town, I stumbled upon a Jewish cemetery. I was surprised to see they went back to the early 1800s. I started reading more about Jewish communities during the Civil War and was surprised again by how much material I found. I think it resonated with me because of how polarized the country is now -- the sense that one has to choose a side, and that whatever side one chooses is the only way to truly be American. This is my third novel, and by now I ought to have a pattern for how write books, but I don&amp;#039;t. I tend to write a novel as though I were a reader reading it -- to find out what will happen next. People who aren&amp;#039;t novelists often don&amp;#039;t believe it when writers say that &amp;quot;the characters get away from you,&amp;quot; and that the writer follows the characters instead of the reverse. But it really is true that you get to a stage in writing a novel where the characters in the book are as real to you as actual people you know. After I finish a draft of a book, I usually have to go back and yell at these people or even kill off a few in order to take charge again. I find it too distracting to work at home, so I often work in my sister&amp;#039;s apartment. Whether or not the plot progresses usually depends a lot on what my sister happens to have in her refrigerator. About the author: Dara Horn is the author of the novels In the Image and The World to Come. She has received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the National Jewish Book Awards&amp;#039; First Time Author Award. Horn holds a doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and started working on her novels while in graduate school out of a desperate need to write something without footnotes. As told to Anya Yurchyshyn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a3301/lastline082107/>