Miles Apart is a work of fiction inspired by my family history. When I was eighteen months old, I was administered a dose of faulty polio vaccine and in danger of contracting the virus. Our pediatrician gave instructions for my parents to watch me carefully for the next week. I did not contract polio, but my mother, due to close contact, did. She was whisked off by ambulance to the hospital and placed in an iron lung. She had disappeared from my life. When she returned home after a year, polio had ravaged her upper body and affected her ability to breath. Remarkably, she made it to seventy-one before she died of post-polio syndrome.
A goal in writing Miles Apart was to give the character Amelia a life my mother might have lived. Wanting to make her saintly, I found her character impossible to write, so I changed Amelia completely away from the likeness of my mother. I made Amelia haunted, troubled and damaged, attributes unbefitting my mother. I gave Amelia the freedom to deep six her responsibilities from marriage, parenthood and parents. She could be selfish in a way my mother never could.
Steven Wight is from Walnut Creek, California.
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