The Blessings is a story Elise Juska has wanted to write for years. The tipping point in telling the tale came when she began thinking about the juxtaposition between individuality and being part of a large extended family, like the one from which she hails. "The identity of the clan is so much a part of who you are, but at the same time everybody has their own lives outside of that and private things going on that the other people in the family wouldn't even know or guess," said Juska.
That idea informed the structure of The Blessings, in which each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character, including college student Abby, torn between the familiarity of home and the excitement of campus life; her aunt, Kate, who pursues motherhood even at the expense of her marriage; and teenage cousin Stephen, whose act of petty thievery takes a surprising turn. Although Juska's relatives need not be concerned that any of the characters are based on real-life counterparts, she did have an uncle who died young, the seminal event that ripples through the story.
Like the Blessing family, Juska is a Philadelphia area native. After several years living in New England, she returned to the city, where she is the director of the undergraduate Creative Writing program at the University of the Arts. Summers she spends writing in a cottage on an island off the coast of Maine. Juska's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping and other journals and magazines, and she is also the author of the novels The Hazards of Sleeping Alone, Getting Over Jack Wagner and One for Sorrow, Two for Joy.
A real-life event that occurred while Juska was writing The Blessings altered a significant aspect of the novel. If she hadn't tied the knot, the Blessings would be the Callahan family. "In the course of writing the book, I met my husband and got married. It happens that some of my in-laws had the original last name of my family, so for that reason I ended up changing the name late in the game," Juska explained.
Early readers of the novel have shared with Juska that the Blessings feel familiar and that they identify with the family members' relationships and experiences. "It's interesting because the book seems so specific to my family or families like mine," said Juska. "But of course you want it to also feel universal and accessible--some feeling of family that is relatable to readers even if their family doesn't look or act just like this one."