Her mother doesn’t understand her change in hairstyle. She wants to be there for her daughter, but she’s deeply afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. They’re both navigating the grief that comes with losing a father and a husband, but what San Diego author Anastasia Zadeik wanted to make clear in her second novel, “The Other Side of Nothing,” is that her characters love each other with a tremendous depth and strength.
A statement that I’ve heard a number of times and totally agree with is that when you are writing the book, the book is yours, but as soon as you put it out into the world, it’s the reader’s book and you can’t control what they’re bringing to it. We all bring our intergenerational influences and all of the things that make us who we are—our experiences, our current context—all of that becomes a part of the process of reading your book.