I first saw the house in Biddeford Pool, Maine about five years ago. We were renting a sad and pathetic cottage there for our summer vacation, and one of my favorite pasttimes was to walk through the village and look at the houses.

One day I took a side street I hadn't been down before and at the end of it was one of the most beautiful houses I had ever seen. It was two stories high, of white clapboards, and it had a Mansard roof with dozens of dormer windows poking out of it. It was completely surrounded by a wraparound porch on which sat two wooden rockers looking out to sea.

The house had a kind of graciousness and serenity that was exceptional, and I think it is fair to say that I fell in love with the house. I wanted to live there.

Living in it was, however, obviously out of the question then, but that was all right, I thought -- it was enough just to be able to look at it and fantasize about it. I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.

Shortly after I had first seen the house, I overheard a conversation between a pilot and a woman at a party. Something he said lodged in my consciousness and wouldn't go away. The thing he said was: When there's a crash, the union always gets there first.

He meant that when there was a crash of a commercial airliner, a member of the pilot's union made it a point to get to the pilot's wife's house first. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most important of which is to keep her from talking to the press. And there was my collision of ideas.

I decided to set my novel, The Pilot's Wife, in the house I had seen in Biddeford Pool. At the very least, the novel gave me a wonderful excuse to think about the house for a year and get paid for it.

So strong was the house's hold on me, however, that I was loathe to let it go, even when I let go of the novel itself. I knew already I wanted to set my next novel in the 19th century because I had found writing in 19th century language in The Weight of Water so pleasurable.

At the same time, I was observing the process of having a daughter and two stepdaughters pass through that delicate age of 14 to 15. Same house, I thought, but a hundred years earlier. Very different story, very different young woman.