by M.J. Rose

(Excerpted with kind permission from Backstory)

When I was three years old, I told my great grandfather things about his childhood in Russia that there was simply no way I could have known.

He became convinced I was a reincarnation of someone in his past. And over time, after more incidents, my mother – a very sane and logical woman — also came to believe it.

Reincarnation was an idea I grew up with that my mom and I talked about and researched together.

For years, I wanted to write a novel about someone like my mother – who was sane and logical – who started out skeptical but came to believe in reincarnation. But I was afraid if I did people would think I was a “woo woo weirdo”.

I tried to start the book ten years ago after my mother died but I was too close to the subject and missed her too much to be able to explore it objectively. Every once in while the idea would start to pester me again but I still stayed away from it.

Then a few years ago on the exact anniversary of my mom’s death my niece, who was a toddler at the time, said some very curious things to me about my mother and I – things she really couldn’t have known — and the pestering became an obsession.

To read more of M.J. Rose’s backstory for “The Reincarnationist” go to Backstory!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Backstories, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.