Bauer recalled in the Penguin-Putnam interview, "[My grandmother] taught me the significance of humor and how it intersects our daily lives."
Humor Brings Hope
Bauer's teen years were difficult. Her grandmother suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and when Bauer was twenty, her father committed suicide. She revealed in the Penguin-Putnam interview that day was "the saddest day of my life." Shortly before her father's death, Bauer had gone to Iowa, where he was living, to seek him out. "I confronted him on several things," Bauer told the interviewer. "I learned from that experience that there are times in life when we have choices--we can continue to be victims or we can move forward to be healthy people." Applying the same direct, pro-active approach in her fiction, Bauer's characters confront problems in their relationships head-on as they attempt to deal with them.
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