Born in Winterville, North Carolina, in 1942, Sue Ellen Bridgers is a southern writer whose books reflect her knowledge of the various regions of North Carolina and their history and life. Her southern family with long family memories and strong maternal figures provides important sources for her writing in general, and Permanent Connections in particular. In "My Life in Fiction," Bridgers discusses the power of the creative imagination and the mystery of why certain memories become fiction and others, perhaps even more obviously source material, are not conscious to her as she develops her stories and characters.

In talking about the writing of Permanent Connections, Bridgers mentioned that a friend's description of the onset of agoraphobia had merged with her childhood memories of watching clouds when she came to describe Coralee's illness. She also said that of the characters in the novel, she first recognized...