Background:

This book of mine got started when I saw The Miracle Worker on stage at MeadowBrook Theatre in October of 1998. We came to the end, that famous scene with the water pump, and when the audience stood up to applaud, I realized I was crying. I don't do that. And it's not like the climax of the play was a surprise – I'd seen the movie, and I knew the story – but bam! there it was, and I got it. When I saw Helen's mind fill with words, I understood for the first time what it was like to be empty of language, and the notion fascinated me. It still does, in fact -- nine years later, I still have the ticket stub, and the movie still makes me cry.

So that night I went home, broke into the public library (actually, I worked there at the time, so I just let myself in the front door) and picked up Helen's autobiography, The Story of My Life and both film versions of The Miracle Worker, which I promptly watched back-to-back, and I was hooked in my utterly obsessive way. I read all the books I could get my hands on, took all the sign language classes my university offered, taught myself Braille, and changed my major to linguistics. Eventually I even visited the Keller home in Alabama.

I knew I wanted to tell this story, but I couldn't do it from Helen’s point of view because you just can't write a book without words. And the more I read, the more I saw how much of Anne Sullivan’s story is still relatively unknown. She spent five decades in the shadow of Helen Keller's fame, yet Annie's early life is every bit as tragic and fascinating as Helen’s – and even Helen Keller herself didn’t know the whole truth about her teacher’s past until they’d been together almost 40 years.

In spite of all that, it's not easy to keep Helen's story from overpowering Annie's. Even William Gibson, who wrote The Miracle Worker as a "hymn to Teacher," remarked that his play could have been called "The Miracle Workee" because of all the attention it brought to Helen. But with a novel, unlike most plays, I could tell the story with just one voice: Annie's. Even if you know the story of Helen Keller, it's a voice you probably haven't heard yet – sharp and lively, and most of all, surprising in its intensity.