“I Dreamed of Falling” – In Conversation with Julia Dahl (Part 1 of 2)

Of all of the books that I’ve recently read, one of the very best is I Dreamed of Falling by Julia Dahl (available September 17, 2024 from Minotaur Books). This brilliantly written page-turner — centered around journalist Roman, his partner Ashley, and their family — is sure to keep you enthralled and guessing until the very end. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Julia about her latest book, including the story behind the story, the impact of COVID on family dynamics, the state of local news and the resulting impact it has on democracy, generational trauma, the drug crisis faced by many communities nationwide, and more. Read on to see what she had to say…

Andrew DeCanniere: I’m always curious about the story behind the story, and what motivated someone to write a particular book about a particular subject. So, what’s the story behind I Dreamed of Falling? What led you to write this particular story?

Julia Dahl: Right. In one way or another, all four of my previous books were kind of inspired by news stories I covered as a reporter, and then I would fictionalize them. This was much more personal in that it was kind of inspired by becoming a mom, and how that really changes you — but how it also really changes the whole dynamic of your family. I, like a lot of women, went through some postpartum depression and some struggle when my son was first born. I just felt really overwhelmed and really inadequate. I was 38 when my son was born. I was used to being good at things. I had a pretty successful career, and then all of a sudden I have this tiny infant and I feel like I have no idea what to do with him. I constantly felt like I was failing. I also had a lot of family support, and I’m so thankful for that. I was lucky in that my husband’s sister lived near us and, when she saw me struggling, she stepped right in and took over in some respects, and really became like my son’s second mom. They’re best friends, and it’s just been such a blessing in our lives to have her be like another parent. He’s now almost nine and they’re super close. 

Every book really begins with a “what if.” For this book, I thought about the struggle I’d had feeling like I was doing the mom stuff right, and thinking about what if I were in a different position. What if I were a much younger mom and I was struggling even more with depression? What if I had financial difficulties, and someone like my sister-in-law — or, in the book, like the mother-in-law — says “I’ll take over with the child.” What if I let them and I said “Yeah. This is too hard. I don’t want to do this. You take charge,” basically. Raising a child — especially a baby — is really hard, and there are times when you want to just be like “Can somebody take this burden away from me?” It feels like a burden sometimes. So, I thought what if I created a character who said “Yeah. You take over,” and she just kind of stepped back and, four years later, she realized that she didn’t really know her son as well as she wants to, and then tried to get back into that relationship. That was sort of where the story came from. 

DeCanniere: While I don’t have firsthand experience, I will say that it does seem to me that so many people who have a newborn do experience some depression, or perhaps feel as though they are not doing things correctly. They are unsure of themselves and whether they are doing everything properly. You know, there are these feelings of inadequacy. I think that people are talking about it more openly these days than they were. Before, it seemed like postpartum depression was this deep, dark secret — this thing that people were ashamed of, even though they needn’t have been, and was something they didn’t want to discuss openly. I think that is a huge thing too — the fact that you are writing about this topic, and that people are talking about it more. I feel like that kind of also helps to alleviate some of that stress.

Dahl: I definitely agree. I think that it’s definitely more talked about, which is really good, because most of the women I know — whether it was just for a few days, or a few weeks, or a few months, or even longer — really struggled with depression and anxiety after having a child. In a way, I wrote about this a little in my previous book, The Missing Hours. The main character’s sister had just given birth, and so I wrote a little bit about what that was like for her. In I Dreamed of Falling,the child is older. He’s four years old. In this book, I really wanted to explore a non-traditional family dynamic, where three generations are living in one house, and the roles are different from what a sort of traditional family might look like, and I wanted to explore how that could be positive, but also how there could be perils in that. I wanted to explore how perilous family dynamics can be, in some ways — how we sort of make assumptions about what the people close to us want, and what they need, when people aren’t able to articulate their needs. That’s sort of another theme of the book — not really being able to understand what you actually need and, consequently, not being able to articulate it, and the people around you then making assumptions about what you need and want. So, nobody is really communicating. Unfortunately, I think that happens a lot in families, where we just get caught up in the day-to-day — get the kid to school, make dinner, make sure the bills are paid. Thinking about what people really want and need from each other, in terms of love and care and support, gets shuffled off to the side. If you ignore that for long enough, it can have really serious consequences. 

DeCanniere: Yeah. I feel like in many families, at one time or another, you can go from speaking with one another to talking at one another. You know, making assumptions. Maybe you are convinced you’re listening, but you’re not necessarily hearing what is being said. As you say, people make assumptions and making assumptions can, in turn, lead to resentment. 

Dahl: Absolutely.

DeCanniere: Another interesting thing that you write about in your book is the impact the pandemic has on the relationships themselves.

Dahl: Yeah. That was really one of the other big themes of the book. The legacy of the pandemic on families. I watched a lot of families fall apart during the pandemic. I have close friends whose marriages just didn’t last. The pandemic was really hard on families. You know, when you have a family, you get in a sort of a rhythm — people go out and go to work, or people stay home and work at home. Kids go to school, and you have sports or you have plays. You go to the grocery store, you go out to dinner. Everything stopped during the pandemic. All of a sudden, families where just forced to stay home together. Even if people love each other, I think that being forced to stay home together, in a time when we’re all sort of terrified that everybody around us is going to get sick, was really traumatic for a lot of people. I also think that because the pandemic became so politicized, the reactions to the stuff around the pandemic — the lockdowns and masking and vaccines — was really different.

I was lucky in that my whole family — we were kind of on the same page. We had a sort of bubble of eleven of us. There was my little three-person family, my sister-in-law and her roommate, my sister and her husband and daughter, my parents and my husband’s parents. The eleven of us sort of had rules about what we would and wouldn’t do. We would see each other, and it worked for us. We were very lucky. Everybody was on the same page, for the most part. However, there were families where one person was like “Screw this. I’m going to go out to the bar,” and then another person is masking for years. One person says “You can’t be around grandma if she doesn’t get a vaccine.” I think that sort of stuff really tore families apart. 

In I Dreamed of Falling, that sort of happens. The family has different ideas of how to behave during the pandemic. Trust gets lost, and they really aren’t talking to each other about how they feel about all the different rules and that kind of thing. Additionally, the main character, Ashley, gives birth during that first month of lockdown, where everybody was terrified. We had no idea what was going on, and she had to go to the hospital alone, give birth to a baby, and have an emergency C-section, with none of her family there. She then had to come home and not be able to do things like immediately go back to the doctor for her own care, and not go to the pediatrician. That trauma really carried through for her, and for the rest of the family, for years. It sort of broke them apart. So, I really wanted to explore the legacy of the pandemic on families.

DeCanniere: Yeah. It seems that Ashley’s mom is sort of this conspiracy theorist. She is really dubious about the necessity and efficacy of wearing masks and vaccines and all of that. This despite the fact that we know masks — particularly N95s — and vaccines work to stop the spread, and reduce the severity, of illness. Science has shown us as much.

Dahl: Right. I saw that happen all the time, where a family would say to the grandparents “You have to get vaccinated if you’re going to come over and see the baby,” and the grandparents didn’t want to — or vice versa. It all just felt really important in those moments.  I think that people really hurt each other when they may not have meant to, because they had different reactions to the pandemic — which is normal, but I think it created a lot of fracturing within families. Even more so than before. You know, maybe there were families in which not everyone had the same values beforehand, but could live together, the pandemic then forced everybody into their corners. 

DeCanniere: Absolutely. I’ve certainly heard of situations like that. Fortunately, as with your family, everybody I was around was more-or-less on the same page where the virus was concerned — particularly early on, when there wasn’t a vaccine. For the time being, I still continue to mask in public places. On the other hand, I know that there are many who no longer feel the need to do so. 

Dahl: Right. And, you know, that’s fine. I don’t mask in public anymore, but I think that my family wore masks in public places much longer than a lot of people. Again, it’s like you see somebody in a mask or somebody not wearing a mask, and you start to make assumptions about them. You judge them, in one way or another. Again, I feel like it created more fracturing of families and communities that was perhaps already there in some respects, but the pandemic was like a shot of steroids into that fracturing. 

DeCanniere: I think, eventually, with some more time, people will get back to normal — more or less. Personally, I think that as long as one is being respectful of others, that’s the main thing at this point. 

Dahl: Exactly. But not everybody is, and I think that has caused families and communities a lot of consequential harm in the last five or six years. 

DeCanniere: It’s unfortunate but true. I will say that, in terms of family dynamics, what I also find interesting is the relationship between Roman and his mother. Obviously, it is affected by their background and what happened with his father, and then there is Roman and Ashley and their background. I think it is interesting how those things come into play as well.

Dahl: Yes. Another theme of the book is regret and whether or not you can forgive someone. In the book, Roman’s mother was not a good mom to him. She had a lot of trauma happen to her. She was a teenage mom. She just really wasn’t there for him. So, one of the questions of the book is whether he can forgive her for that, and whether he is able to move on and have a positive relationship with her. Also, what does it do to her to constantly, over the course of decades, constantly be trying to make up for something that she failed at 20 years ago?

DeCanniere: Right. It seems like it’s ever-present. 

Dahl: Yeah. That’s what I kind of loved writing about families. Every family has such a long history together. A history that begins even before they were born. That trauma that happened to your parents, or to your grandparents, impacts you. It’s part of the story that you tell about your family. It’s like part of the air in the home, and I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore that idea of generational trauma, and how the legacy of your family can really impact who you are, and who your children are.

DeCanniere: Right. There are these traumas that occur that can trickle down to later generations, through the years. What happened to one generation informs the next, which informs the next, and so on. I remember speaking with an author a few years ago now and he wrote about that — at least in part. There are members of his family who survived the Holocaust, and that certainly is one really good example of trauma that so often ends up trickling down from one generation to the next.

Dahl: Exactly. When somebody says “generational trauma,” that’s what I think. I think about Jewish Americans whose grandparents were impacted by the Holocaust, and how the stories that the grandparents told to the parents, and which are then told to us create a kind of trauma in us. But I think it’s much broader than that, right? Terrible things happen to people all the time. They don’t necessarily have to be a group terror like the Holocaust. 

Maybe you had a grandparent who committed suicide. Suicide is something that sort of hovers over this book. I think that there are studies that say that if you had a parent who committed suicide, you are at higher risk for doing that yourself. Even further back, the legacy of pain that something like having been a victim of gun violence, or having been a victim of domestic violence, the pain of addiction — the pain that creates bleeds into the life of your children, and even of your grandchildren. When you’ve had trauma happen to you, and most of us have, it does change you a little bit. It changes the way that you interact with people, and so that is going to bleed into how you parent and how you grandparent. 

DeCanniere: Speaking of grandparenting, whether she realizes it or not, Tara seems to view the grandson as some sort of do-over opportunity. 

Dahl: Totally. That’s how she feels. She feels like she has a second chance to parent this child. 

DeCanniere: Right. That’s kind of interesting, because she cannot really undo or redo what she did. You can’t make up for one with another. 

Dahl: Exactly. She feels like she got a second chance but, in a way, it’s not a second chance. It’s a new chance, but she has to recognize that she messed up the first time, and she needs to own that — own what the impact and the consequences of that are. She can do better with her grandson, but that doesn’t erase what she did with her son. 

Julia Dahl is the author of The Missing Hours, Conviction, Run You Down, and Invisible City, which was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, one of the Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2014, and has been translated into eight languages. A former reporter for CBS News and the New York Post, she now teaches journalism at NYU. For more information visit her website. You can also find her on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.

Click here to continue to Part 2 of “I Dreamed of Falling” – In Conversation with Julia Dahl