Karen Winn Intrigues in 'Our Little World'

Karen Winn’s debut novel, Our Little World, explores the relationship between two sisters and how it’s affected after the disappearance of a young girl in their small, east coast town. “So Our Little World, it does take place in a small, rural town in New Jersey called Hammend. It’s a fictional town but it is a fictionalized version, an anagram, of my hometown in New Jersey – Mendham, New Jersey, and I wanted to tell a story about sisters and secrets and how small, in-the-moment decisions can have lingering consequences and was interested in exploring how tragedy could pierce a small community…This is a purely, almost fictional story, set in the setting of my childhood, essentially.”

In the novel, there’s a pivotal, opening scene where a young girl goes missing, which was inspired by an real event that happened in Winn’s own life. “So there is, in the book, there is a lake called Deer Chase Lake and 4-year-old Sally Baker, she and her family have moved from Boston to this small town of Hammend, and my main character Bee, she’s a rising seventh grader and her sister, Audrina. It’s summer of 1985 and they decide to go swimming at the local lake and that is where 4-year-old Sally Baker goes missing and the novel centers on really what happens in the aftermath of that…” Deer Chase Lake is loosely based on an actual lake named Sunrise Lake that Winn swam at when she was younger. “We were there one summer day in the 80’s and I resurfaced and I saw everybody exiting the lake and I wasn’t sure why. There was a lifeguard there but I hadn’t heard him blow the whistle…so I followed everyone out and there was this, kind of, a chaotic energy on the beach and I was trying to find my mom…she was standing with the lifeguard…he was literally grabbing little girls and saying ‘Is this her? Is this her?’ and then I realized that they had emptied the lake looking for me because my mom couldn’t find me because I was underwater… it was one of those memories, those visceral memories that you have in your childhood that are seared in you, and I just thought… in the aftermath, wouldn’t that be a great starting point for a story? Like, what if I or someone else had gone missing that day?”

Winn, who has a doctoral degree in nursing and worked as a staff nurse and a nurse practitioner for many years, drew heavily on her nursing experience for this book. For instance, there were several medical conditions that appeared throughout her novel that Winn had to research to learn how the condition would’ve been treated in the mid 1980’s. In addition, she relates to her characters as if they were her patients. “I kind of think of my characters like my patients and I think that the idea of character sketches is akin to almost like taking a patient’s medical history… I would like to think that I care for my characters like I care for my patients too.”