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Julia Glass wanted to start her talk with a mom story. “Not a hockey-mom story,” she quipped, “Not even a soccer-mom story.” Julia Glass, it seems, is a badminton-mom. Who knew? For those who live in the fife-and-drum towns of Massachusetts this may be commonplace, but in California it seems novel and quirky, as did Glass. She was the second speaker in this season California Lectures series, after Garrison Keillor (which she felt was a tough act to follow, but which she measured up to beautifully, in my opinion). Her “mom story,” an anecdote about something that happened with her 9 and 12 year old boys at dinner, led into the idea that she has been writing stories about herself and her sister over the years, which have culminated in her latest book, I See You Everywhere. She was quick to point of that the book is not a memoir; though it does contain many elements of their experiences and relationship, it also contains much fictionalization. It is not exactly a novel, not exactly a collection of stories, but something she prefers not to catagorize, though she knows that packaging is inevitable in media. Her sister committed suicide just after one of the stories Glass had written about them won a prestigious prize, the first of the stories that had. That story, or at least those characters, went on to become I See You Everywhere, so one can only imagine what the proces of bringing it to fruition has been like.

Julia Glass’s debut novel, The Three Junes, was also a bit like a story collection. I read it when it came out, some six years ago and liked it, though I know some people found it dull. She’s written another, The Whole World Over, which I’m curious about, partly because it carries over a character from The Three Junes, and partly because it sounds like the only book that isn’t stories cobbled together, making it a bit of a departure for the writer who says she writes short stories that just seem to get out of hand.

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