As a reader and a writer I’m interested in things like point of view. This is a narrative voice I came up with years before I started writing; I thought I was the first person to think of this, and I told a professor, who said, “William Faulkner did that already.” Darn it, Bill! But I put it in the back of my mind, and when I started writing the story it felt so natural. When you listen to people tell stories about their families, there is a we. “When we were little, we went to Disney World.” Marriages are the same way: “We like to go out to dinner on Friday nights.” It allowed me to do some things for the sisters, to have them comment on each other’s actions without being judgmental or cruel. But you have to come up with rules. I had rules on how many sisters had to be in a room before I could write “we” did something. Q. Why doesn’t the mother in the book have a name?

The book is about the transition of this family from being parents and children to being adults together. If you’re a parent, there’s a period of your life where you lose your name. You’re just Mom or Dad or Jaden’s mom or Tony’s dad. You exist because of your relationship to the child. So the sisters aren’t recognizing their parents as people at the beginning of the book. The father gets a name because he has an identity outside the family. But the stay-at-home mom, that’s all she is to her daughters. If I wanted to be precious I could’ve given her a name three-fourths of the way through, but that seemed wrong.Q. The paperback edition of “The Weird Sisters” has a reading guide. How do you feel about guides in general?

I was actually involved in writing it. … It was a collaborative process. At the publishing house it was interesting the questions others came up with. Like: “What’s up with Bean? Why is she such a horrible person?” I objected to that. These are my babies; don’t pick on my kids! She’s the character who a lot of people find hard to love, but there’s so much that’s important to think about with her, the parts of us that are unwilling to accept ourselves, being your own worst enemy. … People love to ask about her. They ask me if she’s really remorseful, has she done her penance. One of the things I’ve realized seeing those questions is that when you write a book, once it’s out there, it’s not yours anymore. Everybody reads a different book. Everybody brings their own emotional baggage, their own history.

Connie Ogle is The Miami Herald’s book editor.