Author Jen Michalski centered her third novel, "You’ll Be Fine," on a magazine writer in her 30’s who’s still carrying baggage from a couple failed love affairs, as she tries to find common ground with her feckless younger brother and deals with a lot of unresolved conflicts with her bohemian mother. And then her mother dies.

Still, Michalski says, she and her editor felt the family was working out the tensions in a predictable way:

“I began to think, what sort of monkey wrench can I throw into their relationship. And just out of the blue this character named Johanna stepped in, like clearly as she walked into the door of my mind. And was like, ‘hello’ and I was like, ‘hello!’ And then the novel just became completely transformed.”

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