THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D is a wonderful novel about friendships, family and ambitions. It focuses on two women post-9/11. Elizabeth died prior to 9/11 and left a life’s worth of journaling to her friend Kate to figure out what she should do with them. The novel delves into both women’s lives prior to meeting each other as well as during their seemingly strong friendship. How well did Kate truly know her best friend? Nichole Bernier turns out a sharp, thoughtful novel with a twist.

Nichole answered some questions earlier this week via email.

Amy Steele: When I first heard the title of your book, I really thought it was going to be historical fiction. Where did you get the idea for the novel?

Nichole Bernier: I lost a friend in the September 11th attacks, a new mother who’d been on the first plane. That week I helped her husband by returning the media calls, so he wouldn’t have to describe over and over the person she’d been. I wondered for a long time afterward how she would have felt about the sound bites and how she would have perceived the eulogizing, and how well any of our obituaries represent the people we’ve been. It’s probably inevitable that there’s a difference in the way we see ourselves and the way we’re seen by others. We all die with part of our stories untold, the quiet fears and unfulfilled dreams.

My novel is in no way about my friend or her family, but is about the questions that stayed with me about identity women have as wives and mothers, sisters and friends. The difference between the faces we show the world and the aspects of ourselves we keep private. The “what-if” of the novel spooled off from there, and became about a woman who inherits the journals of a friend, and learns she didn’t know her friend as well as she thought — including where she was really going when she died.

Amy Steele: Why did you want to set it right after 9/11?

Nichole Bernier: There are several levels of trust and fear and trust in the novel, but the most literal fear is the anxiety for your family’s safety in an unsafe world. The summer of 2002 was such a horribly fascinating time. Watching CNN then, it felt as if anything could happen —anthrax, Mad Cow disease, sneaker bombs, why not poisoned reservoirs, mushroom clouds, detonating shopping malls? I think many people, myself included, felt for a while that anything was not only possible, but likely. Most of us moved on from that paralyzing place, but it was fascinating to me to create a character who became quietly obsessed with the unknowns and could not move on.

Amy Steele: You have a journalism degree from Columbia. Is it difficult to transition to a novelist from a journalist? Do you have any interest in writing non-fiction books?

Nichole Bernier: Initially, the hardest thing was permitting myself to write something I was not contracted to write, and no one was waiting for or paying me to do. For years. That was a hard indulgence not just because I was accustomed to the parameter of deadlines, but because I had three young children when I started the book, and five by the time I finished. Time spent working on my novel was time away from a family schedule that didn’t allow for much slipping away easily. And yes, I’d love to write a nonfiction book if the right idea grabbed me by the jugular.

Amy Steele: How did your journalistic training come into play in writing Elizabeth D?

Nichole Bernier: Funny, but the formats were not as different as you might think. I came from being a writer and editor at Conde Nast Traveler magazine, and for me, the features that make for the best, most transporting travel article have some of the best elements of fiction: a vivid sense of place and characters, a plot trajectory, and a sense of growth through journey.

Also, the research came naturally, the kind of digging you have to do to find out about the daily details of the protagonist’s career. My main character was a pastry chef, and though she was on hiatus raising her children, she helped out at a friend’s bakery. When she worked on a cream cheese-based tart I needed to know whether she’d fling open a foil package the way I do at home, or if it would be a 20-pound foil package, or if she’d scoop it from an industrial 50-pound tub. The same thing was even more true of accurately writing the husband who’d been a golf pro.

Amy Steele: Coming from the journalism world, how difficult is it to transition to fiction?

Nichole Bernier: From a business sense, and from a timeline of contract-paycheck-publication, it couldn’t be more different. The only thing fiction had in common with my magazine life is that it used the same alphabet. But I was surprised by how much I loved that learning curve — the query letters, the foreign rights process, writing marketing materials. Old dog with five pups learning new tricks.

Amy Steele: What do you like best about writing fiction?

Nichole Bernier: It’s like opening the throttle and letting it go. When I’m really going with a section of description I just stare at the wall and let my fingers translate. I took typing in high school, thank God, (do they even offer that anymore?), and I don’t have to think or look down. It’s more natural to me than writing longhand, and sometimes more than speaking.

But it’s equally true of writing essays, which I love as much as fiction, maybe more. I find when I’m chewing on a thought, or an issue in the news, I don’t really understand or process my thoughts until I write it through.

Amy Steele: Do you write journals? I’ve done so myself off and on since high school but did destroy some after I re-read them. Why do you think people write them and why do they save them?

Nichole Bernier: I’ve always been fascinated with why, exactly, people do this crazy thing, putting private thoughts to paper, and what they think will become of them someday. What if you’re hit by a Mack truck tomorrow? Who do you want to read them, or to take responsibility for them so that no one does?

I’ve kept a journal intermittently since I was a teen. I never thought of my journals as something for others to eventually read—or as a way to be fully known, or to have my final say —though I imagine some people do. I always thought they would be interesting for me to have and revisit someday or call back up some time of my life, and in fact, I did mine them for some details for the novel. There’s a scene about a new mother who calls 911 when she smashes a mercury thermometer in the baby’s room, and a HAZMAT team storms the house. It’s nerve-janglingly chaotic and slapstick at the same time, the way so many of those new-motherhood experiences can be. That came almost verbatim from my own experience written in my journal.

Amy Steele: You really successfully delved into the various facades that people keep, the appearances. What interested you about that? Was this based on experience or did you draw from other sources?

Nichole Bernier: I’ve moved a lot, both as a child and since I’ve married and had kids, and I’ve come to know the work of making inroads into a new community. It’s a bit of a dance, feeling out how — and whether — friendships can get beyond the day-to-day PTA machinery and reach more candid ground. My first experience in a playgroup as a new mother for the first time was a very positive one. But it was easy for me to imagine a situation for my book that wasn’t that way.

Amy Steele: What do you think the challenge is for most suburban moms?

Nichole Bernier: It depends on the person. Many would say, just getting in a shower. But probably finding common ground with likeminded people that is honest and doesn’t have to do 100 percent with your children. Finding people with whom you can be authentic and not worry about whether an admission of being frustrated makes you sound as if you aren’t a loving enough mother. People are so unforgiving of themselves as it is.

Amy Steele: What appealed to you about writing about a female friendship?

Nichole Bernier: In the beginning I didn’t think I was writing about women’s friendships so much as a wide range of influential relationships: spouses, children and siblings, our families of origin and how the ties in those early years shape our perceptions of ourselves. The friends we make and keep as adults are relationships of our own choosing, constantly, so one would think they’d be in some ways the most honest and mature.

But there are any number of reasons we become friends with those around us — including proximity, and children — and those relationships can be wonderful, or can even be somewhat destructive. I was interested in the middle ground: people who have experienced the same things but have perceived them differently, or people who hold back a bit because they don’t trust how they will be assessed. That caution is a kind of self-censorship that results in two potentially good friends passing like ships in the night.

Amy Steele: Kate seemed to think it strange that Elizabeth was SO different in her 20s as evidenced in her journals. Don’t you think that people use their 20s to find themselves and that she would be a bit different as an adult? People change yet retain many of the same inherent characteristics?

Nichole Bernier: I think it’s always a jolt when we learn that someone we think we know well has a surprising bit in their past that seems out of character. Though it may be simply that it never came up. Or perhaps it’s more complex than that, and a person harbors guilt about a past incident and would prefer not to talk about it. There are so many reasons why people don’t volunteer information about themselves. My motto has become, You just never know. Because you can’t imagine what people might be dealing with behind the scenes, and why people might behave the way they do.

Amy Steele: Why do you think readers can relate to this story, wherever they are in their lives?

Nichole Bernier: I hope they can. I think most people have struggled with how much of themselves to entrust to others, and have been surprised at one time or another by something unexpected in someone they’re close to. That to me is the common denominator in my book. Though if a reader has lost a close friend or struggled with issues of identity and personal aspirations while being a parent, those specifics might resonate in particular.

And yet I can think of any number of novels that have resonated with me even if the protagonists have wildly different lives than mine. I may not be able to relate directly to the things they deal with daily or agree with their choices. But the book was written in a way that puts me under their skin, or makes me so curious and invested that I care.

Amy Steele: Each woman has or had different types of careers that neither knew very much about as they met in a play group. What did you want to say about working mothers in this novel?

Nichole Bernier: There are so many ways mothers work — and by work I include volunteerism and community organizing, self-employment and creativity — and so many ways they try to juggle it with family. There is no one right answer; we all find our own way. And there can be subtle or not-so-subtle value judgments made about what others do or don’t do. I once heard a PTO member suggest, while room-parent positions were being assigned in a private committee, that so-and-so who’d put in her name worked full time and hadn’t been very involved before, so….perhaps we should find someone else who might have more time?

Well, that might be true. Or it might be her one time to be involved in her kid’s class, and she was going to work like hell to make it happen. Or maybe she’d just lost her job. Or maybe it’s none of our freaking business at all, and she was the first to volunteer for the position, so give it to her.

People size up the way others parent, and have opinions about how and why they juggling things a certain way and what gets lost in the process. But in most cases they really don’t know what they’re talking about. You simply don’t know what someone else’s world is like until you’ve walked in their shoes.

Amy Steele: You’re very blunt about the challenges in raising children and the special moments. Yet in a funny way. Even though I don’t have children I appreciate that. You made very real and varied characters. People will relate to each in some way. How difficult was it to create all the characters? How did you develop each character?

Nichole Bernier: In building a character you can take a germ of an idea, or something you’ve observed in someone, and use it as a launching pad to imagine what a character would be like if that were his or her motivating principle, or paralyzing flaw. That is fascinating to me. But it’s only the pencil sketch. They don’t become colorful and three-dimensional until you shade in the reasons they’ve become the people they are: the family in which this one grew up, the cad who broke that one’s heart. Life experiences are the building blocks that explain how a character came to be the complex collection of foibles and sensitivities that he or she is. That was the fun part behind the character building — figuring out the why behind the traits.

Amy Steele: Do you have a favorite character? Is any character most like you?

Nichole Bernier: Nope. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Nichole Bernier is author of the novel THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D. (Crown/Random House), a finalist for the 2012 New England Independent Booksellers Association fiction award, and has written for magazines including Elle, Self, Health, and Men’s Journal. A Contributing Editor for Conde Nast Traveler for 14 years, she was previously on staff as the magazine’s golf and ski editor, columnist, and television spokesperson. She is a founder of the literary blog Beyond the Margins, and lives outside of Boston with her husband and five children. She can be found online at nicholebernier.com and on Twitter @nicholebernier.