Amy Bourret: Writer in residence

Touting a Yale Law School degree, Amy Bourret set out to protect society’s most vulnerable, working as a child advocacy lawyer. But in her debut novel, the Preston Hollow resident explores a situation in which a mother must fight to keep a child that wasn’t hers to begin with. Now out on paperback, “Mothers & Other Liars” follows Ruby who, at 19 years old, makes a split-second decision to rescue an abandoned baby from an Oklahoma rest stop. Ten years later, she has a picture-perfect life with her daughter, Lark, surrounded by a loving community. All of that begins to crumble when the real parents emerge, searching for their kidnapped daughter. “The foundations for the protagonist, Ruby, comes from my work,” Bourret says. “She faced some pretty devastating choices. You take a child, rip him out of his home; from society’s standards we’re protecting him, but from his perspective, that’s all he’s known.” Bourret says child advocacy work requires thick skin, and she couldn’t handle it full-time. So she switched to the corporate realm, working a few pro-bono cases on the side. She eventually stopped practicing law to focus on writing. “I kept going, and then said, ‘Well, I think I’m writing a novel.’ ” Bourret is dreaming up a second novel, but will only share the details with her critique group that has been meeting at Dunston’s Steakhouse for the past 10 years. “We just call ourselves the ‘Dunston’s Group’,” she says. “It’s not just about the writing. Over the years, they have become very important to me.”