Karen Spears Zacharias has a thing for trailers. She blogs here. What was your inspiration for Double Wide — both the project and the title? To be honest, the title was initially intended as a joke. As the daughter of a soldier killed in action, I was overwhelmed with grief. A year later I read an article about a Georgia couple who won hundreds of millions in the lottery.
They attributed their winnings to the goodness of God. There was no book. The book seems particularly relevant now. In Double Wide, each chapter is essentially a profile of a person who tells the story of what money and God look like in his or her life—from a multi-millionaire evangelist to a friend who was dying of breast cancer.
Why did you decide to make the subjects of your profiles anonymous? Granting people anonymity gave me permission to be the nosy journalist, and it gave the participants a certain freedom to speak to the record about things they would not typically discuss.
So your interviewees have the safety of speaking off-the-record. I did it for literary reasons. In his book, Brewer referred to some of his characters by titles instead of by their names. What are some of the things you learned in researching Double Wide? We have created a Sugar-Daddy God, whose biggest thrill is watching us gamble on his expense card. Your home enters foreclosure or you fail to get the promotion you prayed so earnestly for.
Or your child goes off to Haiti on a mission trip and dies in an earthquake. Or your employee robs you blind or you wake to find all your investments have gone kaput.
