Turn on, tune in, and drop by the biggest happening that never happened. Includes intoxicated musings on Jim Morrison!

Socquet learns to laugh again, the hard way.

Socquet believes all’s well that ends well, but nothing’s well that ends these ten ways.

The wrenching reality of what happens when your family becomes part of a missing persons case.

What is Missing about? The time your remote control got lost in the couch for two weeks?

It is pretty sad when the remote goes MIA. My book happens to be about my mother going missing for forty days. I was a sophomore in college when I got a call saying my mom had failed to show up for work. I rushed home, met my two older brothers, and began looking for her. We scoured her apartment, traced her credit cards and cell phone, drove around in circles, filed a missing person report, hung missing person fliers, appeared on New England news channels, and spun crazy theories of murder and kidnap. In short, it was a lot worse than a missing remote. I just wanted to change the channel and go back to my mundane college life!

The weeks crawled by without any leads. Things were not looking promising, but I refused to give up the belief that we would find our mother and everything would make sense again. She was my best friend; I talked to her multiple times a day. Not knowing her whereabouts was truly terrifying. Finally, after forty days, we found her, in circumstances far worse than anything my insomniac fears had prepared me for. A diver discovered my mother in her car, submerged in the ocean off the end of a fishing pier.

Damn.

I know. The second half of the book attempts to reconstruct a life that could have ended so tragically. At the same time, I wanted to chronicle how my brothers and I grieved and attempted to move forward with our lives. The book is a search on so many levels. I guess you could simplify all this by saying it’s a search for who, what, when, where, and why.

Cheney writes about the events leading up to her first suicide attempt at age 7.

What would you most like to be asked?

That, to me, is the perfect opening question to any interview. I wish more people would ask me about my writing process, rather than just about the content of my books. I certainly don’t mind being an advocate for bipolar disorder, but I consider myself a writer first.

Okay, fine. Where are you at this very moment, as you write this interview?

The same place I always write at — a little café in Beverly Hills called Le Pain Quotidien. I find I write better out of the house, away from tempting distractions. They let me sit here and scribble for hours, just me and a latte and a cup of gazpacho. I’m so grateful to the café I mention it in the acknowledgements of my last book. Come to think of it, I also referred to it in the epilogue of my first book. I’m a café junkie, I guess.

Please explain what just happened.

Jani Lane (Warrant) was just found dead. This is really weird — I’m just sitting down now to do this interview, and my inboxes are flooded with the news. Even though his cause of death is unknown at this moment, Jani did have a history – like too many of us – of alcohol problems. I planned on taking half a day off because it is absolutely gorgeous outside this morning, but this sets a different tone for me for the rest of the day. Mostly because I’m thinking about how his kids must feel.

What is your earliest memory?

Being told that my art was going to fail. I was around 8 years old I guess, and I was trying to make a submarine (like the one used in “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”), out of oak-tag paper- big enough that I could get into and go in the water. I remember coloring it with crayon for days and days on my bedroom floor. My cousin had stopped over our house, saw what I was doing, and said “that’s going to sink like a rock.” I believe I had a revelation at that moment: I completely understood the meaning of the phrase “fuck you” after he hit me with his comment. Negative criticism is usually traumatizing for artists, because we take it as a personal attack. In my case, I have always used it as fuel. I finished the submarine, got into it, and realized it was too big to get through my doorway. The sinking fears my jealous cousin stirred in me would never have a conclusion.

This Gothic noir misadventure is a gritty, raw snapshot of urban legends come home to roost.