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Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

My father and brothers were coal miners.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

I have a wife who's a great mom.

Behind every successful man is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.

The man in our society is the breadwinner; the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother.

But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich, it seemed, but just how he did not know.

I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.

Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.