VIA COUNTERPOINT The Story of a Murder On Telling My Little Sister Her Friend is Dead By Andrea Kleine October 13, 2015 When I began writing Calf , I didn’t tell anyone in my family what the novel was about. I was just “writing a novel” and I “didn’t want to talk about it while I was writing it.” I applied this dictum uniformly and after awhile people stopped asking. And because it took four years to write and almost twice as long to find a publisher, everyone began to forget about it. Amid the torrent of rejection that the novel was “too bleak” or “too dark for most people” and the dead-in-the-water period that followed its initial rounds, I began to think that the book would never be published. The reward for being unpublished was that I would never have to tell my family what my novel was about. When I finally got the call from my agent telling me we had an offer, the first feeling I felt was dread. I would have to tell my sister. One night in 1982, when I was...