Betsy Howie doesn't want me to say that writing "Snow," her first novel, was a cathartic -- "I hate that word" -- process for her. She prefers "soothing."
"There is a fair amount of self-therapy in the book," she agreed with a slow nod. "She didn't come to any conclusions that I didn't believe myself."
"She" being a young woman whose marriage collapses after six months and who piles her two cats into a car and leaves New York in the dead of winter. She drives north, to a snowbound log cabin, with some tins of Spam and a plan to "work it out."