Avi writes:

It was the end of summer and my family and I were visiting my parents who lived on an island on the New York coast. My son, Kevin, had been doing a lot of fussing about not wanting to end his summer’s vacation and go back to school. “Do I have to go? Can’t I stay with Grandma?”

At the last moment—needing to catch a ferry to the mainland, our car packed, good-byes said, I suddenly realized that Kevin was nowhere to be seen. Into my head popped the notion that he had run off and hid—anything to avoid going back to school. The next moment I realized that was a good beginning for a story. The moment after that—Kevin reappeared. He has gone back into the house to get something he had forgotten. But I kept the idea of the story, and that became A Place Called Ugly.

Another curious fact about this story: The house in the book—which is so important to it—was a place which I felt I knew, but didn’t know how I knew. It was some years after I wrote this book that I realized I had recalled a house my aunt had rented on the beach one summer—and I had remembered it, deep, deep in my mind.