“The years it took to learn to write well were probably the hardest I worked at anything.” “I learned to write mostly on my own in med school,” she says. An English major in college, she was “too nervous to share her work in a group of very smart people,” so she never took creative-writing courses. Like Avery, Coggshall is a competitive swimmer (though she didn’t swim for Princeton) who has lived on both the East and West coasts. The novel was published under the pen name Claire Kells. The book follows Avery’s fraught recovery at home and the crash’s aftermath. Only Avery, fellow swimmer Colin Shea, and three little boys survive, and the medical knowledge imparted to Avery by her physician father helps her care for them for five days until they are rescued. In Girl Underwater, Coggshall’s debut novel, competitive college swimmer Avery and two of her teammates are on a red-eye flight from California to Boston when the plane crashes in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains. During several trips, as her mind drifted to thoughts of airlines disasters, she was struck with an idea for a novel about a plane crash and a young woman whose medical expertise keeps the survivors alive. At the end of medical school, Kathleen Coggshall ’05 often found herself in the sky, flying across the country for interviews for residency programs.
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