Editor’s Note: Alice Hoffman is the best-selling author of 25 acclaimed novels, two books of short stories and eight books for children and young adults. Her new novel, The Story Sisters, was just published by Shaye Areheart Books.

How often is the writer the last to know the true meaning of his or her own story? More often than we ever admit. Writing a novel is a journey, one that leads through the subconscious and the tricky map of memory. What a writer finds in the corners of his or her own novel can be a true surprise. For every novel, there is a moment when the story itself is born. This moment of reality will transform into a fictional world — one that is sometimes unrecognizable to the writer herself.

My new novel, The Story Sisters, begins at the Plaza Hotel in New York, when three sisters attend their grandparents’ anniversary party. A series of irreversible events follow when the girls escape from the party and disappear into Central Park. Their lives, relationships and futures will all be altered by a single afternoon’s experience.

Certainly, the Plaza is a place of enchantment, the castle that represents all that is magical about New York. In 1955, Eloise moved in with her pug dog, and a world of girls were jealous of her fabulous life in the most beautiful hotel in Manhattan. Who doesn’t want to fall into a bed at the Plaza, look out over Central Park, order room service? It is the perfect place to be a New York Girl, whatever your age. It made perfect sense for me to begin my novel there. But it wasn’t until The Story Sisters was completed that I remembered that I, too, had experienced extraordinary moments at the Plaza.

When I was 12, the Beatles first visited the United States. Of course, they stayed at the Plaza. The only person I knew who was wild enough to skip out on real life and hightail it over to a place like this with me was my mother. Irresponsible, bohemian, beautiful, she was drawn to terrible men, and was so undomesticated she used the stove as a filing cabinet and the refrigerator as a compartment in which to store her jewelry. She fought for the underdog, fell in love stupidly, hated authority and was not exactly a picture-perfect mother.