About 10 years before I wrote Split, I coordinated a domestic violence legal clinic in Chicago. In the three years I worked there, I saw thousands of abuse victims. Women, men, and their children sought civil orders of protection at the clinic, and I listened their stories.

Once, as a woman relayed a particularly brutal incident while her two children - a boy and a girl - sat beside her, I asked if she'd like an intern to look after the children. She said, no, they had seen it anyway. That same week, I read a statistic: 80% of abusers witnessed abuse as a child. And that little boy began to haunt me. He was losing a tooth when I knew him. He proudly wiggled it with his tongue. When his mother returned to extend her order of protection, I wondered whether, someday, his girlfriend would be sitting across from me, telling me her story. Years later, I found an outlet for these ponderings: Jace.

When I was working on my (unfinished) master's in criminal justice, I wanted to discern what makes one child who has witnessed abuse repeat the cycle and another one break it? Hello, Christian. While I don't think I've fully answered that question, I do feel as though writing Split gave me some inklings as to what a child needs to break the cycle: a support system, a level of identification with the victim (not the abuser), and a sense of personal responsibility. In Split, Jace struggles for all three.