A Happier Life

The renovation of an old family house in North Carolina reveals discoveries about the past and encourages a young woman at a crossroads in the present to make a fresh start in life. 

Author Kristy Woodson Harvey has built a brand writing tender, heartfelt stories that showcase Southern flair, smalltown life, and the bonds of family and friendship. In A Happier Life, she adds to her growing body of work, offering readers a poignant story about one contemporary woman and one woman from the past, both facing change in their lives.

 

The book launches with 30-something, Keaton Smith. She is Southern woman transplanted to a high-powered job working for a New York City “lifestyle brand” company. On the same day Keaton gets dumped from her job and by her beau, she’s asked by her mother to clear out the house her mother grew up in--a home Keaton didn’t know was still in the family--in Beaufort, North Carolina.

 

Keaton is reluctant. However, being at a crossroads and with time on her hands, she takes on the task. When she steps into the 254-year-old house, she finds it has been left eerily untouched--complete with rotary telephone--since the night her grandparents died unexpectedly in a tragic car accident in August 1976.

 

As Keaton settles in and begins to assess the home, she starts to assemble pieces, like a puzzle, of her grandparents’ lives. Did they really die by accident? Or could there be more to the story? Keaton becomes more greatly intrigued when she starts to read her grandmother’s journal. It further encourages Keaton in her determination to find answers. She mingles with the locals and even strikes up a relationship with a young father who lives with his son next door.

 

What ensues is a captivating, heartwarming story that combines a long-lost family saga with elements of mystery and romance. Readers will be riveted and wowed by Woodsen’s (The Summer of Songbirds, The Wedding Veil) 12^th winning novel.

 

 

A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey

Gallery Books (Simon and Schuster), $28.99 hardcover, 9781668012192, 384 pages

Publication Date: June 25, 2024

To order this book on Bookshop/INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Jill Fordye: The Undoing of Aloneness

 The Writer's Life

Jill Fordyce: The Undoing of Aloneness

(photo: Nathan Westerfield)

Jill Fordyce was born and raised in Bakersfield, Calif. She received a degree in English from the University of Southern California, and a law degree from Santa Clara University. While practicing law, she continued to study writing through the Stanford Continuing Education creative writing program. Her first novel, Belonging (Post Hill Press, January 30, 2024), traces the relationships and generational influences that impact the life of one woman over the course of 40 years. (See the review below)

Why write a coming-of-age story?

I have always been moved by stories that chronicle of young love, lifelong friendships, hometowns, music, and the hold the past often has over the present. And when I think of important times of youth, for me they are set against the backdrop of the Central Valley of California.

That accounts for the Bakersfield setting.

Initially, I thought of setting the novel in a fictional town, but every time I traveled back to Bakersfield, I felt such a unique type of inspiration, and I knew I had to write about it. I think we write what we know, what we can see--particularly with a first novel. The setting is so important, and Bakersfield is a place I know personally, so it made sense to put Jenny (the main character) there.

Themes of "hometown" are central to the story.

While some inspiration may come from what the notion of "hometown" evokes for everyone, some of it feels very specific to Bakersfield and Central California--the music, the food, the tree-lined streets and flat horizon, the warmth and the fog, the families who have known each other for generations.

Yes, the importance and influence of family--both birth and created families--is threaded throughout, as are themes of life and death, and a reliance on spiritual faith.

Family to me is a place of home and belonging. And belonging is fundamentally about the undoing of aloneness, which is a primary need for everyone. As I came to understand Jenny more deeply, I could see that her faith--Catholic faith instilled by her extended family--was central to her life. The comfort she derived from those spiritual influences was critical to her survival as a child, as she undergoes illness, isolation, and experiences death for the first time. Jenny comes to believe that to "love forever is to live forever." If she didn't have a spiritual grounding and hold such belief, I don't know if she would have had the fortitude and resilience that she does. She knows she's not doing it all alone. 

The book offers an ensemble cast. Yet, you tell the story solely through the perspective of a sensitive woman whose life is traced over decades.

All of the characters exist relative to Jenny, and I wanted to convey her experience of growing up in an intimate and realistic way--especially in a home with an alcoholic mother. I wanted to show those things that a young girl would rely on when her home life is so tumultuous: friends, extended family, faith, music. Finally, I wanted to understand how she would emerge from it and create the life that she longed for--and those things are possible primarily due to the large circle of loved ones around her.

The enduring battle of alcoholism figures prominently.

I don't know the percentage of families affected by alcoholism, but I suspect it is very high. Jenny learns that you can love and forgive an alcoholic on your own yet, also, step away and live your own life. Even if the alcoholic is never better, is never able to see her way out of the disease, the people around her can find grace and peace, both for themselves and the alcoholic. I think adult children of alcoholics have a unique burden when trying to find trusting love relationships and, in exploring Jenny's relationships, I try to show how some of those difficulties can be overcome.

How difficult was it to tell this story?

The most fulfilling part was experiencing the story as it unfolded, when it wasn't struggle or effort, when storylines emerged without conscious thought. That felt like magic. However, Belonging took me over 10 years to conceive of, write, and market. I embarked on many rewrites. When I first sat down to write, the only concrete idea I really had was the notion of the bonds of childhood friendship that light the way throughout life, across time and distance--and even death. 

The book spans from 1977 to 2017. Why that timeline?

I love a complete and full story--of seeing characters as children and then as young adults on their own in the world... and then in middle age, in a place where they can look back. The seeds of early relationships are so important. I always want to know, if characters are in love, why are they in love? If characters are best friends, why are they best friends? I tried to show readers the strength--and lasting impact--of childhood bonds, what they bring out in people.

Detailed flourishes and nostalgia are embedded throughout the novel. How much research was necessary? 

I researched the climate and geography of Bakersfield and the surrounding area: why there is fog, why the river was dry, the origin of the Grapevine, the ramifications of valley fever, a fungal disease. I delved into the history of Bakersfield and the Bakersfield Sound. I spent time in antique stores and looked at religious prayer cards. I rewatched films that inspired me. I listened to many old songs and made sure they were chronologically correct. I re-read both Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and The Greatest Thing in the World (Henry Drummond) several times. I spoke with a hospice nurse about end-of-life care. I spent hours researching the Vietnam War. But there were moments, too, when no research was necessary--gifts were just presented to me.

Belonging is certainly a gift to readers! Any plans for a second novel?

Yes, I am so excited to be working on another coming-of-age love story and family story, this time set in rural Tennessee.

Belonging

A captivating, sensitively drawn first novel that traces the relationships and generational influences that impact the life of one woman over the course of 40 years.

Belonging--the first novel by Jill Fordyce--is a tenderly drawn coming-of-age story that sympathetically traverses decades in the life of one soul-searching woman from Bakersfield, Calif., and how generational influences shape her fate.

The story begins in December 1977--a time filled with wood-paneled station wagons, the music of Merle Haggard and Carole King, and movies like The Goodbye Girl, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Saturday Night Fever. Jenny Hayes is 13 years old, a "shy and slow to make friends" eighth-grader fascinated by photography and smitten with Billy Ambler--"his broad shoulders, the dark curls that touched the top of his perfect ears, the way he held his camera like he knew what he was doing." Jenny's best friend is Henry, the "boldest and funniest person" she had ever known. The two bonded in kindergarten and became "unlikely but inseparable" friends. Henry's parents broke up when he and Jenny were in the fifth grade, and he is privy to Jenny's home life--the erratic, neglectful, and emotionally abusive nature of her alcoholic mother, Janice. Henry knows "the crushing level of cruelty" of which Jenny's mother is capable, and how her father--amiable, but often absent--works long hours as a produce broker to escape Janice's wrath.

Jenny's saving grace--in addition to her friendship with Henry--is her extended family on her mother's side. The Morettis, who also reside in Bakersfield, are vivacious, loving, and spiritually bolstered by their Catholic faith. The supportive presence of her widowed Nonna and Uncle Gino--Nonna's youngest brother, also widowed, who runs a local antiques shop--brings happiness and much-needed stability to Jenny's life. She often works at the store and is always intrigued when Gino and Nonna regale her with stories of the Moretti family's migration from Italy in 1902, and how they came to put down roots in California.

Shortly before Christmas, a terrible dust storm sweeps the San Joaquin Valley. Eleven days later, Jenny wakes to find itchy red welts covering her body. She has contracted valley fever, an illness caused by fungus spores stirred up in the wind that enter the lungs and develop into a pneumonia-like infection. Jenny's damaged right lung keeps her out of school for months. Throughout her long, harrowing medical ordeal, Jenny's mother and Nonna care for her daily. Janice and Nonna share a "tenuous and bitter" relationship, as Janice became pregnant with Jenny when she was only 19; she eloped, and Jenny was born six months later.

During her prolonged isolation, Jenny draws from the spiritual faith of Nonna and Uncle Gino. Catholic statues and religious icons that Jenny discovers at Uncle Gino's shop become sacred touchstones; they bring comfort on her long road to healing. And a collection of prayer cards with religious art depicting the lives of the saints takes on greater meaning when an unexpected death profoundly impacts Jenny's young, still malleable life.

When Jenny returns to school months later, she reconnects with Billy Ambler, who is now an aspiring pitcher. The two join forces, taking pictures for their photography course, and romance blooms. For the next several years of high school, Jenny and Billy's passionate young love grows--a love that, in some ways, liberates Jenny from the prickly relationship with her mother, who is clearly jealous of her daughter's happiness. At every turn, Janice passes judgment, calling Jenny "trashy" and "floozy," among other slurs. Janice also degrades Henry, describing him as a "freak." These slanders deepen the mother-daughter divide, and Jenny applies to college to escape her mother. Through it all, Jenny conceals her mother's alcoholism from Billy, who doesn't fully accept Jenny's enduring, however changing, friendship with Henry.

At the end of senior year, Jenny and Henry set off to study at USC, while Billy gets a baseball scholarship to Arizona State. Jenny and Billy make a heartfelt, romantic vow: in seven years, after they launch their adult lives, they will get married. But surprising twists and turns, choices made, challenge them and change both Henry's and their lives.

Readers dip in and out of dramatic episodes from Jenny's life. Fordyce crafts perceptive scenes that depict Jenny's maturation, illustrating how the past influences her ability to love and trust. The path she travels rarely goes according to plan. Jenny, and those who come to define her life, are tested, forced to face hard truths--even truths about themselves. Can wounds from the past ever truly heal? Is forgiveness possible? And what will it take for Jenny to carve out her own unique place in the world so she can finally experience a true sense of belonging?

Multi-layered characterizations, spiritual undertones, and emotionally evocative scenes propel this searching, inspiring story that explores themes of trust and loyalty; secrets and truth-telling; the meaning of love; and the many challenges posed in living a truly authentic life. With prodigious insight and great delicacy, Fordyce intimately explores ideas of family in its many forms--how family can both empower and damage--while also probing the battles between the head and the heart in matters of love and acceptance.

 

Belonging: A Novel by Jill Fordyce

Post Hill Press, $28.99 hardcover, 9798888451748, 279 pages

Publishing Date: January 30, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness: Maximum Shelf (December 18, 2023), link HERE 

First Pages in Fiction: Instructions for a Heatwave

The first paragraph of a short story and/or the first page of a novel can be a microcosm that sets the foundation for what's to follow in terms of tone, character and story intent.

Here are the first few paragraphs from the novel, Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell:

Highbury, London 

The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.

Consider her now, yanking open the oven and grimacing in its scorching blasts as she pulls out the bread tin. She is in her nightdress, hair still wound into curlers. She takes two steps backwards and tips the steaming loaf into the sink, the weight of it reminding her, as it always does, of a baby, a newborn, the packed, damp warmth of it.

She has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life. She is not about to let a little thing like a heatwave get in the way of that. Of course, living in London, it is impossible to get buttermilk; she has to make do with a mixture of half milk and half yogurt. A woman at Mass told her it worked and it does, up to a point, but it is never quite the same.


This is a story about a family thrown into crisis when the patriarch, Robert Riordan, a retired bank employee--husband of Gretta and father to three adult children--disappears on a hot summer morning in 1976. Gretta reaches out to her children in an effort to find Robert, but as the story unravels, it soon becomes clear that her children are more lost than her husband (on a psychological and emotional level), as each child is facing challenges in his/her personal life and in relationship to each other. The nature of secrets, estrangement and shame rise to the forefront of the narrative. 

O'Farrell sets up those first four paragraphs to reflect an ominous restlessness amid actions of normal, daily life. This would appear a day like many others ("She has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life"), but something about this particular day is and will be different. For starters, Gretta is baking, operating the oven, amid a heatwave and the reference to the need to substitute buttermilk in the recipe ("A woman at Mass told her it worked and it does, up to a point, but it is never quite the same") might be a metaphor indicative that perhaps, amid the crucible of events that unfold over the course of the novel, the ingredients that make up this Irish-Catholic family might never be the same, either.  

The kitchen often symbolizes the center of family life and if you look at the language O'Farrell employs, the tactile sense of the bread reminds Gretta of a baby ("...a newborn, the packed damp warmth of it"), which seems reflective of the implications of Gretta's children in this story.

In a few short sentences, O'Farrell evokes a sense of the oppressive, stifling heat that mirrors the brooding, pressured confinement of the story and how, as stated later in the book, "Strange weather brings out strange behavior." It's also interesting to note that O'Farrell relies on an Irish comfort food to anchor and ultimately juxtapose the coziness of family life against the idea that the "heat" in these lives is about to get turned up.

See how much you can learn about a book from the first page?


Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95 Hardcover, 9780385349406 304 pages
Publication Date: June 18, 2013
To order this book via INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Looking for Me

Theodora Grace Overman, aka "Teddi," always loved restoring old furniture. As a teenager, this farm girl with a big dream rebelled against her mother's push for secretarial school and ran away from her rural Kentucky home, setting off to Charleston, South Carolina where she eventually opens a shop dedicated to the refurbishing of antiques.

"...Old furniture speaks to me," says Teddi. "The older it is, the more it has to say." Such is the case with Teddi's life. In 1993, when the workaholic finds herself successful but still single at the age of 36, she begins to reflect on the lost years while trying to understand the people she left behind: a mother who never understood her daughter's aspirations; a father who returned from war a completely changed man; and an enigmatic younger brother, Josh, whose love of nature and rescuing animals may have led to his mysterious disappearance and a final letter he left behind that read, "Don't come looking for me." 

When Teddi's mother takes ill, Teddi returns to her rural Kentucky home where strange occurrences begin to emerge that indicate Josh might still be alive. Hoffman flashes back to events from Teddi's childhood in the 1960s and 70s, delving into the haunted mysteries of the past in order to shape the contours of these interconnected, yet sadly detached lives. As in Hoffman's debut novel, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, Southern wit, charm and down-home characters add levity to this story of loss and broken hearts that are ultimately restored with love, hope and remembering. 

Looking for Me by Beth Hoffman

Pamela Dorman Books, $27.95 Hardcover, 9780670025831, 368 pp

Publication Date: May 28, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note:  This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (6/4/13), click HERE

Yankee Miracles

Baseball might be considered America's favorite pastime, but to a 17-year-old graffiti artist from Queens, it also became a saving grace. While spray-painting his "art" on Yankee Stadium in the Bronx on June 29th, 1973, Ray Negron was caught in the act by George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' infamous owner. But instead of prosecuting the vandal, "The Boss" showed uncharacteristic compassion and offered the young Negron a way to work off his transgression by helping out the team. This begins a moving story of how a fatherless street kid and vandal, given a chance by an unlikely savior, transformed himself from batboy to gofer to batting practice pitcher, ultimately becoming a much beloved and trusted inner-circle member of the Bronx Bombers.

With an assist from Sally Cook (Another Season), Negron--a loyal Yankee employee for nearly four decades--pays tribute to the powerful and oft-maligned Steinbrenner for his role in changing his life, while also presenting a plethora of surreal moments and memories shaped by baseball greats like Billy Martin, Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Bobby Murcer, Phil Rizzuto, Catfish Hunter, A-Rod and Derek Jeter. Told with candor and admiration, Yankee Miracles is an inspirational mosaic detailing Negron's unusual relationship with each of his heroes and the wisdom and lessons they imparted--and of how Negron, now a community adviser for the team, has dedicated himself to helping sick and needy city kids find joy, fulfillment and hope in their own lives.

Yankee Miracles by Ray Negron

Liveright, $25.99, Hardcover, 9780871404619,  288 pp

Publication Date: September 3, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please note: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (9/7/12), click HERE.

The Confessions of Edward Day

"What actors know about emotions is that they come in pairs, often in direct opposition to each other. That’s what it is to be conflicted. We want what we should not want and we know it. We desire that which is dangerous or forbidden and might cause us to suffer. We fear success, embrace failure. We strive to be independent, longing at the same time to surrender to a burning passion. We hold ourselves aloof from the people we need and seek the approval of those who have no need for us . . . "

That's the voice of Edward Day (page 178), a narrator of great depth and contradiction found in Valerie Martin's latest novel, a fictional memoir entitled The Confessions of Edward Day.

It is the 1970s. Edward Day is an aspiring, up-and-coming actor pursuing his dream in New York City. One weekend, he has a tryst (more like a conquest) with a young woman (Madeleine Delavergne) while visiting friends at the Jersey Shore and later that night, while taking a walk by himself, he leans upon a wooden rail on the boardwalk and tumbles into the Atlantic, getting swept up in a riptide. It is Guy Margate, another actor who is also spending the weekend at the beach, who rescues Edward and saves him from drowning. But the hero will later evolve into a menacing rival for Edward--in both the theater and in love. There resides the quandary of The Confessions of Edward Day, a brilliant novel by the ever-prolific Valerie Martin.

Ms. Martin is primarily a writer of "literary" fiction, but I've always found her books to be very accessible and perfectly balanced in terms of plot and character. I most admire her strong, first person narrators--see also Dr. Jekyll's housemaid in her novel, Mary Reilly, and the slave owner in Property--but Edward Day is by far my favorite. He is such a complex character--smart, self-assured, ambitious and shrewd--and I kept changing my mind about him. Sometimes I despised him and his heartless vanity, yet other times, I felt sorry him. In the end, I found empathy for him and his fate largely because Martin skillfully peels away the layers of his outer shell to reveal a deeply wounded man. (His mother, a woman with gender issues, committed suicide, and it is that tragedy that seeps into all arenas of Edward's life and colors his motivations--in life and in the theater.) The book sets up an ever-shifting power struggle between Edward and Guy as they vie for Madeleine's affections. Add to the love triangle details and insights about life in the theater, the psyche of actors, and a very clever tie-in of the characterizations and storyline of Uncle Vanya (a play by Anton Chekhov) and you won't be able to stop turning pages. The Confessions of Edward Day emerges as a beautifully-written, gripping and suspenseful thriller.

Family Album

Allersmead, a large Victorian English Manor House, emerges as the main character in Penelope Lively's latest novel of domestic reality, Family Album. It is a story about how perceptions of a family (and that family's history) differ depending on the viewpoint. The novel begs the question, what went on in Allersmead back in the 1970s when the children were younger? What secret does Allersmead hold? And how has that secret shaped the future lives of each inhabitant--a family (The Harpers) with six children and an au pair. Lively is a master of detail and dialogue, both of which contribute great insight into the unreliability of family life. Through shifting points of view and a narrative that cuts back and forth between the 1970s and the present, Lively addresses the issues and themes of the novel via 16 chapters and short, episodic flashback scenes. As the title implies, events such as birthday parties, family dinners, and vacations are recalled like random snapshots in a family album. Ron Charles, of the Washington Post, said the book is " . . . full of glancing humor and spot-on truths about the way families maintain the peace through a process of willful ignorance and disciplined forgetfulness." However, each revelation, sharpened through contrasting perspectives and shifts in time, paints a clear, compelling--and haunted--picture of family dynamics.