What We're Writing? Hank is Juggling and Revealing

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:   What am I doing? Juggling. Juggling juggling juggling. First, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, I have just scoured the house for batteries, plugged in every computer and phone in the house to charge, and made sure we have a selection of fully charged flashlights. They are predicting a blizzard, yes, a blizzard, and I am always terrified that the power will go out. Which, they are predicting, it will. I only like suspense in my novels, please, not in life.

In other news, Hooray! Look look look, the gorgeous and fabulous cover of MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER  was revealed in People magazine! I still can't get over it, and I have to admit that I look at the article again and again.

Isn't this great? You can read the whole thing here, but here's the header:

 

They asked me where the idea for the book came from, and I told them it was from my childhood. When my mom used to read me stories, and finally say "the end." And I would never accept that. "What happened after that?" I would prod her to tell me. "They lived happily ever after," mom would say. And I would say Ever ever after? But what happened after that?"

I am also fascinated by the stories families tell about their histories and past. And the pictures we see in albums. Those snapshots have stories behind them too, and how will we ever know what really happened? What those people's lives were really like? Even if they themselves told us, who knows they were protecting or concocting. Anyway, that's MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER.

Here's another picture of the cover.

 

Isn't it fascinating? I love how the Back Bay brownstone is provocatively blue. And the positioning of it is strange, you have to keep looking at it to figure it out. (Very sticky!) I love the figure in the window. I love the unexpected pink and yellow against that stark black. And I love the slashes through the words. Is that a list that someone is crossing off? Is that a description that someone is giving of themselves?  And of course I adore that cover quote from the brilliant Lisa Scottoline. 

And every one of us who is a woman is or has been every single one of those nouns. Mother daughter sister stranger.

Here’s the back cover copy:  

What if your own family history turns out to be a terrifying lie?

Every family has its story, and this one’s deadly. Two sisters. One secret. And a race against time to find the explosive truth in this twisty and captivating thriller by “master of domestic suspense” and instant USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

The sole survivors of the fiery plane crash that killed their parents, Eliza Ramsey and her sister Bea share an unbreakable bond. But now, on the eleventh anniversary of the tragedy, Bea fails to retrieve her pre-teen daughter from a sleepover at Eliza’s.

Eliza knows her sister would never leave her precious Piper behind, and fears the worst. But did Bea plan her own disappearance?

The Ramsey’s lives have already crashed and burned once. Now, Eliza discovers she's the only one who can protect her niece from the horrifying legacy of her family’s sinister history. Together, the two must prevent their lives from going up in in flames once again.

A missing mother. Her frightened daughter. And a sister on a desperate search for a happy ending. But someone knows the deadly key to their shared past, and won’t stop until they’ve written a devastating final chapter.  Mother, daughter, sister—stranger. 

 

Also! I am so thrilled that  ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS is a nominee for the Mary Higgins Clark award! I am completely floating about that. I adored Mary Higgins Clark, she was such a role model, and she was the one who taught me to make sure that every one of my signatures in books is readable.

She once said: "A person spent time and money to buy your book, and to come see you. The least you can do is give them a legible signature." So Mary, I try my best. The other nominees in the category are spectacularly talented, but I am floating my way to New York to the award ceremony at the Edgar banquet.

And finally, in this crazy week, what I am doing is waiting. 

I sent three book proposals to my agent, and we will see what happens next. 

You know that Tom Petty/Linda Ronstadt song The Waiting? I am singing that now, top of my lungs: “the waiting is the hardest part.”

So on this pivotal morning, Reds and readers, answer any question you want:  What do you think of the cover? The title?  Do you ever read People magazine?  What do you think of the back cover copy, does it sound intriguing? Or how is the weather in your neck of the woods?

And PS: Happy Pub Day, dear Jenn!

Hallie, and what she's re-writing

 HALLIE EPHRON: Last week, it was my great pleasure to teach a three-day class on "Writing from Experience" for the Studios of Key West.

As always, I'm intrigued by the many reasons we humans seem to need to revisit our pasts.

Preparing to teach the class took me down the worm hole of my earliest writing. Not the fiction I write now, though surely my memories infuse my fiction. Or the how-to essays that channel me as a teacher. 

But this early essay, written back when I was starting to write thirty years ago, is a painful examination of growing up in a family of writers and the ugly truth about my mother.

At that turning point in my life, my mother was very much on my mind. Because she was a writer. And I was only starting to recover from the belief that I was nothing like her, therefore I COULD NOT be a writer.

Preparing for my Key West class got me diving back into that early piece of writing. Looking at it now, it has me thinking about WHY do people like me write essays like this. Is it for others to read and understand? Or for me to examine what I think? Or is it to excise trauma by putting it on the page and examining it in the cold light of day and with the benefit of hindsight.

Eventually (decades later) I revised this essay and parts of it ended up in an essay I sold O Magazine. But I rather fancy an earlier version that this excerpt is from. 

Here's how it starts...

MIRROR, MIRROR

Since I was a teenager, I have carefully contrived my life so that nothing reminds me of my mother. I have no pictures of her on my piano alongside my children. No letters. The few good pieces of jewelry of hers that I have are stashed in a safe deposit box. I erased her from my mind, from my space, and from my identify. She was a writer by profession. I was not. She lived in Beverly Hills. I lived in a New England suburb.

She had live-in help. I helped myself. She was an alcoholic.

I thought, if I can just outlive her, then I can stop worrying about becoming her. But now, as I approach the age at which she died, having for decades denied that even the smallest part of me resembles her, I find myself recognizing her in my body parts. Her stubby feet, red from the hot baths that I, too, love to take; her flat chest and thickening middle; her slim ankles and well turned calves. And her hands -- short, efficient fingers, the nails cut short for typing. To her, long painted nails were the stigmata women who didn't work. When I'd ask her what the wife of one of their friends did, she'd snort and quip, "Her nails."

When I think of my mother, it's not the carefully coiffed and suited screenwriter who, with my father, scripted dozens movies. It's certainly not the tall, slim, stylish young woman who was living the Bohemian lifestyle in the 1930's when my father met her and immediately proposed -- she told him she'd have to read one of his plays before she'd give him her answer.

The person I see is the much diminished matriarch who presided over Thanksgiving dinner in 1970, the year before she died.

That afternoon, my husband and I took the subway and then the cross-town bus to get to the modern East Side apartment building where they'd moved since quitting Los Angeles three years earlier. Even though it was Thanksgiving and we’d been invited, I was apprehensive walking the sixth floor hallway, never sure what we'd find. The door was ajar and the smell of roast turkey wafted from the opening. A good sign.

I knocked. I could hear the sound of a TV from somewhere inside. I knocked again, a little louder. My father’s once brisk, now shuffling footsteps approached. He opened the door, grinning his snaggle-toothed, slightly lopsided grin.

“You’re here!” he said, hugging us both. His jet-black hair was greased into place and he wore a jaunty red cravat at the neck. I caught a flash of matching red socks as he hitched up his trousers and tucked in an escaping shirttail.

“Phoebe, they’re here,” he bellowed.

“How is she,” I whispered.

“Fine, fine. Come in,” he said.

We stepped into the brightly-lit foyer that led to the living room.

“Mom,” I said tentatively. She cleared her throat and coughed.

She was lying on the sofa, almost lost in a billowing gold caftan. One arm, a twig, extended from the wide sleeve. A cigarette trembled from yellow-stained fingertips. Her head wobbled slightly on her long, slim and still proud neck. Gold clip earrings, flowers with a diamond at the center, anchored her jaw in place.

Her hair was cut short and, now thinning, stood out like the puff of a ripe dandelion. She took her free hand and pushed the hair straight up and back from her ear.

Her cheeks, flushed with broken blood vessels, gave the cruel illusion of robust health. Her eyes, once gray and sharp, seemed filled with warm brackish seawater. I leaned over to kiss her and inhaled Palmolive soap, Elizabeth Arden skin cream and Kent cigarettes. And beneath that, scotch whisky.

My mother was disappearing and she knew it. All but her belly which was an enormous hard mound beneath the golden caftan. It was growing while the rest of her was shriveling away to nothing. Water was building up in her abdomen, the doctors told us -- one of the symptoms of liver disease brought on by years of alcohol abuse. I had visions, not of impending death, but of a golden beach ball marooned on the white couch when the rest of her had finished becoming invisible.

I went on from there to talk about her increasing isolation due to hearing loss, compounded by the way women were relegated to observers in the movie making business. Her daytime perfection and nighttime rages.

How determined I was to never be anything like her.

And yet there I was, writing this essay. And here I am thirty years later, reading and revising it and discovering it's not half bad, taken in with the benefit of some distance.

I'm sure I'm not alone, finding that memories that were once too painful to write about and then reread, have become important enough that I want to write about then, and then read what I've written.

Does anyone else find that act of putting pen to paper is a way of exorcising demons?

Happy Release Day: BOOKING FOR TROUBLE!

 

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JENN McKINLAY: BOOKING FOR TROUBLE, my 16th and final (maybe, probably, idk, we'll see) Library Lover's Mystery is out on Tuesday, the 24th! I didn't want to interrupt What We're Writing Week, so I'm sharing my celebratory release day post a couple of days early.

First, I have to acknowledge how gorgeous this cover is! Julia Green has been the artist for this series since book one and I have loved every single cover she has created for this series. I feel truly blessed by the cover gods to have been lucky enough to have her illustrate my world. Thank you, Julia!

Sixteen books ago I introduced librarian Lindsey Norris with a knack for finding bodies and a talent for solving murders in BOOKS CAN BE DECEIVING and somehow that mystery turned into the Library Lover’s series. Sixteen books. Which feels a little like saying I raised a child to driving age and now someone has handed her car keys.

Let’s be honest: series fatigue is real. There comes a moment when you look at your beloved fictional town and think, “What fresh havoc can I possibly wreak upon you?” I’ve hunted for treasure, hosted book sales, planned weddings, solved cold cases, and, yes, discovered more bodies than any self-respecting small town should statistically allow. 

And yet.

Leaving this world feels less like typing “The End” and more like packing up a house to leave a town you’ve lived in for years. I know which floorboards creak. I know which of my neighbors is a busy body. I know exactly how the light falls through the windows in autumn. Walking away is practical. It’s smart. It’s probably overdue.

It's also heartbreaking.

These characters have been my daily companions. They’ve surprised me, comforted me, and occasionally refused to cooperate (looking at you, character who refused to be murdered). Saying goodbye feels like moving away from home—necessary for growth, but oh, the ache.

Still, every good series deserves a final chapter. And if I’ve learned anything from my years as a librarian, it’s this: when one story ends, another is waiting on the shelf.

Thank you, Readers, for joining me on this journey. I've loved every second of it. And who knows, maybe there'll be another...I never say never.

Reds and Readers, how do you feel when a beloved series ends?