TRAVELING WHILE FEMALE by BARBARA O’NEAL

LUCY BURDETTE: I am always so happy to welcome writer Barbara O’Neal to the blog—and even happier that her newest book, A THOUSAND PAINTED HOURS, will be published in August. (I have already pre-ordered.) She has some interesting thoughts today on traveling as a single woman…

BARBARA O’NEAL: Last night, I was on a fairly empty train rather late, at the SFO airport. It was grim lighting, that tungsten glow that makes everything seedy.

It occurred to me with some surprise that I wasn’t worried about it. As a young woman, I would have been looking over my shoulder, checking for men who might be dangerous. Constantly. I am still aware—I’m not a fool; I can still be pickpocketed or mugged—but this is no longer an overarching, constant, tense, alert worry. I walk through the world like a man. At ease. Sure. Because I have crossed into the blessed territory of invisibility.

What a delight.

Eating dinner at the airport food court, I saw a young man pass, staring at a very young woman at a table in front of me. She was eating. Her hair was a little messy from travel. She didn’t notice him, but he walked twenty feet staring at her so obviously that it irritated me. I wanted to stand up and whack him with my purse. Keep walking, bud.

I remembered when it was me worrying about the unwanted attention of some random guy, finding a place to sit between an old woman and a mother with a child so the strange man couldn’t sit near me.

My son, age 25 or so, talked about going out to the New York clubs with a small group of women. One was very fearful, jumping at shadows, worried about alleyways and knots of guys on the street. Her friend said, “Don’t worry, Ian is with us. No one will mess with us.”

He said, recounting that story to me later, “I had no idea women worry about this all the time. All. The. Time. Did you know?”

Um, yes, son. I did.

I’m taking my granddaughter to Japan next month. She’s 14 and leggy and eccentric, with a wild head of hair that draws the longing gaze of white women (“I love your hair”) but also the meanness of boys at middle school. I feel some sense of relief about the safety of that country, but I also know I will be instructing her constantly, quietly, on how to be female while traveling. I want her to be mighty. And safe.

I honestly worry less about this one than her younger sister. My wild-haired girl is fierce and knows her own mind. She’s the girl other kids ran to when they were being bullied. Her sister is pliant and a pleaser and very pretty in that way some males want to claim—if it is beautiful, it is mine. We will go somewhere, too, in a couple of years. She longs for Germany, which she visited a couple of years ago. I will instruct her carefully.

I wish this was not necessary. I wish I had not spent 40 years sizing up every space I walked through. I traveled anyway, but often I was nervous.

Now I stride through the world like a white man, able to occupy any space without apology or fear. I just wish my granddaughters could begin here, instead of waiting decades to age into it. 

Readers, do you worry when you’re traveling or otherwise out of your element?

More from Lucy, Barbara has some news for the upcoming A Thousand Painted Hours: If you would like a signed copy, you can order one now, and we have some very special things that go along with it. The first is a giveaway of an original piece of collage art I created to commemorate the book. One golden ticket in the books will win the original art.

To order a signed copy, visit Author, Author

You can also pre-order all the other versions—kindle, hardcover ($2 off if you order now), paperback or audio, which is going to be especially fantastic this time. I’ve heard the clips from my narrator and I am so very excited. Pre-orders really help visibility of a book, so I appreciate any help in that direction.

Imagining Wonder: What if…the best things happen? by Barbara O'Neal

LUCY BURDETTE: you’ve heard me say that one of my favorite writers is Barbara O’Neal. I’m reading her latest, Memories of the Lost, and trying to make it last longer so I don’t feel the sadness of it ending. I follow her sub stack and really loved a recent post, which she agreed to share with us. Welcome Barbara!

BARBARA O'NEAL: My sister, a lifelong nurse, visited me last week. We were talking about aging in general, and our mother in particular.  I made an off-hand comment that I supposed everyone gets frail in their 90s. 

My sister said, most emphatically, that that wasn’t true at all. She sees lots of very aged people in her work, and sees a lot of 90-somethings who are quite vigorous, who live their lives the same way they always have, doing things, traveling, having adventures. 

I blinked. A huge sense of…potential bloomed in my body.  Expansion. 

In that instant, I realized that the idea of looming frailty has weighing on me in the weirdest ways.  My mother is in her early 80s, but she’s suddenly facing frailty from a dozen directions. I guess my mind was casting me into that 80-year-old frail role, too.  My cats are getting older and I think about what it would be like to get new kittens, and then my brain says, but you’re getting up there, and who will take care of the cats if something happens to you? 

I worry about how long we’ll get to stay in this beautiful home by the beach, and if the medical care will chase us back to a city. I wonder how long I’ll be able to do the vigorous travel I love so much. 

All of this has very much in the back of my mind, not anywhere in view, but until we had this conversation, I had not realized how much I’ve been imagining myself frail at 80. While it’s fine to be practical and make arrangements for alternative outcomes (and I think it’s smart to do that), I don’t want to live in that space of vague dread. 

None of us know when something might befall us—an accident or a random disease or whatever—but in our 30s and 40s, we don’t keep looking up at the scythe hanging over our heads. We just go about our lives, make plans, looking forward to things we anticipate doing. 

I want to return to that sense of spaciousness, claim it, as my sister-in-law used to say. I claim a vigorous old age. I am visualizing lots more time to raise kittens, travel, explore long walks on my beach and around the world.  

My sister said that people who stay active stay strong. Which we already know, but it was a great reminder. I can focus on more exercise, less extra weight, more activity, tons of great nutrition. I’m going to start looking for examples of vigorous older people and focus on them. There are many in my community. My neighbor is almost 78 and she’s planning a hike on the Coast to Coast walk in England. 

I’m just going to live without looking up at that scythe and imagine a great future. What if I’m still writing a book every (other) year, traveling with my husband, enjoying my many grandchildren on active vacations in my 90s? What if, like Esther Hicks says, I thrive, thrive, thrive, croak?

Does aging weigh on you? If you allowed yourself a sense of wonder, what might you see? 

Barbara O’Neal is the author of many titles of women’s fiction, including When We Believed in Mermaids and the forthcoming The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth. She writes regularly on Substack and lurks heavily on TikTok.

Memories of the Lost by Barbara O'Neal

 

LUCY BURDETTE: I adore Barbara O’Neal’s books and gobble them up as soon as they’re released. Her newest, MEMORIES OF THE LOST, is out next week and I’m delighted to host her today. I think you’ll find her blog about the process of writing fascinating. Welcome Barbara!

BARBARA O’NEAL: I am in that strange between place that career novelists know well. I spent the past year writing a new book, which I turned in to my editors a few weeks ago. They’ll have it for a month or so, and I’ll get it back for revisions and fine tuning. After the hard push on the book (that last month is always so very deeply enmeshed in BookLand!) I’m taking July off to spend with my family, visit my mother, hang out with my granddaughters, but in the back of my mind, I’m communing with the next book. At this point, it’s only vaguely a book, a wispy bit of storyline, a situation and characters. It was getting solid enough that I opened a Scrivener file for it the other day, but I can’t look at it too closely, or it will evaporate. 

Finally, my new book, Memories of the Lost is arriving in the world, all shiny and polished like a perfect apple. It is a highly romantic and mysterious book full of secrets, set in both New York City and England. I loved writing about Tillie the artist, and Liam the all-too-famous meditation teacher, about the loft where Tillie lives and paints. I also loved Clare, a Devon woman of middle age who has secrets and traumas of her own, and the farm where she lives with her husband and their collection of animals, a blind dog and a hare who can’t hop and the cats who run through everything in this book. 

The thing is, Memories is fully finished. I worked on it for more than a year, many drafts, and many edits to bring it into a place it could give a reader the experience it gave me in my head. It takes a lot of hours and work to get a book to that point, and it’s exhilarating to get it there. Such an accomplishment! (Whether the world loves the book is beside the point, honestly. An artist of any kind can only do the best work she is capable of producing at any given time.) 

The book I just turned in, titled only with the characters’ names, Mariah and Veronica, is in a different state. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and mental energy to get 100,000 words of a book onto the page, and getting to the end in a relatively readable, whole state is an astonishing thing every single time. I love the book madly when I turn it in the first time; I’ve done it! Written a whole book! 

Of course, it’s quite raw yet, full of plot holes and dropped timelines and inconsistencies and probably different names for secondary characters (editor: “is he Joe or Jim?”). There are always overworked words, different ones for every book; I am known to fall in love with some glittery description and then drop it in over and over. There are the plethora of justs and maybes and shrugs (so many shrugs, so many one-shouldered shrugs, so many raised eyebrows and sideways smiles!). I will wince upon reading all of these things in revision, but most of us just can’t see all of them in a rough draft. It’s all forest in rough draft; revision brings in the individual trees. 

And the new book, the misty idea, is just that. I always think I know what it is about when I start, and I’m always wrong. The girls in the basement lure me in with something that sounds like fun—two women, different ages, thrown together on a long journey!—and ends up being about something else entirely. I can see a luxury stateroom, an exotic destination, a—wait, is he—?

I just have to follow it, and see what happens. 

The day after I turned in Mariah and Veronica, I was sitting in my office/studio, feeling the sense of satisfaction that I’d managed to get it done before my guests arrived. The little girl part of me who said writing books would be the best job ever said quietly, “And I was right, don’t you think?”

She was.

Summer is an in-between time for many of us. What books are you reading to keep yourself company?

ABOUT THE BOOK: An unsuspecting artist uncovers her late mother’s secrets and unravels her own hidden past in a beguiling novel by the USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids.

Months after her mother passes away, artist Tillie Morrisey sees a painting in a gallery that leaves her inexplicably lightheaded and unsteady. When a handsome stranger comes to her aid, their connection is so immediate it seems fated, though Liam is only visiting for a few days.

Working on her own art has always been a refuge, but after discovering a document among her mother’s belongings that suggests Tillie’s life has been a lie, she begins to suffer from a series of fugue states, with memories surfacing that she isn’t even sure are her own. As her confusion and grief mount, and prompted by a lead on the painting that started it all, Tillie heads to a seaside village in England. There, she hopes to discover the source of her uncanny inspirations, sort out her feelings about Liam, and unravel truths that her mother kept hidden for decades.

The fluidity of memory, empowering strength of character, beauty of nature, and love of family braid together in this artful tapestry of a novel.

You can find Barbara on Substack and Facebook.

Reading My Way Out of a Reality Funk

LUCY BURDETTE: The news has been so distressing and depressing lately that I’ve made a conscious effort to spend more time reading and less time obsessing about social media. Here’s what I’ve read recently—much of it colored by my trip to France and also the need to escape reality. I’d love to hear what you’re reading too!

THE ART OF INHERITING SECRETS by Barbara O’Neal: I am a huge fan of Barbara O'Neal and this book was no exception. She packed it with food, a fascinating English countryside setting, romance, family drama, and a female lead figuring out what her authentic life and self should be. (Yes, there were a few unrealistic plot threads, but who cares when the rest of the strengths kept me turning the pages deep into the night?)

THE LOST VINTAGE by Ann Mah: As a lover of France and food and family secrets, I very much enjoyed this novel from travel writer Ann Mah. Sommelier Kate travels from San Francisco to France to study Burgundy wines in advance of attempting to become a Master of Wine. In her extended family's vineyard and home, she finds terrible secrets buried in the past along with hope for happiness with the man and world she fled from years ago.

THE CROW TRAP by Ann Cleeves: You guys got me started on Ann Cleeves, and I am crazy for her Jimmy Perez Shetland series. Except I have only two left to read so I’m hoarding. On my trip I took along this first book in the Vera Stanhope series. It was the perfect book for a long journey (over 500 pages!), easy reading, complex characters, and a brooding landscape. So far I prefer JimmyJ, but I’ll definitely read more in this series.

COMING TO MY SENSES by Alice Waters: I read this memoir to get ready for Paris, as Alice Waters was a major Francophile and the founder of Chez Panisse. We grew up in a similar part of New Jersey, with similar non-gourmet food experiences. But that’s where the similarities end. She spent a year in Paris and had a food conversion experience that eventually led to her founding of the local food movement in California and the iconic restaurant she scratched out from nothing. She lived in Berkeley in the thick of the 1960’s—I found these descriptions fascinating.  

And currently reading THE LOST CAROUSEL OF PROVENCE by Juliet Blackwell. How about you?

Just Begin by Barbara O'Neal

LUCY BURDETTE: We are so lucky this week to hear two answers to a classic question: Where did the idea for this book come from? I never get tired of hearing these stories. Barbara O'Neal--who writes brilliantly about food and people--tells us the story of her new novel today. Welcome Barbara!

BARBARA O'NEAL: People often ask writers where their ideas come from. Often, I have no idea where the seed of a particular idea came from or why it sprouted. In the case of The All You Can Dream Buffet, however, I can remember the moment exactly.

I have a magazine fetish, which I inherited from my mother. When I was a child, she brought home all the grocery store magazines—Redbook and Good Housekeeping, Family Circle and Woman’s Day, and of course, in those days, Reader’s Digest.  I read them all, ensorcelled by the promises within the pages.  I could be beautiful, and a tidy housekeeper and a good cook.  Reader’s Digest was always about overcoming tragedy, so I wished to be good, too. My favorite was Redbook, which contained an entire novel in every issue, and often a couple of short stories as well. 

My taste in magazines has changed.  I still love to browse the long, long shelves at bookstores and take home a pile of glossy promise, but I’m often seeking another sort of promise. How to be serene in the face of a fast-paced, busy, noisy world; how to exercise to eternal slimness (if I buy the magazine and read the stories, that’s probably good for a couple of pounds, right?). I’ve given up perfect make-up and the perfect house, but I find I still love beauty.
One of the most beautiful magazines is Artful Blogging. Every issue, it showcases several blogs, complete with high quality photographs, samples of the writing, and a personal insight written by the blogger.  One night, I was sitting in my chair in the living room, a cat on my lap, a glass of Sauvignon Blanc on the table. Lamplight shone over my shoulder as I leafed through the latest copy of Artful Blogging.  I don’t remember the exact bloggers, but there were beautiful photos of one’s food, and another’s old furniture. The light in those photos puts me at ease.

I read the stories of the bloggers, and over and over they said something like, “I had no idea when I started this blog that it would literally change my life. I was only playing around, I was just seeing what I could do. I just wanted a place to show my photos.  And then….”

Then the world noticed their talents. They noticed themselves. Over and over, the bloggers speak of their inner transformations.  Over and over, it is a woman who might not have had many options, and her life opened like a flower when she took a chance, started a blog.

The writer in me wanted to know…what happened then? What happens if you’re a supermarket cake baker in a small farm town in the heartland and you start a blog about cakes and discover that your gift is for photography, not cakes, and you suddenly have thousands and thousands of followers and you are featured in a magazine, and you’re sort of…famous?

How does that change your life? How does that change your friendships and the people around you? How do those connections you make online change your life? My life has been changed by online connections in ways that amaze and astonish me. I’m sure it has happened to some of you, too.
Out of that moment, sitting in my chair, was born the idea for The All You Can Dream Buffet.  Four food bloggers, ranging in age from 24 to 85, come together at the organic lavender farm one of them runs.  Ginny is the cake blogger who discovered a gift for photography.  She’s a small town girl from Kansas who is living in a very unsatisfying marriage, and has never gone anywhere but Minnesota when she decides to drive a vintage airstream across the country to Oregon to see her friends. By herself, with her dog.   Ruby is 24, and runs a vegan blog called The Flavor of a Blue Moon. She’s broken-hearted and pregnant, trying to figure out where she belongs (and by far one of my favorite characters of all time.) Valerie is a wine blogger who hasn’t written a word since tragedy shattered her family, and needs to help her daughter come to terms with everything that happened and live her own life.

Finally, Lavender Wills is the 85-year-old ex-flight attendant who runs an organic lavender farm in Yamhill County.  She blogs about honey and lavender and needs to find someone to carry out her legacy, so she is throwing a birthday fling to see if one of the bloggers will be right for the task.  


There are dogs and cats and men of some consequence, and an adventure in a vintage Bambi (which I do not own but will one day, trust me!) and recipes and lavender. But the true heart of the book is women’s friendships and the ways we empower each other, and how powerful it can be if we just begin. 

 
Are you a magazine fan? Have you ever started something on a whim that turned your life upside down? 

Barbara O'Neal has written more than 40 novels of romance and women's fiction, and has been awarded the RITA seven times.  Find out more at barbaraoneal.com

Barbara O'Neal Bakes a Perfect Life

ROBERTA: Today I'm so happy to introduce you to one of my favorite writers, Barbara O'Neal, also known as Barbara Samuel. She's the author of both historical and contemporary romances and more recently THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING, THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS, and HOW TO BAKE A PERFECT LIFE. She's won six RITA awards and the Colorado Center for the Book Award (twice.)

Welcome Barbara! You said this on one of your blogs: "In virtually every novel I have written, in any genre, some major scenes will take place in a kitchen. There will be scenes written around food, the preparation of food, the feeding of people."

Seeing as I'm writing a mystery series centered on a food critic, I'm fascinated with how you work food into your books without overwhelming the story. Could you talk a little about this balance?

BARBARA: It's much like real life--food is everywhere, a part of everything. Every morning, you're thinking about what to have for breakfast. Every night, you'll have to have some supper. We all have food we love and food we hate (my personal hatred is for egg whites--ask anyone and they will tell you in great detail why they hate that food!) and eating is something we all have to do. In developing character for a foodie sort of novel, it can be helpful to define each character's food profile as part of the development process, and then set them free to do what they do. Food is such a natural part of our lives, that it's easy to work it in. Working it in without overwhelming the work is like using pepper--a little goes a long way, and not everybody likes it.

ROBERTA: And are you a cook yourself? What would we be having if you invited us over for supper?

BARBARA: I love to cook, and in fact, it is one of the handful of things that quiets my word-centric brain and brings me back into my body. When I'm stuck on a scene or on a plot point, you will always find me in the kitchen, experimenting with a new recipe.

If you were to come over for dinner in the summertime, I might serve a tomato tart with goat cheese that I adore, along with fresh bread and ice cold Sauvignon Blanc. If we were just hanging around in the backyard, it would be my mother's tacos, with soft corn tortillas and whole pinto beans, along with guacamole and fresh salsa and plenty of good beer and ale.

In the wintertime, I might bake my specialty vegetarian lasagna, made with sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese, or perhaps my favorite soup, Caldo Gallego, which is a Spanish peasant soup that sticks to your ribs and makes you beg for more.

ROBERTA: Oh my, that all sounds delicious…As a psychologist and a writer, I'm also interested in your comments about how themes emerge in your work. Could you comment on the kinds of things you've watched repeat themselves in your books?

BARBARA: I always say that every writer is stuck with certain ideas. As a friend of mine says, "Even when I don't think I'm writing about fathers, I'm writing about fathers." My central story seems to be about survivors--how do people survive trauma? What kinds of qualities do you need to navigate it well and be healthy on the other side? What makes people give up? It's not always a violent trauma like a car accident or a soldier who has been in battle. Often is is a life-shift that shatters a character's idea of herself. In How to Bake a Perfect Life, Ramona's trauma is getting pregnant at 15. This event turns her life upside down. In The Lost Recipe for Happiness, it is a gruesome car accident that kills everyone but the heroine. I have no idea why this is my central theme, honestly. It just is.

There are other things that show up in my work over and over again--dogs and cats and gardens, the food and kitchen motifs. Animals ground us, create families even when the traditional unit might break down. Food, too, creates community and connections. I'm interested in beauty and how even the pursuit of it makes us happier. Not the shallow idea of beauty, as in beautiful faces, but planting flowers and serving food attractively and finding clothing that feels beautiful to the wearer. All of it.

ROBERTA: You strike me as a writer who is in this business for the long haul. (38 books!) Could you offer some words of wisdom for writers who might be discouraged by recent changes in the publishing world.

BARBARA: I'd say I'm here for the duration! I sold my first book when I was in my twenties, and that was in 1988, so I've been writing a long, long time. The upheaval in publishing is the biggest change I've seen by far. The thing to remember is that change is not synonymous with bad. The markets are changing so fast that it's uncomfortable, but I strongly believe there is always going to be work for good writers. Publishing in e, publishing in paper, publishing by voice or in graphic form--all of those formats still need content providers. That would be us. We provide content, and however the reader finds books, the bottom line is still about the story. Good stories, good characters, good writing is always what matters most. It's up to us to make the magic, and that's the true joy.

If your goal is fame, to be an author, rather than a writer, attaining that in the new order might be a little more difficult. Stars will be created in new ways, mainly by the consumers.

But writers will have more and more ways to make money, and in many cases, a lot more money than most rank and file writers could make in the past. It's a time to be optimistic and excited, not depressed and anxious!

ROBERTA: And what can we look forward to next?

BARBARA: I'm currently finishing a book tentatively titled The Garden of Happy Endings, about a woman minister who has turned her back on God. She organizes a community garden in a challenged neighborhood and helps run a soup kitchen (thus my new passion for Caldo Gallego soup!) out of a Catholic church. There is a wonderful dog, of course, Charlie, and sisters, and love stories of all kinds. It's been a challenging book to write because the central questions are big ones, but I'm finally happy with it. Bantam will publish it in trade paperback in May.

ROBERTA: Thank you for being here Barbara! You can find Barbara on Twitter or at her website or on her excellent blog for writers, called A Writer Afoot. Now JRW, questions, comments, dates you can make it for our dinner??