Questions and Answers:
How did the idea for Beach Trip originate?
I was out for dinner with some girlfriends. We get together once a month to go to dinner and drink martinis and talk about our significant others. Our children. Our jobs. Socio-economic trends in Europe. (Just kidding).
Anyway, we were all sitting there and one of the “girls” mentioned that she was getting ready to go on her annual beach trip with her college friends. Six females and one male captain cruising around the Bahamas on a yacht. For one week. No worries, no cares, just lots and lots of sun. And vodka. Suzi (not her real name) mentioned that she always gets excited but also a little nervous before the trip, because two of the women, college room mates had a “thing” going, some long simmering feud over an event that had occurred in college. No one was really sure what it was about. The rest of the year, the two women were good, good friends. It was only on this annual trip, at the end of a long week of drinking and sunning and being together in an enclosed space, that this conflict surfaced.
“You poor thing,” someone remarked. “Can’t you stay home?”
“Oh hell no,” Suzi replied. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Later, steering the conversation back to the beach trip, I remarked, “You know that would make a good novel.”
“Damn it, you better not write about any of this,” Suzi said.
Did the book involve special research?
Yes, copious amounts of vodka martinis and nights out with girlfriends. I still couldn’t get all the details out of Suzi. They swore some kind of ridiculous secrecy oath. Whatever happens on the boat, stays on the boat - that kind of thing. So I had to make most of it up.
Give a brief description of the novel, along with your intention in writing the story.
I wanted to write a novel about four women whose lives intersect at two very important times in their lives; the first, when they’re young and idealistic and have their whole lives in front of them, and the second, when they’re older, standing on the cusp of middle age, and have been whittled down some by fate and circumstance.
Mel, Sara, Annie and Lola are suite mates at Bedford, a prestigious liberal arts college in the mountains of North Carolina. Twenty-three years later they are reunited for a week-long trip to exclusive Whale Head Island, a reunion that will be, by turns, bittersweet, hilarious, and tragic.
Mel, a mystery writer living in New York, is grappling with the aftermath of two failed marriages and a stalled writing career. Sara, an Atlanta attorney, struggles with guilt over her son’s illness and her own slowly unraveling marriage. Annie, a successful Nashville businesswoman married to her childhood sweetheart, can’t seem to leave the regrets of her youth behind her. And Lola, sweet-tempered and absent-minded, whiles away her hours and her husband’s money, on little pills that keep her happy.
Now the friends, all in their forties, converge on Lola’s idyllic North Carolina beach house in an attempt to relive the carefree days of their college years. But as the week wears on, and each woman’s hidden story is gradually revealed, they find they must inevitably confront their shared past; a failed love affair, a discarded suitor, a betrayal, and a secret that threatens to change their bond, and their lives, forever.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Always. Even before I learned to read, before I knew what a writer was, I was a story-teller. What we call in the South, a “truth-stretcher”. My first stories were mostly morality tales used to intimidate the neighborhood kids.
Somewhere around third grade I began to understand that there were people out there who got paid for truth-stretching, and those people were called writers. It was a revelation to me. Not long after that, I began my career as a writer. I’d clip pictures out of magazines and make up stories to go with the pictures. My favorite was that ad that showed a disconsolate boy sitting at a desk. “Why can’t little Johnny read?” was the caption. I’d write story after story explaining why little Johnny couldn’t read (brain tumor, temporary blindness, raised by wolves, etc.) These were books made of folded construction paper, stapled down the middle. I called them my Little Johnny Books. My mother probably still has them in a box in her attic.
What is your background: hometown, schools, marriage status, kids?
My father was a college professor and we moved around a lot while he was teaching and pursuing various degrees. I was born in Florida, moved to Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Wisconsin (yes, Wisconsin) before we finally settled in Oklahoma. I spent my formative years, sixth grade through my first two years of college, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. My parents were very proud of being Southerners and my grandmothers, cousins and most of our extended family still lived in Cordele, Georgia (where I spent most of my summer vacations). Thus, the locale for my Kudzu novels.
I went to Oklahoma State, where my father taught. After my sophomore year of college I took a job on a dude ranch in the mountains of Colorado where I met my future husband. He was from Detroit, but I liked him anyway. It was also on the ranch that I witnessed my first Dude Stampede. Those of you who’ve read my novel, Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes, will know the scene I’m talking about. If you thought it was funny in the book, you should have seen it in person.
After marrying, we went back to school at Michigan State. When my husband graduated he was offered a job in Atlanta. He was a little apprehensive about moving South, he had seen Deliverance twice, but eventually he agreed. A few years later he was transferred to Chattanooga and I settled down to writing novels and raising three children.
Two are in college now and one has graduated and works as a web designer in Chicago.
What writers have influenced you?
I was one of those kids who read everything I could get may hands on. I loved Nancy Drew mysteries, Marvel Comics, Winnie-the-Pooh, Black Beauty, and anything by Dr. Seuss. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was beginning to find the classics. My parents were poor graduate students but we always had a lot of books in the house. Right around fourth grade they began putting the books they thought were too adult for me to read on the top shelf of the bookshelves. Those, of course, became the books I had to read.
I plowed through Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, The Yearling, Little Women, Great Expectations, To Kill A Mockingbird, Dr. Zhivago. I loved the historical novels of Anna Seton. I spent most of my summers with my nose buried in a book. Even if I didn’t always understand the complexity of human relationships, I loved the beauty of the language, the flow of words on a page, like music.
It wasn’t until college that I began reading Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Bronte Sisters.
Now I go through phases. My British writers phase, Australian writers phase, Southern writers phase, etc. I always come back to O’Connor and Welty, George Singleton, Lewis Nordan, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, Ian McEwan, and Doris Lessing.
I love to read short stories, especially those written by John Cheever, Shelby Foote, Ellen Gilchrist and Isabelle Allende.
Do you base your characters on people that you know?
I once read an interview by a well-known author who stated that all characters arise out of a writer’s own psyche. And I agree with him, up to a point. My characters are never based on “outside” people. It’s like being an anal-retentive schizophrenic or a dreamer who’s perfected the art of lucid dreaming. The characters’ voices appear in your head but, initially at least, you have some control over them. Later, that control diminishes somewhat.
What is your writing style: plot it all out ahead of time or just start working and see where the characters lead you?
When I first began seriously writing, I had a tendency to let the characters take me wherever they wanted to go. I’d start with a situation and let them work their ways out. Now this sounds very fine and “artsy” but the truth of the matter is when you write like this you wind up in a lot of dead ends. You also wind up with a novel which runs close to one thousand pages and which, trust me on this, no one is going to publish.
I was very lucky to have Lee Boudreaux as my first editor at Random House. She taught me to pay attention to the plot, to keep the writing tight, to keep the action moving. I rewrote Revenge four times to suit her but each time I learned something valuable. Now, before I begin a novel, I think about it for some time. I let it roll around in my head for awhile. When I think I’m ready, I put a rough outline down on paper, just a few of the major plot points, more like a sketch than an outline really. Something that leaves a lot of room for the characters to change, which they inevitably will. And then I write the first three chapters. If the characters haven’t come to life in my head by then, I know the novel won’t work. And I’ve saved myself a lot of time, effort, and frustration. I never begin a novel, now, without having a general idea of how it’s going to end.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a novel tentatively entitled Old Money, about a Chicago girl, Ava Dabrowski, who marries into an aristocratic Southern family. While working on her first novel, a legal thriller, she agrees to spend a summer in her new husband, Will’s, hometown of Woodburn, Tennessee. Ensconced in the family’s crumbling mansion with Will and his two great aunts, Fanny and Josephine, Ava finds herself a stranger in a strange land, caught up in the dramas and intrigues of the characters inhabiting this small Southern town. Gradually drawn into tales of the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Fanny’s first husband, Ava stumbles upon a decades old family secret, a discovery that causes an increasing rift in her marriage as she puts aside her legal thriller and begins instead to write about the enigmatic Woodburn family.
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