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Sandra Brown
Sandra Brown, who lives in Arlington, Texas, is a writer who has produced a long string of New York Times bestsellers.
Sandra started her career as a romance novelist, but over the past two decades, her specialty has become the fast-paced, contemporary thriller — crime fiction dealing in murder, corruption, betrayal, and steamy sexual intrigue.
However, her new book, Rainwater (Simon & Schuster, $23.99), is something very different. It’s a story that was inspired by Sandra’s own family history. It is set in 1934, in rural, Depression-era Texas. And while there is indeed corruption and murder in Rainwater, there is also romance, courage and heartbreak. And in her title character, David Rainwater, Sandra has created one of her most memorable heroes.
Here is Sandra Brown, talking about Rainwater.
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When they were young: Sandra's paternal grandparents.
You have said that Rainwater is very close to your heart, and that it was inspired by Depression-era stories told in your family. What real-life experiences happened in your grandparents’ time that made you want to tell this tale?
In 1934, as part of the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation’s attempt to remove surplus commodities from the open market, independent dairy farmers were required to pour out the milk they couldn’t sell to dairies. My paternal grandfather refused to waste good milk when families in his community were starving. He’d been giving away his surplus milk to people in need. Federal agents showed up at his farm, and engaged in an armed standoff against my grandfather and some of my gun-toting relatives. However, without a shot ever being fired, the agents withdrew and my grandfather continued to give away his surplus. This made a distinct impression on my daddy, who was six years old at the time. He told this story to me, and it fired my imagination.
Sandra's new book was inspired by her father's family, who owned a dairy farm in Central Texas.
You’re always on a tight writing schedule, because you’re under contract to produce a book every year. How did you ever make the time to write Rainwater in addition to your other commitments? How long did it take you from the time you began writing?
This story insisted it be written. So when I finished SMOKE SCREEN, but before I began SMASH CUT, I gave myself two months in which to write the first draft of RAINWATER. I didn’t know where the story would go, exactly. I just began writing and let it unfold on its own. When I completed the first draft, I had to put is aside for months while I worked on SMASH CUT. Then, throughout the year, whenever I took a break from SMASH CUT, for instance when my editor was reading the first draft of it, I’d take out RAINWATER and work on it. It took a year to complete, working on it when I could. And when I couldn’t because of other obligations, I missed it!
On the farm: Sandra's paternal grandparents, later in life.
There’s a good deal of racial tension portrayed in Rainwater. Did you research how racial segregation affected ordinary people in small-town Texas during that era, 75 years ago?
Anyone who grew up anywhere in the United States during the past 75 years has experienced racial segregation on some level. Racial lines were definitely drawn in Central Texas during 1934 when RAINWATER is set. In the story I tried to remain true to the general mindset, from the viewpoint of both blacks and whites, while asserting that not all whites are bigots.
Autism plays a significant part in the plot of Rainwater, but it had not even been identified or named yet, in 1934. What did you learn about the historic treatment of autism? Were autistic children often institutionalized?
What’s really interesting: I didn’t know Solly was autistic until he pulled the pan of hot starch onto himself. I didn’t know he was going to be a special child in any way. When Ella, the doctor, and Mr. Rainwater burst into the kitchen to see what had caused the ruckus, there was Solly, shrieking. His autism came as a total surprise to me. Autism wasn’t given a name until the late forties. One of the characters in RAINWATER refers to Solly as “backward.” She says this to Ella’s face, and not unkindly. I believe that’s simply how Solly would have been regarded by people at that time. He would have been an object of pity. And, yes, most children with this condition were either committed to institutions or locked in the proverbial attic.
Here is my latest book review, from the Sunday (Nov. 1, 2009) Dallas Morning News:
Louisa May Alcott biography details author’s lifelong struggles
By JOYCE SÁENZ HARRIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Joyce Sáenz Harris is a Dallas freelance writer.
Two women, both closely identified with the American abolitionist movement, wrote enormously influential best-sellers in the mid-1800s. The first, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery epic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is acknowledged as a philosophical precursor to the Civil War, but it is barely read today except by scholars of 19th-century literary feminism.
Louisa May Alcott
The second novel, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, has never been out of print since it was first published in 1868. Its tomboyish, restless heroine, Jo March, is considered a female icon worldwide. The domestic drama of the poor but proud March family still entertains modern readers from ages 8 to 80, and Little Women has frequently been adapted for stage and screen over the past century.
Moreover, its author evolved into an object of increasing literary fascination over the past 35 years, as it became clear that Alcott was much more than, as she disparagingly put it, a writer of “moral tales for children.”
In her new biography of Alcott (the basis of a PBS American Masters documentary to air Dec. 28), Harriet Reisen puts 20 years of study into a highly readable story. She casts a revealing new light upon an ambitious woman who was very much like her literary alter ego – except that Louisa Alcott’s life was harder, unhappier and far less healthy than Jo March’s.
Harriet Reisen
As the daughter of Transcendentalist philosopher Bronson Alcott, Louisa moved in literary circles from childhood. But her charming, impractical father seldom provided financially for his family. The Alcotts moved frequently, evading debtors and staying afloat with the generosity of family and friends.
Often, their meals were bread and water. The work of keeping the family fed, clothed and sheltered fell mostly upon Louisa, her three sisters and their mother. Louisa, strong-willed and driven by a yearning for travel and luxury, helped support her family with her “scribbling” even as a teenager.
For 20 years, she wrote dozens of pseudonymous Gothic thrillers for pulp magazines and papers – the same dark, “blood-and-thunder” stories that Jo March wrote for pay. “I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!” Alcott declared.
Alcott in a midlife portrait by George Healy (courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
She won notice under her own name, especially with Hospital Sketches, stories from her months as a Civil War nurse. But Little Women made her a celebrity at home and abroad. Alcott wrote novels for adults, too, but her juvenile works – notably the Little Women sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys, Jack and Jill, Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom – made her fortune and let her support her entire family. But she never found lasting romance or true happiness.
Throughout her life, Alcott was haunted by death and illness. Family deaths were often retold in her saga of the March family, but she could not put the loss of her artist sister May (“Amy”) into her final book, Jo’s Boys. She became the guardian of May’s baby daughter, Lulu, and raised her namesake during the last decade of her life.
Despite the wealth she achieved, she worked almost incessantly except when her poor health interfered. Reisen believes that Alcott suffered from lupus, a debilitating auto-immune disorder.
When she died in March 1888, after a probable stroke, she was 55. Alcott never knew she had outlived her father by only two days.
Joyce Sáenz Harris is a Dallas freelance writer.
jesharris@sbcglobal.net
The Woman Behind Little Women
Harriet Reisen
(Henry Holt, $26)
