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.

Sandra Brown's father (right) as a boy, with his younger cousin.

What did you love about the conflicted character of Ella Barron?

Another interesting bit of trivia about the book: Until I’d finished the first draft and was reading back through it, I didn’t realize that I’d written every scene from Ella’s point of view. I suppose my subconscious knew, even if the thinking Sandra didn’t, that the story would be much more powerful this way. Ella is the character who grows and changes. At the end of the story, she has a totally different perspective on life than she did at the beginning. So it was important to chronicle her reactions to everything that happened, even to events that she didn’t personally experience but was only told about. What I also found interesting is that, as a single parent rearing a challenged child alone, the problems Ella faced weren’t that different from those of contemporary women in similar situations. For that reason, she’s very relatable to the reader.

Mr. Rainwater remains mysterious in some ways, right to the end, but you have obvious affection for this character. What did you like best about him?

I loved this character. That’s why I titled the book after him. He was the cataclysmic event in Ella’s life. He touched everyone with whom he can into contact, even the bully Conrad Ellis. Although he’s ailing, he’s the strongest character in the book. He has an inner strength that I envy.

Thanks so much, Sandra!

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ALSO: If you want to learn more about Rainwater, tune in to The Early Show on CBS on the morning of Monday, Nov. 9, to see Sandra’s interview. It is slated to air during the 8 a.m. hour of the show.

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

Louisa May Alcott

The Woman Behind Little Women

Harriet Reisen

(Henry Holt, $26)

"How It Ends" by Laura Wiess

 

 

 

 

 

 

How It Ends (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster; $14)  is the latest novel from Laura Wiess, author of Such a Pretty Girl and Leftovers. Although it is marketed as a YA [young adult] novel, How It Ends is a dark-edged, compelling portrait of love’s power over evil, and adult readers are likely to relate to it on a wholly different level than younger readers will.

Mothers and their high school-age daughters may particularly be drawn to share reading the story of teenage Hanna and her relationship with Helen, an elderly neighbor who has become Hanna’s adopted grandmother. By story’s end, long-held secrets are revealed and illusions are shattered as Hanna moves into adulthood.

Here is Laura Wiess, answering questions about How It Ends.

Q&A for Laura Wiess, on How It Ends:

The first half of this book felt like a YA novel for teens, but in the second half, the parts with Louise’s memoir felt like a serious novel for adult readers. Were you ever tempted to change the concept of your book, so that the “novel-within-a-novel,” the audiobook How It Ends, would become your central story, aimed at an older readership?

Hi, Joyce! I’m so glad to be here.

I flirted briefly with the idea back in the beginning, while writing the audiobook and worrying if teen-age Hanna would ever be able to understand how different life had been back then, but then I realized that was exactly the point. Helen was worried that Hanna would not understand, so of course I was worried, too. These were secrets Helen had kept her whole life, and they could never be a casual reveal but if she wanted Hanna to know the truth and not be left with haunting, unanswered questions then exposing her past was a risk she had to take. And since the heart of the story is about the strength of the loving relationship between Hanna and Helen, an unofficial granddaughter and an unofficial grandmother, we needed to know both of them to really understand the Why? behind Helen’s initial decision to lie to Hanna, and then her later decision to confess.

So they had to be woven together, both voices, young and old, because they’re irreversibly intertwined, because they showed up together in my mind and gave each other so much. I needed to explore how grandmothers and granddaughters interact, coming together from different generations, armed with different opinions, experiences and focuses, sometimes clashing, sometimes impatient but also meeting on common ground, and despite their differences, giving each other love, comfort and care.   

Helen’s part of the story starts out seeming like a subplot to Hanna’s teenage self-absorption and romantic angst. But by the end of the book, Helen’s tale takes on great urgency and power. Did its emotional evolution surprise even you, as you were writing it?

In a way, yes, although I pretty much knew right from the start where we were headed and the intense emotions we would be mining to get there. I knew living inside of Helen was going to be rough – it had to be, to be true to her – and it definitely was.

The story’s momentum nearing the end was nerve-wracking, a relentless, no-mercy kind of internal storm there was no getting away from until I’d felt every scene and written every word. That surprised me, how fierce and raw peeling away all the options and facing the inevitable had left me.      

How important was it for you to show the arc of a relationship between characters of completely different generations?

It’s an integral part of the story’s foundation, along with the idea that no one is ever only what you think they are, and that we never really know the private heart of anyone unless it’s deliberately revealed.

There’s an organic rhythm to their relationship, a natural ebb and flow that shifts in accordance with Hanna’s blossoming and Helen’s withering. Hanna is pulling away from her family, making independent (and inexperienced) decisions and searching for her place in an unknown but thrilling new world. Her voice in the beginning of the book is young, excited, and self-absorbed, concerned more with navigating the bewildering maze of love, lust, school, and partying than boring old home life, and so of course it stands in stark contrast to Helen’s more settled, serious one. As Hanna grows and learns, though, her thoughts, actions and her voice matures.

Helen understands the necessity of Hanna’s pulling away (even while she mourns the loss), and is wise enough not to hold Hanna too tightly, or make her feel guilty for leaving her behind. Hanna then chooses to return to Helen because she wants to, not because she’s being forced into it.  She chooses to stay with Helen during a very difficult, heartbreaking time, and making that choice teaches her more about love, life, loss and the depth of her own strength and love for Helen than she ever could have imagined.

Parents often try to protect their children from pain and loss, to shield them from the realities of illness and death. Do you believe it is important for children to grow up understanding that tragedy is an unavoidable part of life?

Children are going to experience pain and loss whether they’re protected or not,  so how tragedy is handled within the family may be just as important, if not more so, than the tragedy itself. To what degree is it explained or exposed? What is the nature of the tragedy, how many questions are answered, and to what level of detailed truthfulness? What is the truth, and how is it handled?

Hanna’s parents understand that life is not always pretty and perfect, and while it’s painful to watch their daughter struggling, they remain in the background offering discussion, love and support while allowing Hanna, through her visits with Helen, to discover this hard truth for herself.

So while I’m a fan of kids not having to tote around giant, overflowing plates of pain and tragedy before they have to, I also believe there needs to be a balance so that a decent range of coping skills can be developed. Overprotecting kids can be just as stunting as shoving them into the middle of a harsh, bitter, bare bones world with no protective filters or support, and expecting them to just be able to deal with it.  

Does Hanna, in listening to the audiobook, deliberately avoid realizing the truth of Louise and Peter’s story?

There’s no doubt that Hanna has the ability to only see what she wants to see at any given moment – Seth being the prime example – but on the flip side she’s also sitting with a grown-up, a woman she’s loved and trusted since she was five, someone who has never let her down, who has always been there with the answers, a calm, trustworthy, reliable old lady she believes she knows, someone who has already shared her (false but believable) happy past and who has never really given Hanna any reason to doubt her.

So why would she think there was another truth? The idea that Helen might have lied, much less written a book confessing isn’t even on her radar. The thought alone is incomprehensible.

Well, consciously, at least.

By the time the audio book ends however, she’s absorbed so many lifestyle similarities and thinly-disguised truths that when she wakes up that next morning with a dark sense of foreboding and a persistent, throbbing headache, she’s teetering on the verge of a staggering realization, and that one last shock brings everything into focus.    

Families often keep secrets that are glossed over or deliberately hidden from children. Yet children are expected to keep no secrets from their parents. Over the course of the book, Hanna keeps many secrets from her parents, who are consistently kind, understanding and supportive of her. Is Hanna correct in believing that even such good parents as hers would not understand all of her actions, and therefore she is justified in keeping them secret? Do you believe secret-keeping is not just normal but necessary for maturing teens? Can some secret-keeping be a healthy part of growing up?       

Well, some of us learn (usually the hard way) that sharing everything we do with our authority figures will get us in trouble, so we develop craftiness and learn to edit the info we share as a form of self-protection.

No matter how understanding Hanna’s parents are, their job is to dole out measured doses of freedom while still trying to keep Hanna relatively safe, and from doing herself irreparable damage.  So if Hanna’s goal is to hang out at a keg party in the woods and drink, and she knows that if she tells the truth her parents won’t let her go, or will follow her around beforehand nattering about safe sex and date rape drugs and drunk driving, then why in the world would she ever tell them the truth?

No, better to reach her goal via kid-logic (a thought process I both love and am simultaneously unnerved by), which is armed with the blithe, convenient insistence that ‘Nothing bad will happen,’ and believes that keeping secrets, omitting specific information, contorting facts and flying under the radar is necessary in the quest to get what or where she wants to be.  

I think developing discretion in what you reveal is normal and healthy, and in a perfect world no secrets kept would become the deadly kind. Unfortunately that’s not always what happens, so maybe some secrets should be shared before they turn toxic, and do more harm kept than they could ever do revealed.    

There’s a balance here somewhere, and I think it’s different for everyone. Helen shared her secrets only twice in her life but because she confided in people who loved her, was not scorned or ridiculed for them. She took that big chance because she had to. The lies and the poison of their legacy had become more than she could bear, so the risk of telling the truth was worth whatever happened in the end.  

 Thank you, Joyce. It’s been a real pleasure being here, and I’m so glad you enjoyed How It Ends.

P.S.  I had a huge fan moment when I read your Sarah Bird interview. I absolutely love her work. She’s one of my all time favorite authors. Great stuff!

I have to admit, this little satire cracked me up.

Apparently it is going viral across the Web, assisted by social-networking sites such as Facebook, which is where I first saw it. It originally comes, as best as I can tell,  from another WordPress blog, Cash Peters’ The TV Swami:

“This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by socialist electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the socialist clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the socialist radio to one of the FCC- regulated channels to hear what the socialist National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using socialist satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of socialist US Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the socialist drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as kept accurate by the socialist National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my socialist National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the socialist roads built by the socialist local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the socialist Environmental Protection Agency, using socialist legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the socialist US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the socialist public school. If I get lost, I can use my socialist GPS navigation technology developed by the United States Department of Defense and made available to the public in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, who issued a policy directive declaring socialist GPS to be a dual-use military/civilian system to be managed as a national socialist asset.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the socialist workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the socialist USDA, I drive my socialist NHTSA car back home on the socialist DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the socialist state and local building codes and socialist fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the socialist local police department.

I then get on my computer and use the socialist internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and browse the socialist World Wide Web using my graphical web browser, both made possible by Al Gore’s socialist High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. I then post on Freerepublic.com and FOX News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.”

Dallas at night, if not from a DC-9.

A conversation today on Facebook reminded of a column I wrote back in 2002, about the classic Jimmie Dale Gilmore tune “Dallas.” It’s probably the most famous song ever recorded by The Flatlanders, a Texas trio of lifelong friends from Lubbock: Jimmie Dale, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock.

I’ve always thought the song nailed the character of Dallas in a number of telling ways. So here’s the column again… and if you want to hear the song sung by Jimmie Dale himself, here’s a YouTube link.

                                                                            ***
JOYCE SÁENZ HARRIS, Staff Writer  
Published: May 19, 2002
(c) The Dallas Morning News

The topic at lunch (and don’t ask me why) was: What kind of a beautiful woman would Dallas be?

Dallas is like a beautiful woman … with a hangover?

With a Bible?

With Manolo Blahniks in a Neiman Marcus bag?

We never quite decided. The conversation moved on to what the members of the Algonquin Round Table would talk about if they were around today.

After lunch, however, I realized that one Texan has already described the kind of beautiful woman Dallas would be. He did it 30 years ago, in fact. I heard him sing about it just last autumn.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s song “Dallas” never made it to the top of any charts in 1972. It was the lead-off tune and lone single from an album by a Lubbock trio called Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders. The project got a dismal, half-hearted release in eight-track format and promptly vanished from all commercial view.

But Jimmie Dale Gilmore and his fellow Flatlanders, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, did not vanish. They went on to become three of Texas’ favorite singer-songwriters, each with his own cultlike following.

Meanwhile, fans in England rediscovered the trio, and the word spread back home. Eventually the Flatlanders album, a neglected stepchild of corporate Nashville, became the darling of music collectors.

Years later, the album – aptly retitled More a Legend Than a Band — was re-released on CD, in slightly reconfigured form, by Rounder Records. (Sun Records, which had produced the original release, also released the album on CD but called it Jimmie Dale Gilmore and The Flatlanders “Unplugged.”) Jimmie’s song “Dallas” probably got its widest exposure when he sang it as a duet with Natalie Merchant on Jay Leno’s Tonight show.

Today, the Flatlanders’ music is widely recognized for the traditional jewel it always was.

The band began performing together again in 2000 and at last has another CD, Now Again, being released Tuesday.

The trio is scheduled to play the Granada Theater on June 26 and will also be part of the “Down From the Mountain” tour at Smirnoff Music Center on July 20.

I saw the Flatlanders play at the Texas Book Festival last year in Austin. The literary crowd loved them; historian David McCullough, among dozens of others, two-stepped up a storm.

But a clear favorite among the Flatlanders’ tunes was “Dallas,” for the fans hummed and sang along with that one. This is how the opening chorus goes:

A careless listener might mistake this song as a hymn to our fair city. In a way it is, for if anything, Dallas is even more spectacular by night now than it was 30 years ago.

But the reference to “a jungle” should tip you off that something darker is coming. And sure enough, it does.

Now Dallas ain’t a woman to help you get your feet on the ground,

And Dallas is a woman who will walk on you when you’re down.

That’s the kind of a beautiful woman Dallas is, according to Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Any number of local heroes and has-beens would likely agree with him that Dallas dearly loves winners and is mighty tough on losers.

The “middle eight” verse of the song could be sung by many Dallas newcomers, legal or otherwise:

If we do have an unofficial anthem, it’s probably Frank Loesser’s 1956 Broadway hit, “Big D,” from The Most Happy Fella.

But I suspect our fellow Texan, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, may have caught more of the way we really are.

Papa'iloa Beach: Can't you almost see Sawyer?

We got back last Monday from a trip to Maui. On the way back, we had a 24-hour stopover on Oahu… meaning we were in LOST territory.

Unfortunately, I did not run across any LOST shoots that Sunday. Nor did I bump into any stars in the airport or in Waikiki — unless you count spotting the Searcher, aka Penny’s boat, in a Honolulu marina.

Papa'iloa Beach on Oahu's North Shore, a backdrop familiar to LOST fans.

But the mountains were there as a green backdrop, the beach looked a whole lot like the beach we all know and love… and if you used your imagination, you could almost see a shirtless Sawyer sitting on the rocks, looking out to sea. (Well, at least I could almost see him. My husband was probably imagining Kate or Juliet.)

YMCA Camp Erdman welcomes LOST fans.

Next we went up the Farrington Highway to YMCA Camp Erdman, also known as the Dharma Barracks or “New Otherton.”

Almost nobody was around Camp Erdman that day, and even before we checked in at the Welcome Center, no one seemed to mind that we parked and walked around to shoot photos. As you can see from their sign (above), they seem to welcome LOST fans.

Kate was held captive in Camp Erdman's Assembly Hall.

We spotted the gazebo and the Others’ recreation hall (above), sometimes used as their temporary jail. You’ll recall that’s where Kate was kept prisoner when she tried to rescue Jack, who didn’t really want to be rescued.

The yellow cottages of "New Otherton," aka the Dharma Barracks.

The mustard-colored cottages (above) were unmistakable, although the campgrounds didn’t look nearly as green and pretty as they do in the show (I suspect the LOST crew does a lot of set dressing beforehand). It’s obvious that the cottage interiors we see are sets; the real interiors are much more spartan.

All in all, it was a fun afternoon. If we’d had a few more days in Honolulu, we might have taken a pricey tour of Kualoa Ranch, a private estate where many LOST shoots take place, on the windward side of Oahu. Or I might even have contacted Grass Skirt Productions to see if I could finagle a backstage, on-set visit.

But for the brief time we had on Oahu, it was enough to know that we were as close to the Island as we were ever likely to get. Now when I watch the reruns and see the Barracks, I can think: “Wow…I was there!”

Summer of Two Wishes by Julia London

Texas is home to many romance novelists, but not many of them take the kind of leap that Austin’s Julia London has just made.

Julia’s best known for her historical romances, but her new novel, Summer of Two Wishes (Pocket Books, $7.99), is a contemporary. And not just any contemporary, but one dealing with a very serious issue: the effects of the current war in Afghanistan on one returning veteran, as well as on the folks back in his Hill Country hometown.

The story centers around Macy, a young war widow in the small Texas town of Cedar Springs, who suffers through two years of grief and loneliness after her cowboy husband, Finn, is reported killed in Afghanistan. But after she finally recovers enough to marry again — this time to a wealthy land broker, Wyatt — Macy is stunned by the news that Finn has been found alive after all. He comes home to Cedar Springs, and Macy finds herself torn between loyalties to her two husbands. Which one will she choose?

There are plenty of hot, steamy love scenes, of course — but Summer of Two Wishes also tackles difficult issues such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the stresses of military family life, and even the thorny legalities that ensue when a person declared dead is found in fact to be alive.

Julia London

Here is Julia London talking about Summer of Two Wishes:  

Hello, Julia! This is the first book of yours that I’ve read. I was interested in it not only because you’re a Texan, but because you set your story in a part of Texas that we all know and love, the Hill Country.

Another Hill Country lover—that’s great.  Although at this time of year, I wish I was anything but a Texan.  It’s too hot in August for sane people, isn’t it?

You have written a lot of historical romances before now. What made you decide to write a contemporary? And why take on a subject as intense as the emotional fallout from a war that is still ongoing?

It was a need to stretch my creative wings, I think.  I love the historical romance novels I write; it’s like living in a Jane Austen period film.  They are definitely flights of fancy, and they are fun.  But I also had this compelling need to write stories that are grounded more in reality and about people who could be our neighbors. As for the subject matter—what better way to ground the story in reality?  The war is something we’ve all experienced.  In fact, this idea came about because my nephew had served in Iraq with the Marines.  He’s out now and on to a new life, but every year, our local paper prints the faces and names of all the men and women from Central Texas who have been lost to the war.  I couldn’t look at those pictures without thinking of my nephew.  And I thought about all the families who were seeing their loved ones there and who would give anything if they came back. I started thinking, what if one of them did come back?  What would they come home to?  How would life have changed?  The story built from there.

What kind of research was necessary to get the details right about the lives of servicemen and military families?

It was an education for me.  There are several sites and organizations that are dedicated to the families of servicemen and women, but one in particular, the www.americanwidowproject.org gave me insight into what it must be like to be left behind.  I also spoke with people from the military who had been to Iraq.  Interestingly, I never met anyone who had been to Afghanistan.  I read a lot of news items to form that part of the story. 

By an odd coincidence, Tom Batiuk’s syndicated comic strip “Funky Winkerbean” also just featured a very topical storyline about a serviceman believed dead for years who is found alive through an Iraqi prisoner exchange. He suffers from a loss of memory, but he does remember his wife. However, he comes home to find his wife has remarried.

Really!  That is an odd coincidence. 

One big difference: The wife in the comic strip chooses a different husband than the wife chooses in Summer of Two Wishes. 

I honestly didn’t know which husband my wife was going to end up with until near the end.  I went through the process of deciding with her.  I can’t imagine how painful it would be to make that decision in real life.  And it could honestly have gone either way.  She loved two men, and two men loved her.

The other major difference: In the comic strip, there’s no apparent media fanfare over the “dead” soldier’s miraculous return.  However, I think your portrayal of the media frenzy surrounding Finn seemed far more likely to be what happens in such a case. Did you feel it was important to show what sort of public pressure is placed upon returning veterans, from the media and from their family, friends and fellow citizens?

I think in this particular case, it would certainly be a big part of the story.  I can’t imagine that happening today without a lot of fanfare, and probably a lot more than I portrayed.  And it seemed to me that the intense media spotlight would add so much more stress to the situation, which, as an author, I liked.  I also read a lot about the return home, and I tried to put myself in the shoes of returning soldiers.  For some, the adjustment to civilian life seems so drastic, and I guessed that people run out of patience when a soldier doesn’t adjust as quickly as they would like.  I thought it was important to show how that would affect someone who essentially has been living as a captive in the desert the last few years.

Thanks so much, Julia!

Thank you!  I am very happy to have shared some time with you and your readers. 

Quinn Cummings at 10, backstage in a dressing room, 1977.

If the name “Quinn Cummings” sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s probably because in the back of your mind, you have a memory of a precocious child who played Marsha Mason’s daughter, Lucy McFadden, in 1977’s The Goodbye Girl. She got an Academy Award nomination for that role, in which her comic timing rivaled that of Richard Dreyfuss. Quinn also was the girl who in 1978 joined the Aaron Spelling drama Family in its third season, playing Annie, the adopted daughter of Sada Thompson and James Broderick.

Quinn Cummings (Photo by Donald DiPietro)

That child grew up a long time ago. Thirty years have passed; she’s almost 42 now, and she has acted only occasionally since her teens. Now Quinn’s a businesswoman with her own company (she invented the HipHugger baby sling), and she’s a mother. She always loved to write, and for the past several years she has been blogging on The QC Report. 

Notes from the Underwire

The success of her blog led to Quinn’s first book, the just-published Notes from the Underwire: Adventures from My Awkward and Lovely Life (Hyperion, $14.99). Technically speaking, it’s a collection of first-person essays, a sort of episodic memoir, although that description makes the book sound way more serious than it really is.

In fact, while there are some serious moments in it, this is one very funny book.

Notes from the Underwire covers everything from Quinn’s acting career to her stint as an AIDS hotline volunteer, from her Significant Other (known here as Consort) and their daughter (known here as Alice) to the perils of homeownership and the bloodthirsty habits of their cat, Lulubelle, a nonpareil predator who is supposed to be catching only mice and rats:

I measure the advent of spring not with the first crocus but the first bird skull. I long to explain to Lu that we only wanted the ugly and verminous eaten, but that would have been like asking Godzilla to stomp only Tokyo’s less popular neighborhoods.

Quinn tells us why she never got to go to her prom, how she spent a couple of years as a talent agent, and how she realized she was not meant to be a sitcom writer. She also opens up candidly about the most terrifying time of her adolescent life, when she feared losing her only surviving parent to cancer.

Here’s Quinn Cummings on Notes from the Underwire.

* * *   

Hi Quinn: Unlike some of your blog-tour reviewers, I’m coming to Notes from the Underwire as a newbie to your blog. So please forgive me if some of these questions would have obvious answers for a longtime reader of The QC Report.

How much of the book came directly from the blog? Did you do much rewriting of original blog posts for book publication?

Very little is from the blog. This annoys me tremendously, as I am lazy and hoped to cut-and-paste my way to being a published author. Mercifully, my editor had other plans. What little was originally in the blog has been edited and, one can only hope, improved to a fare-thee-well.

As a cat lover, I nearly laughed myself sick over “A Nice Big Fat One.” Is Lulubelle still living with you and paying her rent on time?

Lulabelle appreciates your interest but isn’t surprised by it; without ever understanding the idea of the Internet, she’s always assumed she’s world-famous for her beauty, charm and killing skills. Just last month, I was outside watering the plants when she trotted by me in a casual yet purposeful gait. A second later, she leapt into a bush and emerged with something wiggling in her jaws. I shouted “LU!” impotently, and she sneered at me before snapping the neck of the mouse. I think I was to understand that’s what would happen to me if I continued to be a buzzkill.

How grateful are you that so very little of your “child star” past is readily available on YouTube?

I don’t know how much of my earlier life is on YouTube because I’m too fearful to look, so I’m going to say that if very little is on there I am VERY GRATEFUL and yet wish there was a little less.

“Like a Tattoo on Your Butt” was a heartbreaking chapter, especially because I lost a brother (at age 34) to non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He left behind two very young daughters whose whole lives thereafter were changed by his death in 1995. I couldn’t help wanting to know: What happened to your mom? What happened to you?

I’m so sorry about your brother; I’m so sorry for his kids. My mother defied the odds and was able to recover from Lymphoma with only a single round of chemo. She’s here in Los Angeles, still leading an interesting life and adoring her granddaughter. What happened to me? I got over it.

At the end of that chapter, you say you told your vice principal  that you didn’t “plan on getting close to anyone.” But now, of course, you have Consort and Alice. When did you dare to let yourself hope that you could, in fact, be close to someone again?

As I said, I got over it. I didn’t go through Sarajevo; I had a sick parent who then got better. Eventually, I defrosted enough to realize that caring for other people might put you as risk of loss, but not caring for other people sapped most of the color and the flavor out of the world. It’s frightening to imagine losing either one of them, but choosing to participate in the world is infinitely better than sitting in the bleachers.

Quinn, I enjoyed the book tremendously, and you have made a new fan. Thanks so much!

Thank you for such thoughtful questions. Let me know when it’s up and I’ll link to it.

Walter Cronkite in 1991 (Washington Post photo)

Today I’m thinking about how, back in the summer of 1992, I had a phone conversation with Walter Cronkite.

The occasion was a High Profile cover for The Dallas Morning News, a story about author James A. Michener, then 85 years old. I had spent an amazing day with the hospitable Mr. Michener — just the two of us, talking, having lunch at a local Chinese restaurant, then talking some more — at his summer home in Brunswick, Maine.

By the time I went home, I had a list of his friends and associates I wanted to chat with. And the one I was most eager to contact was Mr. Cronkite, then 75 and still busy as ever, though retired from the CBS News anchor chair for 11 years.

Over the 10 years I was a High Profile reporter, I often placed such phone calls to secondary sources who were as famous as, or even more famous than, the people I was profiling. Cesar Chavez, Lady Bird Johnson, Dan Rather, Ross Perot, Lloyd Bentsen, Barbara Walters, Franco Zeffirelli, Dame Joan Sutherland — ordinary folks like that. There were only a few times when I was a little nervous about making those calls.

The call to Mr. Cronkite was one of those times.

I mean, this was Walter Cronkite. How many times had I watched him on our family’s TV set as that deep, reassuring voice informed me about the tragedies and triumphs of the 1960s and ’70s? How often had I heard him introduce himself: “This is Walter Cronkite…”? Or sign off with, “And that’s the way it is…”?

Thousands of times, surely, over some three decades. I probably knew that voice as well as I knew my own father’s.

So yes, I was nervous. But I called his office at CBS and left a message for him. And a few days later, my phone rang, and that unmistakable voice informed me: “This is Walter Cronkite.”

So hypnotized was I that I had a little trouble remembering to scribble my notes. But he was kind and patient, and we talked for 10 or 15 minutes, mostly about Mr. Michener and their friendship. Among other things, he told me that his favorite Michener book was Chesapeake.

In the story I wrote (published on Aug. 16, 1992) I ended up using an anecdote about one of their adventures aboard Mr. Cronkite’s beloved sailboat, the Wyntje:

“One time when we went sailing on Chesapeake Bay, we picked Jim up in Oxford, Maryland. We were sailing to Annapolis, and it got nasty out there. Jim was getting pretty wet, and I was worried about him, so I asked if he’d like to go below. But he wouldn’t.

“Eventually the storm passed, and I told Jim that it was lovely of him to insist on staying with me.

“He said, “Walter, I couldn’t afford not to stay on deck. The State of Maryland just made me an honorary Admiral of the Chesapeake. How would it be if they heard I went below in a storm?’ “

I went home that day and told our then-13-year-old daughter (who had met Mr. Michener on our Maine trip): “Guess who I talked to today for my Michener profile?”

“Who?”

“Walter Cronkite!”

“Wow!” Pause. Puzzled look on her face. “Who’s Walter Cronkite?”

I then realized that Mr. Cronkite had retired from the anchor desk when she was only two years old. “He used to be the anchorman on CBS,” I told her. “He’s really iconic, really famous and respected among journalists. Well, among everyone who’s a grownup, really. I can’t believe I got to talk with him!”

All these years later, our daughter is now 30, married and the mother of two small children. I know that Walter Cronkite will never mean to her what he meant to my generation, or to her grandparents’. She’ll never think of any news anchor as “iconic,” really. The communications world has changed so radically that there will never be another news figure with the kind of respect, authority and clout that Mr. Cronkite had.

He was a serious journalist, a real newsman. He did his job well, he loved his work, and he helped to change the world and make it a better place. That’s the best way any journalist can hope to be remembered.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea. Godspeed, Uncle Walter.

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince

Thanks to a media preview screening, I’ve already seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which officially opens with midnight showings on Wednesday.

It’s safe to say this film is highly anticipated: Across the lobby, fans already were queueing up for another screening five hours later, at 7 p.m., one of those first-come-first-seated promotional showings. And to be honest, they’ve really been waiting longer than that; the new HBP movie’s opening date got pushed back from last fall. So hardcore Potterheads have had about nine months to crank up their squee levels.

Number six in the series is the darkest yet, as the boy wizard’s fan base surely knows. It pays a good deal of attention to certain key aspects of the J.K. Rowling book, while other parts of the original story, as always, must fall by the wayside — even with a running time of two and a half hours, something’s gotta go.

Overall, I felt this sixth film compares favorably with the three more recent entries in the series. (The first and second installments of Harry Potter, directed by Chris Columbus, were huge box-office successes — but were blown away artistically by No. 3, Alfonso Cuaron’s critically acclaimed The Prisoner of Azkaban, which set the standard for all Potter movies thereafter.)

What will Rowling purists quickly spot as hits and misses in Half-Blood Prince?

My major complaint is that I’d have loved to see the book’s opening chapter dramatized. That chapter, “The Other Minister,” discusses a series of disasters in the Muggle world, which are really caused by rampaging Death Eaters, followers of the wizarding world’s evil Lord Voldemort. I was hoping for a couple of scenes with the Muggle Prime Minister (who simply would have to have been played by Michael Sheen, Tony Blair’s cinematic alter ego) and the new Minister of Magic, Rufus Scrimgeour (who will be played in the next Potter film by Bill Nighy).

However, screenwriter Steve Kloves (back after a hiatus from Order of the Phoenix) and director David Yates (returning for his second Potter film in a row) chose to show us, rather than tell about, one of the disasters: a new bridge that inexplicably collapses in a freak storm, thanks to Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter) and a couple of other Death Eaters, the creepy Carrow siblings.

And instead of giving us scenes from the hilarious chapter with Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore retrieving Harry from the Dursleys’ home, we get Harry in a railway coffee shop, flirting awkwardly with a comely young waitress before Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) whisks him off to persuade Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) to return to Hogwarts as the new Potions professor.

Another big departure: After Harry is deposited at the Weasleys’ home, The Burrow, a fiery Death Eater attack makes it clear that no place is safe. In the book series, a similar attack happens at a Weasley family wedding. But that event happens not in Book 6, but early in Book 7, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. So it seems safe to assume the wedding’s not going to happen in the film series, because the bride and groom don’t show up in this movie at all. Neither does the surly house-elf Kreacher, although he’ll surely appear in the movie version of Book 7.

Lovers of Quidditch will be happy to see one last airborne match in this installment. And as in the book, teenage hormones rampage through much of the film, with “snogging” and humorous romantic situations to leaven the increasingly darker themes of death and loss.

The leading trio of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) are joined by Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), Ron’s sister who has grown up to be Harry’s love interest, and who gets much more screen time in this film than in the previous ones.

Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) is happily daft as ever, and the lovelorn Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave) is all over her “Won-Won.” There’s a wonderful set-piece with the Weasley twins, Fred and George (James and Oliver Phelps), in their amazing Diagon Alley joke shop.  Meanwhile, a solitary Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) lurks miserably about, determined to carry out his secret mission for Voldemort and restore his family’s lost honor.

Other Hogwarts teachers, such as Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith), Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) and Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) get a few crucial scenes each, but I felt Snape in particular got short shrift in this film, considering his importance to the series. We never even see him teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, formerly Harry’s favorite class at Hogwarts. (And has anyone else out there ever wondered what it would have been like if they’d cast Daniel Day-Lewis as Snape? He’s the only actor I can think of who just might have out-Snaped the amazing Rickman.)

Voldemort’s craven sidekick, Peter “Wormtail” Pettigrew (Timothy Spall), is fleetingly spotted in the “Spinner’s End” scene, which also introduces a badly miscast and horribly made-up Helen McCrory as Draco’s mum, Narcissa Malfoy. (Why, oh why didn’t they get Naomi Watts for that role?)

Frank Dillane

In his scenes as 11-year-old Tom Riddle, young Hero Fiennes-Tiffin (nephew of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Voldemort) holds his own with Gambon’s Dumbledore, projecting a youthful malevolence appropriate for the boy who will grow up to be the Dark Lord. It’s also worth noting that Riddle at age 16 is played by another scion of a British acting family: Frank Dillane, son of actor Stephen Dillane (who played Thomas Jefferson in HBO’s John Adams miniseries). The two young actors bear enough resemblance to each other that it becomes easy to believe this is the same boy at different ages.

When Harry and Dumbledore journey to the cave where Voldemort has hidden one of his Horcruxes — a personal relic containing a piece of his irretrievably damaged soul — Yates recreates the scene almost exactly as Rowling imagined it. And it is both dazzling and fearsomely scary. Even when you know exactly what’s coming, the moment when an Inferius grabs Harry is still enough to make you gasp.

It does not do to be too much of a purist with these movies; after all, watching a film is not the same experience as reading a book. But seeing what Yates can do with such a powerful scene makes me wish again that he’d had the chance to direct the first two films as well. There were so many moments in this new film where I was completely, happily absorbed in the story — never mind that I know the entire plot inside out. That’s the mark of an adroit director.

Fortunately, we know Yates is shooting the final two Potter movies. Deathly Hallows is already in production and will be released in two parts, in 2010 and 2011. With twice as many hours to tell the last story, even diehard fans may be satisfied that justice will be done to their beloved wizard’s saga.