I’ve just gotten home from a two-hour meeting with a book club that had read my February 2007 EL, DANCING ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS. It was one of the most stimulating discussions I’ve had with readers, ranging from musings about whether my heroine, Giulia, felt fulfilled at the end of her life or had regrets; the role (and power) of women in traditional immigrant families; the balance and tension in close-knit families between nurturing support and stifling judgment; and the research I had done to place the story in the context of what was happening in the world my characters inhabited.
It occurred to me that someone reading the above paragraph describing our conversation might be surprised to learn that this group of highly educated, sophisticated readers (their choice for next month is Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing’s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK) were talking about a Harlequin romance. It is no surprise to those of us who write Everlasting Love stories. We are weaving complex, deeply satisfying tales of women and men facing and overcoming the challenges of sustaining love.
I’m currently reading Robert McKee’s STORY, a book on the craft of writing. He writes that readers turn to stories to answer the question posed by Aristotle: How should a human being live his life? The women in tonight’s book group agreed. And what they found in and took from DANCING intrigued me. DANCING, like all of the Everlasting Love stories I’ve read so far, is a very particular story, deeply rooted in a culture and a time and a place: the journey (both literal and figurative) of a young Italian immigrant woman in turn-of-the-century New York. Many of the women in tonight’s group were Iranian, and the book’s themes resonated with them, despite the differences between their lives and Giulia’s. As a friend once said to me after reading DANCING, “Linda, you don’t have to be Italian to understand DANCING. You just have to have grown up in a family.”
We Everlasting Love writers hope that readers continue to recognize themselves in our books, and take heart and hope from our characters’ triumphs.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Linda, it sounds like you had a wonderful time with the book club. I'll simply add that I think all good books are about particular people in a particular setting dealing with particular challenges. That's why readers can identify, enjoy and root for the characters. They are us. It's just like a news story. A thousand casualties are bad, but the behind-the-scenes story of one such hero(ine) can break our hearts. EL stories try to dig deeply into characters' lives so that a triumphant ending will be immensely satisfying to all - and totally justified.
Linda, thanks for your comment. It was an amazing discussion. I agree that all good stories have particularity, and that we are indeed digging deeply in our EL novels. I think that is what struck me this summer in our discussion in Dallas, that each one of us was reaching into a personal well of emotion and history to create these stories--and doing so is clearly touching our readers.
That sounds like so much fun. As a reader, it is just so much fun to talk with authors of books I love. I studied Medieval literature for so long that it is just so weird to even think of the fact that the name on the cover is actually a person but it is really one of the delights about reading romance because so many romance authors just seem to appreciate their readers.
Merri,
Thanks for continuing to be such an avid reader of and contributor to this blog! I think one of the delights for me as a romance author is how connected and responsive our readers are. And yes, we are living, breathing human beings who never tire of hearing from someone as enthusiastic and committed as you. Thanks again!
Post a Comment