Now on sale . . . Muffins & Mayhem: Recipes for a Happy (if Disorderly) Life by Suzanne Beecher, and when you purchase it, request a free autographed bookplate, by visiting:
http://tinyurl.com/Muffins-MayhemPO
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Dear Reader,
If you haven't entered the Write a Dear Reader Contest yet, get out your recipe box and enter today. This year's theme is: Share a recipe and the story behind it. Even if your recipe and story aren't chosen as contest winners, your story could end up in my next book. To see the prizes and rules to enter, go to: http://tinyurl.com/writedr
I'm on vacation this week. Today author Caroline Leavitt is filling in for me. Caroline is the author of nine novels, most recently the Indie Pick, Girls in Trouble. Her latest novel, Pictures of You, will be published in January, and was already cited by Booklist online as one of the big book club books of 2011. A book critic for People and for The Boston Globe, Caroline teaches writing at UCLA Writers Program online and does freelance book editing. She would love to hear from you. Email her at: carolineleavitt@gmail.com
From Caroline Leavitt...
Can writing heal? When I anxiously sent my last novel, Girls in Trouble, about adoption, to Suzanne, hoping she might include it in DearReader.com, she left a cryptic, upset message on my phone. I was sure she hated the book! But when I called her back, she told me something deep and secret about herself. Like my book's heroine, she had become pregnant when she was young and unmarried. "This is the book that made me not only want to talk about what happened to me, but to claim it," she told me. It meant so much to me to hear that my novel had helped someone!
Over the years I've tried to write about the issues that I myself grapple with, always hoping I'd find answers or healing in the exploration.
Somehow, though, I always avoided the hardest time in my own life, my childhood, and the terrible asthma that plagued me. As a kid, I was always in and out of hospitals and emergency rooms. Gripped with fear and shame about being sickly, I yearned to be just like everyone else. I never told anyone I had asthma, but instead, thanks to the library where I hung out while everyone else was outside playing, I learned to use words like "pleurisy" and "consumption," which sounded somehow better than asthma. I hid my inhalers or deliberately lost them. I told friends I was away on vacation instead of in the hospital, and I would never ever let anyone see me wheeze or take my medicine!
My asthma calmed down after I had my son, but I still didn't want to claim it or write about it. Imagine my surprise when in the midst of writing Pictures of You, about the colliding lives of four people in a mysterious car crash, I began to write about an asthmatic ten-year-old boy with a terrible secret. I don't know where he came from, but he refused to go away. While I was at first tentative about writing some of his story, I found myself revealing all the shame and sorrow of my childhood. I wrote about how it felt to struggle for breath, how terrifying it was to enter a hospital, and how unfair it was to always be at the mercy of the weather, which could make my asthma a thousands times worse. And the funny thing was, the more I wrote about this little boy, the better I began to feel. My asthma, slight as it now was, disappeared! How was this possible? My doctor told me not to get my hopes up, that asthma was tricky and could play hide and seek. I was convinced my writing had healed my asthma, right up until the moment I turned Pictures of You in, and then I got sick enough to have to rush to the ER!
I got better again. And I didn't despair. Maybe writing hadn't healed me of the physical disease, but because I felt such love and understanding for this little boy I had created, I was suddenly healed of all that old shame and terror. I could now look back at my younger self and feel compassion. I could claim my asthma. And to me, what's more healing than that?
Caroline Leavitt
carolineleavitt@gmail.com
http://www.carolineleavitt.com
AUTHORBUZZ: New authors, old favorites--all wonderful books you can win: Debbie Macomber, Orchard Valley Brides; Dori Ostermiller, Outside the Ordinary World; Maria Stewart, Home Again; Kathryn Meyer Griffith, Before the End: A Time of Demons; and John Jodzio, If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home. Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader
* This month's Penguin Classics book is A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. To start reading and enter for your chance to win a Penguin totebag go to: http://tinyurl.com/July10Classics
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