AUTHOR SARAH ADDISON ALLEN IS BACK
By Myra Schoen
Published in Black
Mountain News: March 20, 2014
You’ll discover 100 fascinating and whimsical things about The New York Times bestselling author Sarah
Addison Allen on her website. Author of the recently published magical romance,
Lost Lake, Allen in person is as “Light,
sweet and sparkly,” as her latest novel was described in a recent review.
For instance, Allen, who grew up and lives
in Asheville, wrote her first novel at 16, “just to prove I could.” While she
promises that that novel will “never
see the light of day,” her next work, Tried
and True, was published as a Harlequin romance under the pen name of Katie
Gallagher.
Since then, Allen has written a half-dozen
bestsellers, including her latest, Lost
Lake, a romance about a grieving young widow rediscovering love, an 8-year-old
girl with a zest for life, and an elderly woman seeking her last great
adventure. Their lives intersect at a collection of lakeside vacation cabins in
hot and steamy Georgia, where magic spins dreams into reality.
More than anything, Allen writes about
hope. “That is first and foremost in my mind, what I want readers to experience
in my stories,” she said.
Writing Lost
Lake was a special challenge for Allen.
“I had been diagnosed with breast cancer in
early 2011, and it was a dark time,” Allen said. “Cancer is too hard, too mean
to write about. You have a base fear of death, of failure. It’s hard to
describe the journey, but it changed me. After completing a round of
chemotherapy later that year, I didn’t know if I would get back to writing and
touring. I couldn’t control the disease, but I knew I had to let go of the
fear, and embrace hope.”
About two
or three months after treatment, still in a fog, with “chemo brain,” Allen
found it hard to focus.
“I thought
I’d lost it,” she said. “Lost Lake
was a hard book to write. I was
determined not to write about cancer. Instead I wrote about grief. We take
a journey of grief and come out on the other side of it, and life is still
there waiting for us to live it.”
It took
Allen a year and a half to complete Lost
Lake. “By the time I finished, I felt whole. It taught me a lot. I could
write a book after something traumatic. It didn’t have to be an anxiety-ridden
process. Lost Lake helped me heal.”
Inspiration
for her novels, Allen said, comes initially from a setting. “It can be the name
of a town, the atmosphere, a sense of place. The place is the cornerstone for
everything else. For Lost Lake, it
was an image of Spanish moss, a wet swampy place.”
While Kate
Pheris, the central character, was the first to inhabit the novel, Allen likes
to introduce elderly characters into her stories. “I love them. They’ve had
life experiences, and have a lot to offer the younger characters. They provide
the moral compass.”
The Lost
Lake resort may be fading and run-down, but its elderly owner, Eby Pim, is as
young at heart and dream-filled as Devin, Kate’s young daughter.
Allen
earned a B.A. in Literature at University of North Carolina at Asheville. She
thought it “…amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. It
was like being able to major in eating chocolate.”
A shy and
daydreaming child, Allen’s desire to write comes from a lifetime of reading.
“The books we read in childhood influence our imagination even into adulthood.”
Her literary heroes include her Zack
Allen, her father and a retired award-winning reporter and columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times, Fred Chappell,
Alice Hoffman, and Harper Lee, and others in the genre of magical realism touched
by romance.
What’s
next for Sarah Addison Allen?
“Fans
have been asking for a sequel to Garden
Spells, published in 2007, for the past seven years,” she said.
“That’s what comes next….”
And
after that…certainly another compelling story spun with romance, mystery, and
unforgettable characters.
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