Who Would Make Your List?

Plus...audiobooks for $1 and an Instagram giveaway for my forthcoming novel.

So excited to share that my audiobook Cave of Secrets is available on Chirp for $0.99 for a limited time! My second novel, Cave of Secrets has won 4 awards for romance, multicultural fiction and LGBTQ fiction. Go to this link to snag the audiobook of Cave of Secrets before the sale is over!

(And by the way—ALL of my current audiobooks are discounted to $0.99 until I LOVE YOU, CHARLIE TANNER launches on June 12th!)

And finally, I’m hosting a FREE Writealong on Zoom this morning at 11 a.m.—Add your name to the list so you’re notified of future events, and join me here today at 11 a.m. ET, ready to write.

Who Influenced You Most?

Recently, I read The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle, and it has me really thinking. The premise of the novel is that the protagonist, Sabrina, makes a list of the 5 people, dead or alive, that she’d most like to have dinner with. And then it happens, for her 30th birthday. One of them is Audrey Hepburn.

I won’t spoil it for you, but this story goes back and forth between the dinner in real time and the backstory of her most important relationship, and if you read it, you’ll see why. I listened to the audiobook and so loved the writing and nuance to Serle’s voice that I ordered the paperback so I could look at it on the page.

In fact, I kind of want to teach a class on this novel. I can’t explain it—the writing is so original, the voice so particular, and it’s what I, as an author, strive for. I want to pick apart how she did it and learn.

Anyway, that’s not today’s point. What I want to focus on is this idea of the list.

After I finished the book, Dan and I were out for dinner, and I asked him who his 5 would be. He mentioned a deceased labor leader, a beloved great-uncle, and others, and me. Totally flattered, as I never got to meet Uncle George, but hey, if you only have 5 you can dine with, I didn’t expect to be invited. (I mean, I see him every day!)

So then I thought about who would be on my list. My father, who died 5.5 years ago. My grandmother, who died a decade ago. Diana Gabaldon, the Outlander author who is alive and well and I think one of the most talented and fascinating people. I tried to choose one more person from history, perhaps who exemplified Jewish identity or was a leader for my people. I had a few options. And then I said I’d want my best friend Katie there, too.

Dan was a bit perturbed that he didn’t make the list, and we joked about it, but as I said, I’d come home and tell him all about it, you know?

Where I Come From Impacts Where I Go Next

But more than that, I got to thinking about ancestral roots, what we learn from the past that we carry into the future.

(from top left, clockwise) My father and my mother in younger years, my paternal grandmother as a child, my maternal great-grandparents, my maternal grandmother as a child, my mother and aunt as young children, my maternal grandfather during World War II

Ancestors whose names I do not know bravely left pogrom-infested towns in Poland, Ukraine and Russia and made their way to the goldeneh medinah, Yiddish for the golden land, America. They had nothing, and they built so much. I came along generations later, the beneficiary of their gumption and courage and hard work.

We like to think that we are singular, and everything we do, good and bad, emanates strictly from us. But that’s too easy.

I carry in my bones and in my blood ancestral inspiration and generational trauma that imprint on my soul and direct my consciousness. I am an amalgamation of my mother and my father and my four grandparents, who were alive and present for all of my childhood—I lost my first grandparent when I was 22, my last at 42.

And beyond them, there are influences from extended family, cousins, aunts and uncles, relatives in distant locales who came in for mitzvahs and marriages, neighbors on the block where I grew up, camp counselors, teachers, and so many more, along with the stories they shared.

It’s rather arrogant to insist that who I am today is the sum total of only my effort. It’s a lie, too. So many people helped me get to where I am, and if I don’t credit them, or at least think of them, then I am being unkind.

Where Real Life & Fiction Meet

So the stories I write, the fact even that I write stories at all, come from all of this, this deep well of being and knowing and noticing. All of those people heaped shovelfuls of knowledge and perspective and experience into the well that I pull from to write even one word.

My characters, the situations they find themselves in, to be even a tiny bit lifelike, come from the knowledge of what it is to live among people, to be impacted by, for better and for worse, others. One thought that dogs Charlie Tanner in my new novel is why, exactly, she stayed with a man for two decades, when he so clearly did not align with her values or give her what she wanted, what she needed.

What in her history set her up to tolerate that?

{You’ll have to read the book to find out!}

My third novel launches in 11 days. I hope you’ll join me for virtual or in-person launch events. (Register for both here.) And if you generously choose to read this story, I’ll be interested to know where you think the influence from real life comes.

Because it’s there. It can’t help but be there. Yes, it’s fiction, but we write about what we know and we learn about what we don’t know so that we can write about it, too. We infuse the words on the page with pieces of ourselves. Little droplets of me, Lynne, like the curlicues on a cursive letter, my DNA in the story

Instagram Giveaway Before Book Launch

Hey—starting tomorrow, I’m doing an Instagram giveaway where one lucky winner will win a signed copy of I LOVE YOU, CHARLIE TANNER and a $25 Bookshop.org gift card. You can enter the challenge if you go over to my Instagram and follow the instructions above, which will be posted there tomorrow. Good luck! And as always, thanks for reading!!

Love you all, Lynne

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