In the coming months, I am going to be doing Q & A’s with a number of women’s
fiction authors. I think you’ll find their work engaging and their thoughts—on
writing, life and how to balance it all—fascinating. I know I did! First up is
novelist, journalist and celebrity ghostwriter Holly Robinson. Holly is the
author of several books, including The Gerbil farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir
and the novels BEACH PLUM
ISLAND and HAVEN LAKE.
Her articles and essays appear frequently in The Huffington Post, More, Parents,
Redbook and dozens of other newspapers and magazines. She and her husband have
five children and a stubborn Pekingese. They divide their time between Massachusetts
and Prince Edward Island, and are crazy enough to be fixing up old houses one
shingle at a time in both places.
Holly’s newest novel, CHANCE
HARBOR, tells the story of Catherine and Zoe. Though they are sisters, even
their mother, Eve, admits her daughters are nothing alike. Catherine is calm and
responsible. Zoe is passionate and rebellious. Nobody is surprised when Zoe gets
pregnant, drops out of college, and spirals into drug addiction. One night Catherine
gets a call from Zoe’s terrified daughter, Willow, saying her mother has abandoned
her in a bus station and disappeared. Eve blames herself, while Catherine, unable to
have children, is delighted to raise Willow as her own. Now, five years later, Eve
is grieving her husband’s death and making reluctant plans to sell the family’s
beloved summer home on Prince Edward Island. But a series of unexpected revelations
will upend the family and rock three generations of women.
How do you go about constructing a novel?
A: I wish I knew! When I was first starting out, I used to think, “If I practice
writing fiction long enough, I will learn how to write a novel.” Slowly I've
realized that novels are like children: each one demands a different sort of
upbringing, and the tricks that worked for the first book probably won't work for
the next. You just have to trust yourself enough to push through the mud and sleet
and disasters along the way. Basically, that means getting enough words on the page
so that you can fix everything that's broken.
What was the inspiration for CHANCE HARBOR?
A: The novel starts with a child being left at a bus station by her mother, who
says, “Call your aunt after I leave.” The mother then disappears. The genesis for
that was the true story of one of my mother's best friends, who was left at a city
bus station by HER mother. I also wanted to set this novel on Prince Edward Island,
because it has been my beloved second home for nearly 25 years.
New England seems very important to you; can you elaborate?
A: Because I grew up with a father who was in the Navy, my upbringing consisted of
moving every few years whenever he got new orders. I think I was always looking for
a place to belong. When I married my first husband, we were living in San Francisco,
and we knew we'd never be able to afford a house there. My brother was in
Massachusetts at the time; we moved into an apartment in his house, and when my
brother took me on a day trip to the North Shore of Massachusetts, I felt, for the
first time, like I was meant to live in this exact location. I love everything about
it: the beaches, the small seaside towns, the do-it-yourself attitude of Yankees,
and even the winters. I think I must have been a ship captain in a former life.
How do you use the settings in the novel to ramp up the emotion?
A: Like most writers, I'm often looking for a way to make scenes more emotional
without using unnecessary adjectives or having my characters fall prostrate to the
floor. In THE WISHING HILL,
my first novel for Penguin, I used an old mill as a setting because it was where one
of the characters worked and had a love affair, and because this mill (which I
looked at from my own bedroom window as I worked on the book) oozed sorrow, with its
water stains and rusty chains. For BEACH PLUM ISLAND, I used a barrier island—Plum Island, near my home
in Massachusetts—because a barrier island is always changing due to storms, and the
characters in that novel are facing enormous life upheavals because they've
discovered a brother they never knew they had. CHANCE HARBOR, too, is an
extremely emotional novel; for this one, I chose the very tip of Prince Edward
Island. That easternmost point of the island really does feel like the end of the
world, and these characters feel that they've reached a point in their lives where
they might not be able to go on. Boy, that makes my books sound horribly dreary,
doesn't it? But I promise that good things happen, too!
Do you build your novels from your own family’s stories?
A: Absolutely! I'm extremely lucky to come from a family that loves to tell stories.
I've been filing away these anecdotes since I was old enough to sit at a table with
my parents and grandparents.
Are you drawn to writing about “broken” families and/or family secrets?
A: All families have secrets, and there are far more “broken” families than unbroken
ones, so yes, I am. This is partly because, in my own family, my parents were
divorced and my father married another woman. Then, after sixteen years, he went
back to my mom and they were remarried. I, too, was divorced, and now I'm remarried
and have a blended family of five children. The intricacies of families that break
and reform are complex and endlessly intriguing to me. I like to say that I write
“emotional family mysteries,” because I want to write books that read like your
favorite mystery novels, but have at their core a family secret (or secrets) that
will drive the narrative forward and reveal the characters as complex and relatable.
Some secrets are revealed in this novel; others are not. What’s your view on
keeping secrets?
A: In my own life, or in my novels? Basically, my view is that everyone has secrets,
and some really ought to be kept—especially if revealing them will do harm. On the
other hand, the best fiction often involves secrets that are revealed unexpectedly
and force the characters to go through a crisis and resolve their conflicts.
What’s obsessing you now?
A: I'm revising FOLLY COVE, a novel that will come out in Fall 2016, and it's
driving me bonkers. This book absolutely refuses to behave. So far, I've written it
from three points of view, then decided a fourth had to be added, and when I did
that, I discovered that one of the other main characters served no real purpose. Now
I'm in the process of killing that character off early in the book—which of course
causes all sorts of ramifications for the rest of the family—and revising the novel
accordingly. At the same time that I'm doing all this, I'm researching my next novel
—always the fun part, before I start digging in and realizing once again that
writing is so HARD that sometimes I want to lie down and put a cold cloth over my
eyes until my impulse to write fiction goes away.
Catherine and Zoe are sisters, but even their mother, Eve,
admits her daughters are nothing alike. Catherine is calm and
responsible. Zoe is passionate and rebellious. Nobody is
surprised when Zoe gets pregnant, drops out of college, and
spirals into drug addiction.
One night Catherine gets a call from Zoe’s
terrified daughter,
Willow, saying her mother has abandoned her in a bus station
and disappeared. Eve blames herself, while Catherine, unable to
have children, is delighted to raise Willow as her own.
Now, five years
later, Eve is grieving her husband’s death and
making reluctant plans to sell the family’s beloved summer home
on Prince Edward Island. But a series of unexpected revelations
will upend the family and rock three generations of women.
About Yona Zeldis McDonough
Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of six novels; her
seventh, THE HOUSE ON
PRIMROSE POND, will be out from New American Library in February, 2016. In
addition, she is the editor of the essay collections The Barbie
Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty and All the Available Light: A
Marilyn Monroe Reader. Her short fiction, articles and essays have been
published in anthologies as well as in numerous national magazines and
newspapers. She is also the award-winning author of twenty-six books for
children, including the highly acclaimed chapter books, The Doll Shop
Downstairs and The Cats in the Doll Shop. Yona lives in Brooklyn, New
York with her husband, two children and two noisy Pomeranians.
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