Beach Trip - Author Interview

Beach Trip by Cathy Holton is the story of four women who might never have been friends. Fate brought them together as roommates in college and now in their 40s, they come together again for a reunion at the beach. Lola, who organizes the trip, is the most enigmatic of the four women. She is unhappily married, seems drugged much of the time and exhibits childlike behavior. Mel is the strong one, an author, she lives the single life in the city and says what she thinks. Annie struggles with secrets in her past, and keeps her life orderly in contrast to the inner turmoil she feels. Sara is happily married, mother of two children, one of them who struggles. She was the most relatable character I felt, but she struggles with her past as well.

This is pure women's fiction. It's the sort of book that deals with heavy subjects and secrets with a light hand; there is sadness and regret but also humor and hangovers. The narrative goes back and forth in time as the reader gets to know the women in the present, and how their pasts shaped their lives.

This was a really good read for me. I enjoyed the writing style and the subject matter and whenever I saw the book on my nightstand, I looked forward to getting back to it, always a good sign. There was a plot twist that I picked up on right away - Holton waited until towards the end to confirm my feeling. I thought that would be the only plot twist but boy was I wrong! The ending contains a huge twist that I thought was well done and believable - it made the book for me.

Cathy Holton was kinds enough to answer a few questions from me. Her answers are fun and witty, and her next book sounds fantastic. Check it out:

What inspired you to create the four women Beach Trip centers around?

A friend of mine told me about a trip she was getting ready to take with some college friends; just six women alone in the Bahamas aboard a yacht with a Captain and crew (one of the women had married well). I said it sounded like fun and she said it was, just lots of drinking and lying in the sun and reminiscing. But then she qualified that by saying that the trip usually got kind of tense toward the end because there was something between two of the women, something that had happened in college and never been resolved and only surfaced at the end of the week when the sun and the close quarters and the martinis got to be too much. That got me interested.



Did you already have the idea for the ending in your mind when you started writing? (I wasn't expecting what happened at all - which I love.)

I knew something dramatic would happen and I knew it would involve Lola, but I wasn’t sure until the middle of the novel what it would be.



Would you talk a bit about your physical writing process? Where, when, on a computer or by hand, is it quiet or noisy, is there food involved?

There’s always food involved. And caffeine. Although I try to keep the food to a minimum; usually just a little something sweet around mid-afternoon when my brain begins to fog and I need that carb rush. When I’m working I try to stick to a structured routine; up at 8:00 and in front of my computer by 9:00. By noon I break for lunch, take the dog for a walk in the woods, and then get back to work by 1:00 or 1:30. I break for the day around 4:00. I try to average ten double-spaced pages a day. I write in a corner of my bedroom, near a pair of long windows, in front of a fireplace and a wall of bookshelves. It’s very cozy and very quiet.

Who are your favorite authors - for inspiration or just reading pleasure? What's on your nightstand right now?

I read constantly; I’m an eclectic reader. My list of favorite writers is long and changes daily but I always come back to Flannery O’Connor, George Singleton, Lewis Nordan, Alice Hoffman, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, Ian McEwan, and Doris Lessing.

I love to read short stories, especially those written by John Cheever, Shelby Foote, Ellen Gilchrist and Isabelle Allende.



On my nightstand right now is Alice Munro’s “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” and Brock Clarke’s “An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.”


Besides books, I also write about cooking on my blog. I loved the fact that in Beach Trip you wrote about what the women were eating and drinking. Does that mean you enjoy cooking? What would you serve your girlfriends if they were coming over - feel free to include a cocktail!

Eating, yes. Drinking, yes. Cooking, not so much. I’m lucky though. My husband has a degree in Hotel, Restaurant, and Institution Management and, get this – he likes to cook. (Which helps explain why I’ve kept him around for thirty years.)



If my girlfriends were coming for dinner, I’d have him wear his apron that reads, Kitchen Bitch, and then serve something like Goat Cheese Salad on Field Greens with Toasted Pecans, Pan-Seared Tuna with White Bean Puree and Asparagus in a Crawfish Bernaise, followed by Strawberry Creme Brulee. And, of course, that delectable creation, the Mother of All Martinis – The Breathless.



(I hope he never reads this. If he does, it’s Beans & Weanies for me for a month.)


Finally, what are you working on now in terms of your writing?

I’m working on a novel tentatively called “Old Money”, about a Chicago girl, Ava Dabrowski, who marries into an aristocratic Southern family. While working on her first novel, a legal thriller, she agrees to spend a summer in her new husband, Will’s, hometown of Woodburn, Tennessee. Ensconced in the family’s crumbling mansion with Will and his two great aunts, Fanny and Josephine, Ava finds herself a stranger in a strange land, caught up in the dramas and intrigues of the characters inhabiting this small Southern town. Gradually drawn into tales of the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Fanny’s first husband, Ava stumbles upon a decades old family secret, a discovery that causes an increasing rift in her marriage as she puts aside her legal thriller and begins instead to write about the enigmatic Woodburn family.


Many thanks to TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to read Beach Trip and contact Cathy Holton!

The Laws of Harmony - Book Tour - Author Interview

Back in February, when I reviewed Judith Ryan Hendricks' fourth novel, The Laws of Harmony I never dreamed I'd be interviewing her one day! The idea that I have the opportunity to correspond with and ask questions of an author whose work I enjoy and respect is a truly thrilling experience and one I never thought I'd have when I began this little blog. Many thanks to Lisa from TLC booktours for offering me this chance.

From my original review, here is short synopsis of The Laws of Harmony:

Sunny Cooper grew up on a commune in New Mexico and as soon as she is an adult she does everything in her power to leave her past behind. She attends college, supports herself, and eventually moves in with her boyfriend Michael. She is looking for a 'normal' life, but events will dictate otherwise. Sunny receives news that Michael has died in a car accident; soon after her home is broken into. Sunny's life is shattered, she realizes that Michael's job was not what it seemed and she is in danger. Sunny sells everything and moves to San Miguel Island, one of the Channel Islands. There she begins again, finding a home, job and new friendships. Several surprise discoveries turn Sunny's life upside down yet again, and she struggles to maintain equilibrium and mend the troubled relationship with her mother whom she left on the commune.

Judith was kind enough to answer a few question. I could literally have asked her 100 different things, but I limited myself to these.

*Food is so often an integral part of your books; what has inspired you to write about food and cooking within your novels?

Food is a physical need, but it’s also deeply symbolic—a touchstone for events and relationships, a way of expressing ourselves creatively and communicating our feelings for other people. It’s so much a part of life that it would be difficult for me conceive of a story that doesn’t incorporate it somehow. Food also makes a great metaphor. As my main character says of her bakery job in Bread Alone, “But maybe the most important thing I learn is that almost any disaster, no matter how awful it looks, can be salvaged if you keep your head and don’t just start dumping things into the garbage.”

*I'm guessing you enjoy cooking yourself! Am I right? Would you share with us some of your favorite things to make?

A few years ago I cleaned out my kitchen files and when I read the recipes, I couldn’t believe I’d ever done those things—Beef Wellington, escargots in parchment, Baked Alaska—dishes with five or six different components that had to be made from scratch. And they had to look perfect. I was working full time then, and I wonder not just how I did it, but why. I suppose it was partly to educate myself about food, partly as a creative outlet, and partly because I had something to prove. Now I prefer cooking (and eating) rustic, simple food. A roast chicken, pasta, fresh veggies from the farmers’ market, handmade bread. These days if I get in the mood to tackle an interesting, time-consuming project, it’s almost always dessert! Like the blackberry brownies that Sunny makes for the Island Fair in The Laws of Harmony.

*Would you talk a bit about your physical writing process? Where, when, on a computer or by hand, is it quiet or noisy, is there food involved?

My writing process involves discovering rather than inventing a story. To discover the story, I have to write it, then write it again. And again. Until it’s right. Which means I probably write a couple thousand pages to produce a 350-page book, but it’s the only technique that works for me.
Books on writing talk about the need for discipline, the need to make yourself sit at your computer or your desk and put words together, but I find that I need discipline to make myself get up and take a break, to go shopping, cook dinner, do the laundry. I’d write a lot more if I could. I like to get my chores done in the morning so I won’t be interrupted once I begin, and then about noon I sit down at the computer and write till dinner time. My office is an extra bedroom with a nice view of the back yard. I usually have a cup of tea or iced coffee and my dog Blue curled up on her rug next to me and I have to have quiet. If I can hear music or conversation, my mind follows it unconsciously and I lose my concentration.

*Who are your favorite authors - for inspiration or just enjoyment? What are you reading right now?

I read both fiction and nonfiction, and anything I like serves as an inspiration in one way or another. I love Dickens, Stevenson, Austen and the Brontes. Graham Greene, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux, Robertson Davies, Jo-Ann Mapson, Roxana Robinson, Judith Guest, Salley Vickers, Kate Atkinson, Anne Tyler, Joanna Trollope. I enjoy mysteries, too, especially P.D. James, Jacqueline Winspear, Donna Leon and Tony Hillerman. For nonfiction, Tom Wolfe, Jon Krakauer, Laurence Gonzales and Annie Dillard. I’m currently reading The Great Man by Kate Christiansen.


*The ending of The Laws of Harmony felt a little bit open ended to me. Is there a chance Sunny Cooper might turn up in another novel?

I think there’s an excellent chance, assuming I live long enough. There are a couple of story lines I could see developing, but I’ve already made a start on two other books, and the idea for a third is simmering on the back burner. Which makes a good segue into the next question…

*Finally, are you working on any new books right now?

I think my next project is going to be the third part of Bread Alone. I’m kind of interested in finding out what those characters are up to about 15 years down the road.

Many, many, thanks to Judi for sharing her thoughts with myself, and my readers. Don't forget to stop by the other stops on the tour.

And finally, here is a blog post Judith did which includes the recipe for Sunny's divine-sounding blackberry brownies - Yum!

The Green Beauty Guide - Booktour (and a giveaway!)

Confession: I love my beauty products. Sometimes it feels as though I've spent my entire life trying various products to finally get to the point where I am now - with my skin not breaking out or reacting to things all the time. So when my husband wondered why, with all the organic food and household cleaners that I purchase, I don't consider all the products I'm covering myself in. Good question, but to tell the truth I didn't really want to think about it.

Enter Lisa from TLC Booktours and her offer to me to host Julie Gabriel and her book, The Green Beauty Guide. Julie Gabriel has written a complete and all encompassing book about green beauty - from head to toe. I knew she had me after I read the second chapter, beauty and the toxic beast. Gabriel discusses specific ingredients contained in most beauty products that are just plain toxic, and the fact that they're not really being regulated. This was a huge take home message for me. Gabriel provides a list of specific ingredients/chemicals to avoid. If you are like me, most everything in your bathroom will contain these things.

What's a girl (or boy) to do? Not only does Gabriel give examples of products she recommends, she also give recipes to prepare your own beauty products. I'd love to try her hand and nail treatments! Gabriel says that if there's one product you should replace, it's your moisturizer since it sits on your skin all day with plenty of opportunity for absorption, unlike soap. I thought great - I have a bottle of Whole Foods brand lotion that I had a coupon for - I'll use that. When I looked at it, wouldn't you know it contained several of the ingredients Gabriel recommends avoiding. The point is, as Gabriel says, you really need to be vigilant in seeking out green products and making sure they are actually green instead to just appearing to be.

From Gabriel's Ten Commandments of Green Beauty, to the incredibly helpful appendix complete with online product sources and resources, this book covers it all as far as green beauty goes. From hair care, to toenail polish, Gabriel shares her thoughts and suggestions on each and every topic.

I didn't agree with everything in Gabriel's book. For example, the idea of rinsing my face with imported bottled mineral water simply because it contains magnesium does not strike me as being an especially green suggestion. But overall, I found The Green Beauty Guide to be a helpful addition to my 'green' library, and I imagine I'll refer to it often as I adjust my personal regimen to make it more green.

If you would like to read more about Julie Gabriel and The Green Beauty Guide, may I suggest her website - I've enjoyed browsing it myself.

If you would like to visit other stops on the booktour (there are more giveaways!), you may find them here.

Now for the fun! The publisher accidentally sent me two copies of The Green Beauty Guide! So I would like to share one with you. To win this book, you must leave a comment on this post telling me your favorite green beauty item, or if you don't have one, what you perceive to be the biggest challenge in transitioning to green beauty products. There is one entry per person. You do not have to have a blog to enter, but please make sure I have a way to contact you via email if you've won. I'm sorry to have to restrict this contest to US addresses only - I checked the shipping costs for Canada and the UK and I simply cannot afford it right now. I will close the comments and draw the winner on November 28.

Booktour Stop for Capote in Kansas

I'm so pleased to be hosting Kim Powers, author of Capote in Kansas, on behalf of TLC Book Tours. In Capote in Kansas, Powers presents an alternate reality, in which a drugged and drunk Truman Capote contacts his estranged friend, recluse Harper Lee, towards the end of his life. As Capote and Lee revisit old memories of their friendship and working relationship, there exists an undercurrent of anxiety as both are haunted by the Clutter family and consider how their lives turned out.

Kim Powers was kind enough to answers a few questions I had for him and a good sport, too, as you'll see from my last question:


*One of the aspects of Capote in Kansas that I found most interesting were the snake boxes. How did you find out about those and have you ever seen one or a photograph of one?

I love the snake boxes – I’m glad you did too! Bizarrely, though, since they’re such an important part of the book, I didn't find out about them until I was some ways into it, after I had written about Capote and Lee’s childhood together, and their time in Kansas. Then I found several mentions of these art collage boxes that Truman began making, in George Plimpton’s oral biography of him called Truman Capote. Truman began working on them in the later years of his life, when (I think) he was having so much trouble writing. He had so much creativity in him, it had to find an outlet somewhere, even if it no longer could in his writing. He was such a visual writer, with such rich descriptive powers, I think it’s natural he moved toward visual art. He knew a lot about art, and supposedly tore pictures out of the coffee table books of friends! The “snake boxes,” as I call them, also had a great deal to do with his fascination with snakes. He had been bitten by one as a child, and almost died from it. After that, he was obsessed with them, almost as if focusing on the thing that scared him the most could take away its fear and power. (The snake image on the cover of Capote in Kansas is actually from a Richard Avedon photograph of a snake sculpture that Truman kept in his apartment.)

Truman would order snake bite kits by the dozens, and then decoupage these artsy clippings on to them, the same way he would make home-made kites, decorating plain white paper. He’d add on all sorts of odd bits, like photos of favorite authors like Emily Dickinson or Oscar Wilde, and then add more snake pictures, cigar bands (his stepfather manufactured the Capote brand of cigar), etc. Then he’d put the boxes down n plexi-glass shells for safekeeping. Near the end of his life, Truman went to a renowned book store owner in New York (Andreas Brown’s Gotham Book Mart, now defunct) and said he wanted to deliver a “top secret” project. Of course, Andreas thought it was the long-in-process novel Truman had been talking about forever. Instead, it was the snake boxes. There was an exhibit of them at the Gotham Book Mart. Many of them were left to various people in Truman’s will, and a number of them were recently sold at auction, and went for prices ranging from 3,000 to 10,000 (too rich for my blood!) I’ll send you photos of some of them.

Anyway, once I began reading of the boxes in Plimpton’s biography, I thought they would be a great device to add into my book, a Gothic element. I wanted the book to have a plot, not just be a series of flashback memories, and I came up with the idea of Truman sending something akin to the snake boxes to Harper, along with photographs inside them, to create a mystery Harper had to solve. So I’m not recreating the boxes literally, just using them (and dressing them up a lot) as a jumping off point for part of my plot.


*What are your favorite authors?

I really love so many writers, but there are certainly ones I’ll buy whenever they come out with a new book. I tend not to read reviews, because I don’t want anything to prejudice me. A favorite of the last few years, who makes me insanely jealous because she’s such a brilliant, imaginative writer, is Kate Atkinson, whose new book is called When Will There Be Good News? (Or something like that; I might be paraphrasing.) I also love her books Human Croquet and Case Histories. Early on, in my pretentious high school and college days, I began reading a lot of John Cheever, whose Waspy world was so different from my lower middle class Texas upbringing. Maybe that’s why I liked him so much. Then in college, I had a great Southern literature class, and started reading a lot of those writers: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullars, Flannery O’Connor. Her collection of letters called The Habit of Being is one of my favorite books, and taught me so much about what it means to be a thinking, feeling person in the world. And because I thought that I wanted to be an actor, and acted quite a bit in high school and college, the plays of Edward Albee and their exquisite language had a huge affect on me. I also love Pat Conroy, whom I once interviewed at Good Morning America. I literally started crying as I talked to him I was so moved. I also like a lot of comic writers like James Wilcox, Peter Lefcourt, Armistead Maupin. (I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve literally never read Jane Austen or Dickens…maybe when I retire!)

*What is on your nightstand right now?

Some finished books, some not so finished. I’ve developed a bad habit lately of buying books and then reading just a few pages, and no more if they don’t grab me. I jumped on the Oprah bandwagon and just read The Story of Edgar Satwalle, which is truly a work of genius. It will be one for the ages, it’s that good. Also a great new book that got a little lost in the Satwalle uproar is Hannah Tinti’s The Good Thief. Three other books are just sitting on my nightstand, which will probably head to the bookcase in my apartment basement: one is the Joseph O’Neill book Netherland that got such great reviews. I’m just a few pages into it, but I’ve already gotten so bogged down by all the writing on cricket I’m turned off. Another is the Swedish writer Peter Hoeg, who wrote the great Smilla’s Sense of Smell. But his new book that’s just come out in paperback, The Quiet Girl, is just so downright weird! And I hate to admit it, but I’ve been working away at Ann Patchett’s Run, which I know is a big book club favorite, but it’s just not enveloping me. I’ve always got to have an easy mystery or two on hand, to lull me to sleep (in a good way): right now it’s a Ruth Rendell, and the new Brad Meltzer book The Book of Lies. So my nightstand is quite crowded!

*Would you talk a bit about your physical writing process - where, when, on a computer or by hand, is it quiet or noisy, is there food involved?

It’s gotten much more relaxed over the years. When I started on my first book, a memoir about my twin brother’s disappearance called The History of Swimming, I could literally only write in the dark. This sounds like I’m making it up, but I’m not. I’d turn off the lights and do half hours of automatic, stream of consciousness writing, almost as if the material was too scary to see in the light of day. (As I said earlier, I had been an actor in college, and I think it had roots in that, “suffering” for my art and getting into character.) And I’d just hope my fingers were hitting the right keys! Then the rewrites involved copious amounts of iced coffee, with lots of cream and sugar. This was before I developed a late in life lactose intolerance – which I ignore (and pay the price of) when a bowl of coffee Haagen-Daz is staring me in the face.

When I started working on Capote in Kansas, I could look at the computer screen a little more directly. I found several photos of Truman and Harper at different points in their lives, and I taped them up on the walls around me. (That’s become a consistent thing – taping up these sensory pictures. I did it with the thing I just finished, a semi-autobiographical thing about my childhood. So I taped up lots of childhood pictures that had meaning to me.) And for Capote, I listed nonstop to the sound track of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’d keep playing the same most emotional cuts over and over. That was somewhat deliberate, that choice of music, but I’ve found that everything I write organically develops a sort of soundtrack. During The History of Swimming, I was listening a lot to a singer named Michael Holland and his album Darkness Falls, and it became sort of Pavlovian – I got to where I couldn't write without it.

I have to be pretty focused while I’m struggling through a first draft, more or less creating on the spot, with only a few big turning points already in mind. I don’t outline. And there’s so much agony about whether I’m going in the right direction and should I keep going to the bitter end, or do I stop midstream and go back to the first and start revising. But after that first real draft, which is actually a few drafts, and can take over a year to write, I can then write anywhere and during anything. I write on a laptop computer, and I say “my lap is my office.” I often write with the TV on, because I like the white noise. I’ll try to write about two hours in the morning, before I have to go into the job that pays the bills (as a writer for ABC’s Primetime and 20/20), and then I’ll keep writing a lot on the weekends. On a full day, I can go for about three hours at a stretch before I take a break. And lots of coffee – but now with coffeemate!


*What are you working on right now?

I just finished a new novel, with the lurid – and hopefully provocative title -- The Movies We Watched (The Year My Father Killed My Mother). That title pretty much sums it up! It’s about a little boy whose mother has died, and he begins to think his father killed her, so he can be with his new girlfriend. The little boy obsessively goes to see the movies every weekend, and keeps a scrapbook with the movie ads from the local paper pasted in it. Then based on the grown-up things he sees in the movies, he begins playing detective, to try and catch his father. It’s somewhat autobiographical, a sort of prequel and sequel to The History of Swimming. My own mother died when I was seven, and there’s always been a mystery to how she died: suicide, an accidental drug overdose, a brain aneurysm, even murder. So I’m chasing those family ghosts, once again. Because of the title, I came up with a fun way for my agent to submit it to editors. Most books these days are submitted to publishers via email, but this manuscript was too big, because of all the movie ads that are scanned into it. So I bought all these old-fashioned movie canisters from a film company in Hollywood, and taped the title of the book on the lids, and we had those messengered to editors. Certainly made the book stand out ! Now I’m just hoping editors like the book itself as much as the marketing. It’s a relief to have finished the book -- I went through about ten drafts of it – but now I’m feeling a little post-partum. But already, I have some rough elements of a new book in mind, something that’s not based on real people, but will require a lot of historical research.


*Is there a chance Truman Capote or Harper Lee might be subject matter for you in the future?

No! I’ve put them to bed.

*I write about what I cook as well as what I read. Do you do any cooking at home? If you could have Truman Capote and Harper Lee over for dinner, what would you serve them?

I love cooking, and like doing it when I have an easy day at work. It’s the shopping I hate, which is such a hassle in New York. A few years ago, my partner and I bought a weekend house an hour or so outside the city, in Asbury Park, NJ – Bruce Springsteen land! We finally had a decent, big open kitchen there, unlike the cramped little galley kitchen we had in the apartment. And it was sort of the social thing to do to cook on Saturday night, and have friends over. So we really started cooking there, instead of our endless parade of Chinese takeout. I like following recipes. I wish I could bake and make cakes and pies, but I haven’t much. Now that the weather’s turning colder, we cook at home a lot. In the summer, it’s nice to sit outside at a restaurant, and we like taking our dog Frankie (a Maltese/Yorkie) with us, to sit outside and drink margaritas!

What a wonderful question about cooking for Truman and Harper! It’s the one question nobody’s ever asked me! I was in Baton Rouge a few weekends ago at the Louisiana Book Festival, talking about Capote in Kansas, and I found a book I’d never seen before, called Sook’s Cookbook – after Truman’s old cousin Sook Faulk, who is memorialized in Truman’s short story “A Christmas Memory.” I want to start cooking my way through that, but until then, I’d like to dig up the recipe for a Coca Cola cake, which I remember having as a kid in Texas, and which I have Harper make in my book. And I’d make this jazzy baked chicken I made the other night, stuffed with goat cheese and apricots and almonds – that’s as fancy as I get. And I’d love to make biscuits. And since Truman is there, I’d have to have lots to drink!

Thanks to Kim Powers for answering these questions! If you would like to check out the rest of the booktour the full list of hosts can be found here.