I have always given my parents credit for my becoming a writer. My father was a great reader. Our living room was filled with walls of books. I grew up with him reading to me, and ultimately began reading any novel he did. But I am a writer largely due to my mom’s love of gossip. Our venetian blinds were always at a tilt in our house because Mother watched the neighbors day and night. Many of her telephone conversations began, “Wait till you hear this!” On execution nights in our prison, my mother and her girlfriends huddled outside in a car, waiting for the executioner to go inside. He was one of ten men who entered the prison together on execution night, so no one snooping could know who had really pulled the switch.
I have taught writing for thirty-four years at nearby Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. We benefit, in part, the Springs Scholarship Fund. My teaching inspired me to write Blood on the Forehead: What I Know about Writing. A dozen members who had never finished a book became published writers after joining the class, and we also have members who are already professional writers. Currently, I am in the middle of a memoir called Remind Me. The title comes from an old Mabel Mercer song:
Remind me not to find you so attractive
Remind me that the world is full of men
Portrait of Meaker, drawn by Louise Fitzhugh from a baby picture.
Seven-year-old Meaker, her mother, and her brother Ellis in Auburn, New York.
Meaker (front left) with her mother, her brother Ellis, her father, and several other Meakers at the home of British relatives in Brighton in 1938.
Meaker as a girl scout in Auburn in 1939.
Meaker, age seventeen, with her first car, a 1937 LaSalle convertible with a rumble seat, and a sailor from Sampson Naval Base. The bane of her parents’ existences—both the base and the sailors.
Meaker and Jim Sears at a fraternity dance in Missouri in 1948.
Meaker with Irving the dog in East Hampton, New York, in 1976.
Meaker (front), with close friend and author Tom Baird and Barbara Dicks of Harper & Row in 1980.
Portrait of Meaker at age sixty-two.
Meaker with Tom Baird in 1989.
Meaker holding Gerbils the dog, next to ER the Siamese cat, in East Hampton in 1989.
Meaker and neighbor John “Trip” Timmerman in East Hampton in December 1991.
Meaker, her brother Charles, and her grandniece Tracy Hovelin in August 1999.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1981 by M. E. Kerr
Cover design by Barbara Brown
978-1-4804-5556-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
M. E. KERR
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