The bestseller was Sullivan’s Island, the story of a woman betrayed by her husband who returns with her teenage daughter to the place where she grew up and rebuilds her life. Steeped in memories of the Lowcountry, it came out in 1999 and sold more than a million copies. That I had never heard of this or any of Dottie’s other books did not surprise or perturb her one bit. They were beach reads, so-called domestic fiction, a genre that she was well aware did not get reviewed in publications like the New York Times or The New Yorker. Anyway, Dottie didn’t need me. She had a devoted following. Her books were so popular that you couldn’t just show up at her signings: you had to buy a ticket. There was even a Dorothea Benton Frank Fan Fest in Charleston. Dot Frank was an industry.
After the signing, Dottie was going straight to the airport for her next gig. But she gave me her business card and told me that an event similar to the one we’d just done would be held in Charleston in November, and she’d get me invited. I emailed her the next day, before I could lose her contact information. “Tickled pink to hear from you!” she wrote back. “Send me your address and I’ll send you a copy of my funniest book!” She sent two, with inscriptions, Sullivan’s Island (“It all started here”) and The Last Original Wife (“For Mary Norris—My new BF!”), and added, “I can keep you in beach books forever!” Later that year, I was invited to an authors’ luncheon hosted by the Post and Courier in Charleston. The first night, the organizers put me up in a serviceable hotel, with the usual hideous hallway carpeting, on the outskirts of town. My room overlooked the football stadium of the Citadel, the famous military academy. That weekend, there was a big game as well as a reunion, so the hotel was fully booked, and after the luncheon I would have to move across the river to a different hotel, even more remote. When I told Dottie this, she asked, “Are you packed?” I was. “Come home with me,” she said.
Suddenly there I was, driving to Sullivan’s Island with Dorothea Benton Frank. Her fans would be pea green with envy! In the car, she gossiped about her children, just as the women in her books do. Her daughter, Victoria, she told me in confidence, was pregnant. (Victoria’s son, Teddy, would be born the following year, in 2017, and turn Dottie into a fan of Lesley Stahl’s grandmother book.) She had encouraged her son, William, to try online dating and threatened to write his profile herself. (He has since married.) That day was Victoria’s birthday, and Dottie was throwing a dinner party for her, so on the way home we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few loaves of Victoria’s favorite frozen garlic bread.
The house wasn’t the one Dottie had grown up in. It wasn’t even the one that she had bought with the bestseller money. She had traded up to a mansion by the sea. The street was lined with palmetto trees—pronounced pal-metto, not palm-etto, she told me—and alongside the house was a pristine white cottage to which she gave me the key. But instead of retiring to the cottage I hung out in the kitchen while Dottie bustled around, whipping up dinner for twenty. I also admired the many ship models in glass cases in the hallway and living room—Peter collected them. Then I settled in a rocking chair on the back porch and tried to read. But I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t get over how I had scored. I had been delivered from a hotel in suburbia to this magnificent historic property with a view of Fort Sumter. For dinner, Dottie seated me with her on the porch while her daughter and friends took over the dining room. The climax of the evening was when Peter fired a blank from a small cannon, of the type used to signal the start for yacht races, off the back-porch steps.
The next morning, Dottie came to the cottage to invite me for coffee and show me a note from a reader, who loved her work but felt compelled to write, “I shuddered each time I read ‘was’ when it should be ‘were’! My Mom taught me (and she was a grammar fanatic!) when it comes to using ‘was’ or ‘were’ you use ‘were’ when it is contrary to fact.” The fan had cited a line of dialogue from Lowcountry Summer: “None that I know of, honey. I wish there was a pill.” Dottie wanted my professional opinion: How should she answer? Was she obliged to use the subjunctive? “Tell her this is fiction and this is how people talk,” I said. She was pleased to be able to quote a copy editor in her reply, adding that, for her own part, she believed that “it’s more important for dialogue to ring true than it is for it
