It was roughly 1959. I was a young girl of around eight years when I realized we didn’t have a school newspaper. Working as a school journalist seemed to me to be a perfect extracurricular activity. We had one big campus that consisted of a kindergarten and grades one through eight. I thought, surely there must be enough going on to produce some kind of a newspaper. A monthly seemed appropriate. I pointed this out to Sister Miriam, our principal, and told her I had a plan.
She listened and smiled at me and said, “Well then, let’s go start us a newspaper.”
I was thrilled. It was my first publishing experience. My plan was to ask each class to submit one page of news and if they wanted to, they could include a cartoon. My secret was that I would write a Dear Abby–type column called Ask Stella. There was a box—probably an empty tissue box—where students could discreetly write out a question anonymously, drop it in, and Stella would answer. What made me think I could offer valuable advice to eighth graders is anyone’s guess. I think we published three or four issues before the whole venture fizzled. Maybe the novelty had worn off. I remember being a little disappointed. But here’s what I remember most—the smell of mimeograph ink. And what it felt like to organize a team and to put writing out there for others to read. There was criticism. There were kudos. It was worth it. It was also the beginning of coming to understand myself and of some deep-seated desire to be understood by others. To have a voice and have it heard seemed very important, even then.
The fifties and Catholic school did not really go hand in hand with self-expression. In fact, we were unquestioning, well-behaved, polite little lambs for the most part. We did our jobs by doing massive amounts of homework and projects, but we kept our opinions to ourselves.
Time marched on and soon the civil rights movement began. There was the Orangeburg Massacre, the bombing in Birmingham, and the marches on Selma and Washington, DC. Then came the Vietnam War and the women’s rights movement. My teenage years were fueled by heated debates and massive change all around and in my world. And guess what? Suddenly, I had opinions. I wasn’t afraid to voice them because if I hadn’t learned anything up until then, I sure knew the difference between what was right and what was so terribly wrong.
Later, a job in Charleston took me to a job in San Francisco and then in 1973 to a job in New York. I became an importer of women’s apparel and traveled all over Europe looking for inspiration and then all over Asia looking for production. I had a brief marriage of arrogance and then when that firestorm ended, I met Peter Frank. What a romance we had! Anyway, we married and three years later our daughter was born. Knowing I couldn’t be much of a parent if I was out of the country or on the road somewhere domestically for almost half of the year, I retired. We left the city for the suburbs of New Jersey and our son was born. I was so bored I thought I would die, so I began to volunteer. I was class mom a number of times and still say that if I could get back the amount of time I spent in the car line waiting for one of my offspring to appear I’d be ten years younger. But life was good, almost idyllic.
Then the unthinkable happened. My mother was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma and she passed away quickly. Burying our parents is the natural order of life, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I was completely heartbroken. And then my siblings wanted to sell her house on Sullivan’s Island to settle her estate. Now I was deeply depressed because I had lost my mother and was about to lose my sense of place in the world. How would I bring my children home to know their aunts and uncles and cousins if I didn’t have a house? And I had given up my career and therefore my own income. Peter wasn’t interested in stepping up for a second house, so I began scratching my head. What to do?
Well, given the fact that my children were in school, it had to be part-time work. But what could I do to earn enough money to cover a modest mortgage, taxes, and maintenance on that house?
Still an avid reader, I stumbled across a bestseller in paperback that I had not read. It was written by a wildly popular author at the time. After I finished I thought, You know what? I can do this. I can write books! It seemed like the perfect solution to my situation. I was so naïve I didn’t know the odds were stacked against me of ever getting published. I didn’t have an MFA, or even a BA. I just sat down and did it.
But how did I decide what to write about? Well, I already knew I wanted to write about the Lowcountry because I missed it so desperately. But something was bothering me and after a lot of thought I figured it out. My children were being raised in a bubble of peace and prosperity. I grew up with history happening all around me. They had no clue what my childhood had been. So I decided to tell a story that would show them the difference between the childhood they knew and mine. It took a while to get a manuscript together, but I finally did.
I used to believe that much of life was serendipitous. But now I suspect certain things are almost preordained. Call it
