Free Food for Millionaires

"That's the one they got rid of. Did your mother ever tell you?" My mother's youngest sister stood pointing to an obliterated entry on the passport her grandfather had used to bring his wife and children from Sicily in 1914. My gaping mouth was all the answer she needed.

"Never mind." She snapped the passport shut, returning it to a molding shoebox filled with the family documents I'd been begging for years to see and photocopy.

Many genealogists uncover secrets in their family's past. I uncovered an unspeakable tragedy that took me more than a decade to unravel, one heartache at a time.

The child obliterated from that passport, erased from her family for more than eight decades, was my grandmother's sister, Francesca, murdered in Detroit when she was just 16.

The scars of that murder have never healed. They bleed freshly today with relatives who'd rather that Frances' secret had remained buried, even though they themselves had no part in the horror.

But Frances' story is important. Her fate is as old as Juliet's - and as current as today's headlines.

From the moment I learned of her existence, I vowed to uncover the truth of her murder. I vowed to tell her story. To give her back her name.

I have always thought guilt is the hardest emotion to endure. When I read about tragic accidents in the newspaper, I often wonder about the driver as well as the victim. I imagine the driver's sense of identity would be fundamentally changed if she knew she was the cause of someone else's death - even if the accident was caused by a moment of inattention, a careless mistake. As a writer, I wondered what a thoughtful character would do with that guilt for, as the title of this book suggests, the rest of her life.

The main 'accident' in the book is a car accident, of course, and it happens because the teenage driver never sees the pedestrian in her path. But in the relationships portrayed in the book - specifically, the mother's relationship with her daughter - there are other kinds of accidents caused by people not seeing each other - or themselves - clearly. The book also ended up being about community, and how important it is to reach out, and let others reach out to you, in difficult times. 

I wanted to explore how the movies shape and haunt us, and what happens when the eternal allure of classic movies collides with the daily indignities of contemporary life.

 

I had a situation I wanted to write about, a woman who begins a romance that ends before it has a chance to take off, with a man who has a family in a foreign country. The situation is a stalemate: the man's wife refuses on principal to grant him a divorce. The male character is weary of asking, and angry that his wife has hijacked his life. And although he's attracted to the single female character, things don't move forward with her. Just because he's a man and she's a woman, doesn't mean that they fall in love, and burst into song on public transportation, the way it happens in the movies.

 

I've been married for five years now, but for a very long time, much longer than is generally recommended, I was single. Remaining alone while everyone around me moved on proved traumatic. So although I'd written about the absurdities of dating before (WAS IT SOMETHING I SAID?, SoHo Books, 1998), I found that I had more to say. 

 

 

Author Bio

 

Valerie is available to call-in to book clubs and to meet with clubs located in the New York & New Jersey metropolitain area. Email her to request a call-in or visit.

 

 

I heard a story about a woman whose child was born with a dislocated hip and had to be in a body cast for the first few months of her life. This mother was such a perfectionist, she hid her newborn daughter from friends and family until the cast came off. Thus was born the idea of a perfectionist mother whose baby is born with a deformity.

 

Having my first child also definitely inspired the premise of this novel. While I was pregnant, I was so concerned about having a healthy baby with ten fingers and ten toes.

 

 

Joanna is available to call-in to book clubs and meet with clubs in Toronto (Canada.)  Email her to request a call-in or visit or with questions about the book.

 

 

 

 

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Locked In is a medical thriller about a group of physicians and a malpractice attorney who profit by creating malpractice cases. The doctors use their patients as pawns in their malpractice game. They change their patients' medical records, perform unnecessary operations, and report erroneous findings. More...

Ann Marie Feitt and the Read a Bunch Eat a Bunch book club of Santa Barbara, CA (11 members)

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The Cliff House Strangler (5 clubs)

 

1. Liz Degner and the All Booked Up book club of Springfield, OR (14 members)