I’ve always said that I wanted to write books about real women’s lives. I’ve wanted to include the dirty dishes and the endless day when your children are both sick and you never get out of your stained robe and you eat peanut butter off your spoon because you don’t have the energy to make a real meal, which your children can’t eat anyway, because they’d throw it all back up. So yes, I’ll admit I borrowed shamelessly from my life, and from my children’s.
Three Women at the Water’s Edge was published in 1981. The three women are in classic stages of life. Margaret, at fifty, wants to break away from taking care of others and find out who she is under her Mrs. Santa Claus guise. In a way, she was like me, or I was like her, exhausted from taking care of my two small people alone. Daisy, at thirty, has two small children and a baby on the way when her husband leaves her for another woman. The scene in the book where both of Daisy’s children are extremely sick with bronchitis and the stomach flu might seem long in the book, but it wasn’t nearly as long as it was in real life. Daisy’s joy in her children came from my life, too.
Dale is the character most not like me. Not me as I was then. She’s a teacher in a small town on the coast of Maine, and she’s fallen crazy in love. She’s so wildly in love she has to drive to the ocean and run through the surf, because her heart has come alive. When I wrote Three Women, I was living in a small town in the Berkshires. The ocean was far away. So why did I set Dale near the ocean? Why did she fall in love near the ocean?
Often I write about events that have actually happened in my life.
It’s a little wonderful when events in my life happen after I’ve written about them.
