Quick reads, small joys, and everyday moments from life on Nantucket.
Want to stay up to date on The Latest with Nancy? Join the newsletter!
1. COLOR: Blue and white striped 2. FOOD: Blueberry Pie From Susan Simon’s THE NANTUCKET TABLE 3. DRINK: Whale’s Tale Pale Ale 4. FLOWER: …
Who knew that Mr. Rogers had a home on Nantucket, out in Madaket? For the 1996 review celebrating the newly renovated and expanded library, he…
This is builder Charles Wood who built the Nantucket Atheneum in 1846 and 1847. Not to be irreverant, but hubba hubba! He looks like quite…
When I moved to Nantucket in 1984, I looked different from the way I look now (yes, shoulder pads) and so did our island library,…
I was so pleased when Sofia Dakos said on my recent post about writing that she likes my little blue desk. It’s one of several…
I love winter, truly–it’s a great time to write. But I miss color. So when my husband went to Bermuda for a meeting, I tagged…
December is my favorite month of the year. Christmas with all its excitement arrives, along with friends and family. The house smells wonderfully of pine…
We can never forget we live on an island. On Nantucket, we’re thirty miles from the continent. We’re surrounded by the cold, dark, uncaring…
As we head into the holiday season, I think that some of the more. . .mature. . . of my readers might enjoy taking a…
Autumn is a calm season on the island. The light slants differently on the houses and the harbor. Now we have time to read books…
While writing this blog, I’ve discovered I’m obsessed with houses. Island Girls is about three sisters who will inherit a Nantucket house IF they…
Multi-talented Sara Prentice Manela made this wonderful map for me years ago, to show where special places in my book are on Nantucket. So many…
I wonder how many public high schools have the skeleton of a whale hanging in the main hallway. Nantucket High School does. It’s much like…
It’s true, what Mitchell’s window says. Life is a wonderful fairy tale. Not all the time, maybe, but sometimes, and so many times on Nantucket….
The Island House is about two young women with secrets that will change their lives during one summer on Nantucket. Some of it was inspired…
What inspires my writing? Sometimes, my memory–and my diary, which I kept from the time I was 17. I dated this slightly older, very handsome,…
I had a really good idea for a novel. What if a lovely divorced woman with a little girl marries a lovely divorced man with…
In Between Husbands and Friends, I explored the secrets we tell our husbands, our friends, and ourselves. Nantucket summers, so sensual, sunny, and carefree,…
I think it takes a while for anyone who moves to a strange new town to feel as if they belong. For me, my moment…
“Could she just accept her child? Or should she, must she, remain on guard, forever nudging and nagging her daughter toward safety?” page 336, Family…
Everlasting flowers are those that keep their color and shape for, well, a very long time, if properly dried. I was inspired to write…
(The ereader cover) In this novel, Daphne Miller is trying to rebuild her life after she was divorced from her husband when she discovered…
A writer, Fanny Anderson, says those words on page 252 of my novel Morning. At the beginning of the book, a free-lance editor, Sara…
Sometimes the separation between fiction and autobiography is as thin as gossamer. In 1983, after I met Charley Walters, I rented a house for a…
In 1978, Tillie Olsen published a non-fiction book called Silences, where she shares a survey proving that then—in 1978—one of every 12 published writers were…
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…
By the time my first novel, Stepping, was published, I had already written most of my second novel. As I wrote Three Women at the…
It was a glorious occasion when my first novel, Stepping, was published by Doubleday in January, 1980! If you want an idea of just how…
YOUR LIFE IS NOT A NOVEL OR MAYBE IT IS! I’ve always wanted to write about the lives of “ordinary” women, and I have done…
When I looked at the photo of our library–republished here because I accidentally deleted it–I saw 2 books by and about a woman writer I…