Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Origins of Buried Truths

On October 18, 2012, Red Rose Publishing will reissue my first published e-book BURIED TRUTHS.   Another publisher, now defunct, initially released the novel in 2008, but the story made an even more circuitous journey from my brain to my pen.  (Yes, I still plot with my pen.)

The idea developed from an encounter I had with a young woman in a local book store. As I was leaving, the rather confused clerk shyly asked if she could pose a question to me.  When I said yes, she indicated that a friend of hers was looking for her birth mother.  According to the young clerk, I was a dead ringer for her friend.  Had I produced a baby and given her up for adoption? I told the young woman that I hadn't given birth to a child. Andrea, the employee, said she hoped I wasn't offended.  The girl's embarrassment was palpable, but I reassured her I'd taken no offense.  As I walked to my car, the wheels inside my brain began turning.  What if someone had been asked that question and it were true?  Of course, the hypothetical person would deny it to a stranger, but what would she do when she was alone?

In BURIED TRUTHS, a book store clerk asks Heather Kerry that question. Did you have a baby and give him up for adoption? In this case, the young woman is inquiring about her husband's birth mother, and Heather, like my hypothetical person, denies having had a child.  Of course, that's a lie.  Heather gave her son up for adoption twenty-three years before. After the encounter with the pretty bookstore employee, Heather returns home, pours a stiff drink, and then calls the man she hasn't seen since she surrendered her child to strangers.

In BURIED TRUTHS, Heather and Wesley, her former lover, must confront their pasts and see if they still have a future, and I sometimes think of that young woman searching for her mother in New Orleans. Did she find her birth mother? Did they have a future? My protagonists have to search for people they lost.  Did this young woman search and find what she sought?