Authors Interviewing Characters: Molly Fader

Molly Fader interviews Kitty and BettyKay from The Sunshine Girls

About THE SUNSHINE GIRLS

“A breathtaking story of an extraordinary friendship. Molly Fader has penned an unforgettable novel that is sure to be one of the year’s best.” —Kristy Woodson Harvey, New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding Veil

Two friends. A lifetime of secrets. One sparkling story.

1967 Iowa. Nursing school roommates BettyKay and Kitty don’t have much in common. BettyKay has risked her family’s disapproval to pursue her dreams away from her small town. Cosmopolitan Kitty has always relied on her beauty and smarts to get by and to hide a painful secret. Yet the two share a determination to prove themselves in a changing world, forging an unlikely bond on a campus unkind to women.

Before their first year is up, tragedy strikes, and the women’s paths are forced apart. But against all odds, a decades-long friendship forms, persevering through love, marriage, failure, and death, from the jungles of Vietnam to the glamorous circles of Hollywood. Until one snowy night leads their relationship to the ultimate crossroads.

Fifty years later, two estranged sisters are shocked when a famous movie star shows up at their mother’s funeral. Over one tumultuous weekend, the women must reckon with a dazzling truth about their family that will alter their lives forever…

Interviewing Kitty and BettyKay from The Sunshine Girls

Molly: Hello ladies, it’s so nice to get a chance to talk to you together like this. I feel like for such a strong and sustaining friendship, you actually have spent a lot of time apart. 

Kitty: What do they say about absence and fond hearts? 

BettyKay: Oh my god, could you imagine if we were neighbors? Everyone would be so sick of us. 

Kitty: It would be my dream come true, but actually might have been the end of our friendship. 

BettyKay: Oh, Kitty. Nothing is the end of us. 

Molly: How did you manage to stay friends with so much distance? 

BettyKay: The button pranks. Thinking about the way I could surprise you with those buttons was like a year-long mission for me. I was constantly thinking about you in the years I had the buttons, trying to figure out how I’d get them back to you. And the years I didn’t have the buttons, I was waiting for you to jump out of a bush or send a singing telegram or have them dropped from an airplane. 

Kitty: Remember the year I sent you the glass Christmas ornaments with the buttons inside? 

BettyKay: I can’t even imagine what it cost for you to do that.

Kitty: Well, what is the point of being fabulously wealthy if I can’t make expensive gag gifts.

BettyKay: You know, the other way you were never far from my mind is that you always in the press. I could pick up any magazine and find a picture of you inside. Looking glamorous at some Hollywood event.  It was-

Kitty: A nightmare?

BettyKay: I was going to say nice. For me anyway. It was probably pretty awful for you.

Kitty: The price of fame.

Molly: You two met in nursing school in Iowa. Can you tell me why nursing and why Iowa?

Kitty: Well, BettyKay was born to be a nurse. There was never a more compassionate, level-headed, calm in a crisis, bossy in a crisis person. 

BettyKay: Thank you. I think? 

Kitty: And I was just trying to get as far away from home as I could get and at the time there weren’t a lot of options. Teaching, nursing or secretarial school. That was kind of it.  I wasn’t great with kids, didn’t want to fetch coffee for some man while getting my butt pinched all day, so nursing it was. 

Molly: What did you two think of each other when you met? 

BettyKay: She was glamorous and beautiful and…

Kitty: A terrible student?

BettyKay: I think we can agree your heart wasn’t in it. What did you think of me? 

Kitty: You were the squarest square that ever squared. And you didn’t like me. So I liked you right away. 

BettyKay: Stop. You did not.

Kitty: I did. I knew the moment you walked into our room in that ugly coat you made, that you were going to change my life.  I just had no idea how much. 

Molly: In nursing school you were friends with another nursing student – Jenny. But the three of you did not stay friends. Why was that? 

BettyKay: I had the tremendous fortune of calling Jenny a dear friend for most of my life. I knew her kids and she knew mine. We were friends not just because of nursing school but we both served in Vietnam together and that kind of experience makes a bond that’s impossible to break. 

Kitty: I made a lot of mistakes in my life and letting go of Jenny… or maybe letting her let go of me, was one of the biggest. But I made choices she could not forgive and I had to respect that. I wish it could have been different. 

Molly: Kitty, the world knows you as a Hollywood icon and award-winning actress, but BettyKay, you went to Hollywood too, for a while. Can you tell us about that experience? 

Kitty: Well, she spent most of that experience in Rex Daniel’s bed…

BettyKay: Kitty!

Kitty: Am I lying? 

BettyKay: No. But… Hollywood was thrilling and not just because of Rex. I got to watch Kitty become a star and I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget how she changed when the camera was on her. You can know someone so well, but then see a whole new side of them. Hollywood wasn’t for me and I had some awful heartbreak there – but I’ll never forget watching Kitty turn into an icon. 

Molly: Let’s talk about your daughters, BettyKay.

Kitty: Aren’t they amazing? 

Molly: They are. But they’re also really struggling with big issues. 

Kitty: Who doesn’t? I mean, they’re young and struggling with big issues is kind of the name of the game at that age. But I know down to my bones that having had a mother like BettyKay, they’re going to be all right. 

BettyKay: One can only hope. 

—

Molly Fader is the author of The McAvoy Sister’s Book Of Secrets. As Molly O’Keefe she is the USA Today Bestselling author of over 50 contemporary romances. She lives in Toronto Ontario with her husband, two kids and rescue dog.

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Find out more about Molly on her website https://mollyfader.com/

Tags: feautured, women writers

Category: On Writing