My Book Club Made Me An Author

My book group formed seven years ago. A dozen busy, smart, book-obsessed women in Portland, Oregon, we’re probably not that different from most neighborhood book clubs. We struggle to make time for reading, there’s always someone who confesses that she hasn’t had time to finish the book, and there’s usually another who clearly didn’t finish, but gamely joins the discussion and fakes her way through without ’fessing up. We’re easy on each other; we understand. So many of us serve frozen Trader Joe’s appetizers at our meet-ups that we named ourselves “The TJs Book Club.”

Five summers ago, after a string of satisfying but long adult books like Haruki Murakami’s 607-page “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” we got to talking about Blumesday, an annual riff on the James Joyce celebration Bloomsday & Portland’s celebration of all things Judy. Someone suggested Judy Blume’s classic young adult novel “Are You There God…It’s Me Margaret” as our next pick. It would be a departure—with the bonus that we’d all read it multiple times.  

We called that session “Margaret and Margaritas.” I hosted, providing the discussion questions (and the top-shelf tequila). We talked until midnight about “Margaret” and “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t” and “Forever.” We could still recite the “We must, we must” chant and visualize Margaret’s male classmates blowing mustard splotches onto the ceiling through straws at Norman Fishbein’s 6th-grade party.

After everyone went home that night, I reminisced about how much Blume’s books had meant to me when I was growing up, and I couldn’t sleep. I poked around Judy Blume’s Facebook page and, as a goof, entered a contest to meet her at the L.A. premiere of the “Tiger Eyes” movie.

I messaged my book-group friend Virginia. “I’ll take you if I win. Ha!”

Well, I won the contest. And Judy Blume was so lovely and down-to-earth with me the night of the premiere, describing her progress on her adult novel, “In The Unlikely Event,” that I flew home determined to finish the novel I’d always wanted to write. Five years later, my debut novel, “The Summer List,” is on store shelves.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about book groups lately—not just how mine led directly to me becoming a published author, but how important they are in 2018.

At a recent all-day book club event in San Diego with NovelNetwork, a service that connects book groups interested in videocall or in-person appearances with authors, I asked attendees about their own clubs. How had they formed? How did they pick the books? What did they get out of them? Why were they in a book club, anyway?

Nearly everyone answered the last question with a variation on the same response—My book club reminds me how important books are.

That’s what mine did for me. Novels had been my whole world when I was younger, and I’d wanted to be a writer ever since I was seven. My grandma used to give me a dollar and send me to the used-book sale at the library down the street from her house in San Mateo, California. I’d lug home a paper grocery bag stuffed with books and read happily for hours under a Bay tree, dreaming of becoming an author myself. What had happened to that girl?  My book group made me remember her.

And when I did finish the first draft of my novel, my book group friends pushed me to keep going when I wanted to quit. I saw some members daily, at my daughter’s bus stop, and I’d give them updates on the rollercoaster of acquiring an agent, revising, and submitting to editors.

Don’t quit, they said. Someday we’re going to pick your book for the group, so you can’t quit.

Now that I’m deep into the revision process for my 2019 novel, the women in the group are still a lifeline. They remind me why we read, and why I started writing in the first place.

Once you have a foothold in publishing, it’s easy to get distracted by marketing tasks, “hot” genres, lists, and comparing your success to others. But at book club, I remember what’s essential in the kind of novel I want to write. A good story, well told. Believable characters. An author’s tenderness for her subjects. Twists that are earned, not forced.

The unfiltered words of readers who are detached from the behind-the-scenes publishing world, who know only the intimate, raw relationship between reader and page, are golden. They keep me on track when I start to doubt my instincts or detour from the basics of good storytelling.   

In August we’ll get together for another book—mine. We’re going to call the night “The Summer List & Sangria,” and I can’t wait.

—

Amy Mason Doan’s debut novel, “The Summer List” (June 26, 2018), is about two girlhood best friends who reunite after 17 years for an epic scavenger hunt. The novel “cleverly blends a coming-of-age tale, the story of a long-simmering mystery, and a thoughtful study of relationships between childhood friends” and “will please readers who grew up with the novels of Judy Blume.” (Publishers Weekly).  Doan has also written for The Oregonian, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Forbes, and The Orange County Register. She has an M.A. in Journalism from Stanford University & a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/AmyLDoan

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

 

About THE SUMMER LIST

In the tradition of Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, The Summer List is a tender yet tantalizing novel about two friends, the summer night they fell apart, and the scavenger hunt that reunites them decades later—until the clues expose a breathtaking secret that just might shatter them once and for all.

Laura and Casey were once inseparable: as they floated on their backs in the sunlit lake, as they dreamed about the future under starry skies, and as they teamed up for the wild scavenger hunts in their small California lakeside town. Until one summer night, when a shocking betrayal sent Laura running through the pines, down the dock, and into a new life, leaving Casey and a first love in her wake.

But the past is impossible to escape, and now, after seventeen years away, Laura is pulled home and into a reunion with Casey she can’t resist—one last scavenger hunt. With a twist: this time, the list of clues leads to the settings of their most cherished summer memories. From glistening Jade Cove to the vintage skating rink, each step they take becomes a bittersweet reminder of the friendship they once shared. But just as the game brings Laura and Casey back together, the clues unravel a stunning secret that threatens to tear them apart…

Mesmerizing and unforgettable, Amy Mason Doan’s The Summer List is about losing and recapturing the person who understands you best—and the unbreakable bonds of girlhood.

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing