WAIT UNTIL DARK

I can remember watching this movie - which scared me to death - when I lived in Toronto, years after it first came out. It was late at night, I lived by myself, I have this feeling it was in the winter so it was (or felt) especially dark.

Audrey Hepburn is blind and she's on her way home from a trip and a drug dealer puts something in the doll she's bringing home.

She lives in a basement apartment in New York and I think the reason it felt so incredibly scary to me was that I lived in a ground floor apartment at the time, I was about Audrey's age, though I hadn't just flown home from Paris and I wasn't married.

But still, this is probably the scariest movie I ever saw and it wasn't scary because it was violent or because there were ghosts or the devil or some big evil, it was scary because it was incredibly suspenseful.

The bad guy keeps showing up in Audrey's life as she maneuvers her way around her apartment, around the city, and she's blind. I still can't think of anything more frightening...

She couldn't see him, she didn't know he was following her, but things kept moving in her apartment, things kept happening that she couldn't understand.

You need to see this movie if you like suspense - but don't watch it by yourself late at night, okay? I'd never do that again. I have watched it since the first time but I either watch it in the daytime or with someone else. Too scary for me.

Kate

Truth? And Consequences

My mother is so mad at me. She’s in the midst of reading Face Time, the newest Charlotte McNally Mystery. It’s being released this week! I say: Hooray. So far, Mom says: I’m sure that’s lovely, dear. You can imagine the tone.

Mom is terrific. She’s almost 80, and is absolutely beautiful. An artist, a reader, a wonderful intellect. (She doesn’t have a computer, so she’s not reading this.) I’m her oldest daughter, and any psychologist will tell you that can cause some friction.

So anyway. Why is Mom mad? She thinks I’ve “used her for art.”

It’s true: Charlie McNally’s mother in Face Time is a bit—persnickety. She’s opinionated. She thinks, for instance, that Charlotte might want to give up her very successful 20-year TV career to marry some tycoon and become a tycoon wife. No matter that Charlie is happy with the personal life (pretty happy, at least, for a 46-year-old single woman who is married to her job) and happy with her professional life (pretty happy, at least, even though she’s fearful she’s gong go be replaced by someone younger). Mom also thinks Charlotte (she refuses to call her Charlie, saying, “nicknames are for stuffed animals and men who play sports”) might want to visit the plastic surgeon for some face time of her own.

Now Mrs. McNally is not, I repeat, not, my mother. But in these days of controversy over whether books that are purported to be memoirs are actually true—I find myself fighting to convince her that my book is truly fiction.

It’s ALL MADE UP, I tell her. Yes, Charlie has a Mom, and I have a Mom. But I’m not Charlie and she’s not you.

Silence on the other end of the phone.

“Of course it’s me, dear,” she finally says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

So I’m wondering, do any of you have a problem with this? Do people “recognize” themselves in your books—and you have to convince them it’s a fictional character they’re recognizing? Would you “use” someone for “art”?

Or if you’re a reader, do you assume fictional characters are real people just put on paper?

And as it turns out—as Mom will find out if she’ll just get to the end of the book—it’s not only a mystery, and a romance, but kind of a love story between mothers and daughters. My editor said she had tears in her eyes. One reviewer told me she cried. (Which is odd, you have to admit, in a murder mystery.)

Yes, as authors we take elements of reality. Then we polish, and tweak, and exaggerate, and accessorize. But the fun is making up something completely new. Creating a new world. New characters and new relationships. And it’s ALL MADE UP.

Okay, Mom?

Do you have a contentious relationship with your mother? (or daughter?) Do you understand each other?

With love to all mothers and daughters...

Hank (okay, it's Harriet) Phillippi Ryan

What's NEXT in November

I'M YOUR MAN

by Susan Crosby

There was a hot-looking man in her kitchen. And he was cooking!

Maureen Hart had never had a summer so crazy...not even the year she'd become a teenage unwed mother. Now her life was on track with a steady boyfriend and a big promotion looming. And the one person who could derail everything was now waiting on her doorstep!Maureen's estranged daughter desperately needed her to care for her six-year-old son for a while. She just never imagined when she said yes that the child's gorgeous paternal grandfather, Daniel, would insist on staying, as well.

Quarters were getting interestingly close. But Maureen was technically almost engaged...and a workaholic...and a control freak. And totally about to cut loose and indulge in a little fun with a man capable of doing his own laundry!

RT REVIEW OF I'M YOUR MAN:

Thirty-nine-year-old Maureen Hart's life seems like it's moving toward complete satisfaction. She has a serious man, good friends and a possible promotion. Then her estranged daughter leaves Maureen with the young grandson she adores but has never spent any time with. Handsome and unsettling Daniel Cregg, the paternal grandfather, follows. Since her daughter and grandson live with him in Seattle, Maureen feels he stole them from her after his son died. Soon her settled life is in turmoil as she fights her attraction to Daniel and refuses to put her boyfriend ahead of her grandson. I'm Your Man (4), by Susan Crosby, has an interesting, compelling hero, a complex heroine and a heartwarming ending—which might be too neatly tied up but is completely entertaining.
~ Romantic Times

THE SECRET GODDESS CODE

by Peggy Webb

What happens when two women swap lives?

Soap Opera Star Gloria Hart: After losing her celebrated soap opera role, she winds up crashing her Ferrari Spider and getting stranded in Mooreville, Mississippi. Will America's TV goddess discover the role of her life with handsome rancher Matt Tucker playing the leading man? After all, he's the first man she's kissed off camera in over five years!

Married Mom Jenny Miller: Up to her ears in pies she bakes for her husband's restaurant and the trials of an angst-ridden teenager, she's lost touch with herself. Can her budding friendship with Gloria change that? With a few margaritas, a memorable road trip and a little help from each other, these women are about to find friendship, love and their own secret goddesses!

Congratulations to the winners of the September contest

Jenna and Ashley Ladd.

Would you email me at kate@kateaustin.ca with your name and address and I'll send them along to the prize givers for this month?

And don't forget to post for the October contest prizes...

Kate

Book review--The Lost Years

In the past, I'd generally stick to pure fiction in my reading material. I love to get lost in other people's imaginations, and I like that there are no constraints. But ever since I picked a memoir I'd read a review about (A Girl Named Zippy) I've been on a non-fiction kick.

Last night I finished a book called The Lost Years by Kristina Wandzilak and Constance Curry. It chronicles years of alcohol and drug abuse by a girl (Kristina) who was once an athletic, bright, and popular high school student who had the world at her feet. After Kristina's first drink of alcohol in high school, her life spirals down into an alcohol and narcotic addiction that tears her family apart and leaves Kristina herself broken and nearly dead.

Contance, Kristina's mother, whose marriage is troubled and whose husband is also an alcoholic, is at a loss as to how to help her daughter until she begins to take charge of her own life. As she grows and finds a strength she never knew she had, she realizes the only way to help Kristina is not to help her at all.

I cried several times while reading this book. It is emotionally wrenching and powerful, each scene recounted first by daughter and then by mother, in their own unique perspectives. How they lived through this ordeal, which is no doubt being played out thousands of times every day in this country, is inspirational. I recommend it if only for reaffirmation of the resiliance of the human spirit.

--DLB

All the Roadrunning

These two talented musicians - and between the two of them they've been around the block a few times - have crafted a CD full of duets that don't feel like they did them just for the money. They work. Their voices are perfect together, Knopfler's guitar (as always) is sublime, and the lyrics are all about love and pain and longtime relationships. I could talk about every song on the CD, but just listen if you can to the first verse from If This is Goodbye, the final song on the CD:

my famous last words

are lying around in tatters

sounding absurd

whatever i try

but i love you and

that's all that really matters

if this is goodbye if this is goodbye

This CD is all about storytelling, about aging and living gracefully, about romance after many years, about surviving. It's about you and me and our memories as Knopfler writes in This Is Us.

You know how there are CDs you only play when you're in party mode and others you only play when you're nostalgic or sad or with your very best friend? And then there are CDs you play as background music. We all have music that works for different times in our lives - this CD begs to be listened to, the lyrics beg to be heard, so don't waste it on background music but do share it with your friends.

Kate

September From Both Sides

I didn’t realize when I signed up to blog today that this Tuesday would be the sixth anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Certainly that’s one thing to hate about this ninth month of the year because it will always be a reminder of that terrible time in our nation’s history. Because I've lived in New York City twice in my life, as both a single and then a married woman, and because my husband and I still go there regularly to enjoy the city, I feel a special connection to Manhattan—my second home—and a definite sense of loss on this anniversary of 9/11. May all those who were lost, and who did lose loved ones, find peace.

There have been other losses, too, sad to say. Personal ones. Both of my parents died in September—in different years but one on September 19th, the other on September 21st. My maternal grandmother, in fact, passed away in the same year just ten days after my father did. I truly hope that’s the end of that, and bad events come only in threes, no more.

That’s one side of this end-of-summer, beginning-of-fall time of year.

But there’s a better side.

The glorious days are still ahead. What things do I love? The dozen or so hummingbirds that swarm around my feeders, performing their jet-fighter pilot maneuvers as they store up food for their long flight to Mexico to spend the winter. The leaves changing color, becoming a riot of orange, yellow, red on the wooded mountain road that leads to my house, scattering the pavement and beautifying the hills. The cool mornings after a blazingly hot August that shattered old records, the warm, magical, golden afternoons under a true-blue sky, the crisp, cool evenings that hint of winter in the air. The first smell of woodsmoke rising from someone’s fireplace or stove. New clothes—and the rediscovery of old favorites taken out of storage for the season ahead.

Having just returned from Connecticut where my son was married on the last of August—thanks to all for your good wishes, it was a beautiful outdoor ceremony on a beautiful day!—how could I not love September? The post-wedding brunch was held at the bride’s parents’ home on the first of this month and the newlyweds are just getting back from their Paris honeymoon. This season I have a new “daughter,” a new extended family. It doesn’t get better than that.

So how can I not love September, its splendors as well as those poignant memories?