Guest Post: Susan Wiggs

Please join me in welcoming Susan Wiggs, author of the new book, The Goodbye Quilt to Always With a Book! I will be reviewing this book next month so be sure to come back and see what I thought. Today Susan talks about writing The Goodbye Quilt.

The Goodbye Quilt is a different sort of book from me. While readers will find the emotional heart of the book familiar, they might notice that the conflict feels very personal. Any parent who has ever said goodbye to a child as she leaves the nest will relate to Linda’s dilemma in the book–does she want to keep Molly close, or set her free to fly on her own?

The constant changes in a woman’s life are the blood and bone of my fiction–and of the world I live in. Over the course of decades of writing, I’ve found all the kinds of love that fill a woman’s life, as daughter, sister, friend–and finally and most importantly, as a mom.

When my own daughter left for college, I was bereft, but also inspired. Suddenly, after all the years given to this beloved child, my life was my own again. That’s the conflict Linda faces in the book. Sometimes the hardest thing of all is to have all the choices open to you. What do you pick? Do you follow your head or your heart? Is there a way to do both?

In the story, the quilt is a symbol of a woman’s struggle to stitch together all the disparate threads of a long and eventful life. I’m not a quilter, but I adore quilts. The author photo on the back of the book shows me seated on a family heirloom quilt. At the start of the book, Linda thinks of a quilt like this: “A quilt is an object of peculiar intimacy. By virtue of the way it is created, every inch of the fabric is touched. Each scrap absorbs the quilter’s scent and the invisible oils of her skin, the smell of her household and, thanks to the constant pinning and stitching, her blood in the tiniest of quantities.”

Here are some pictures of some of the quilts that inspired me: https://picasaweb.google.com/susanwiggsauthor/Quilts?feat=directlink. I’m privileged to live in a community filled with creative women, and one of them generously shared her talent by creating an original pattern for THE GOODBYE QUILT in the book.

Women transitions every day, and The Goodbye Quilt is a celebration of these everyday dramas. I would love to hear how readers deal with life’s transformations every day. After all, my best ideas for fiction come from the readers I write for!

About the author: Susan Wiggs is an internationally bestselling author with millions of copies of her books in print in numerous countries. She continues to draw inspiration from her friends, family and the nuances of human nature that make the headlines every day. Susan, who holds a graduate degree from Harvard, recalls that the first romance novel she ever read was Shanna, by the late Kathleen Woodiwiss, which she devoured while slumped behind a college textbook, studying to become a math teacher.  

Thank you Susan for contributing this great guest post, and thanks to Eric at  Planned Television Arts  for coordinating it.