Today I’m delighted to welcome cybergirlfriend Samantha Wilde with her brand new debut novel, THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME. Welcome Sam! Tell us about your book.
SAM: Joy McGuire, a seemingly normal person with a seemingly normal marriage, has a baby, after which point, nothing is normal again. Not her breasts or her belly or her heart or her marriage. It’s a hilarious, rueful, laugh-out-loud post partum tale about the grueling work of the first nine months of the first baby when change is an urgent necessity that you wish you could run away from.
ROBERTA: Dr. Rebecca Butterman, the protagonist in my advice column mysteries, is a clinical psychologist (like me.) If your protagonist made an appointment to talk to Dr. Butterman, what would that first session be like? What deep dark secret or problem would she be there to discuss and how much of it would she tell?
SAM: Oh, I imagine she’d talk about hating her husband and his mother and sometimes wanting to run away from the baby and being mad at her mother and the grocery store clerk and pissed off about the isolation in suburbia. None of this, however, is at all secret. When you talk about your perineum on the first page, you’re not much of a secret person.
ROBERTA: What got you writing in this genre?
SAM: Being who I am, I suppose. I think my genre is chick lit, yummy mummy lit. It just came out of me that way, actually. And then it landed in a genre. Sassy, funny stuff about motherhood really only has one genre, in fiction, for the most part.
ROBERTA: What’s your favorite thing about being a writer?
SAM: The actual writing, the living inside the worlds of my characters, and some sense that some time, somewhere, my words may make someone laugh, may make a difference, for an instant.
ROBERTA: Least favorite thing about being a writer?
SAM: Being alone. I’m a people person. I don’t love sitting in front of my computer.
ROBERTA: What is the most interesting thing that’s happened to you since becoming a published author?
SAM: I started blogging. I am afraid of blogs, so this still surprises me. It’s been alright. I’m a ludite. I’m into in-person community, but I’ve learned a lot and made some connections.
Good luck with the book! You can visit Sam’s blog here.
Praise for THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME:
“Here’s a talent: when a narrator’s doldrums make a reader laugh out loud. Samantha Wilde’s inkwell must be filled with truth-serum because this brave and funny book gets the postpartum peaks and valleys so very, winningly right.”
—Elinor Lipman, author of Then She Found Me
“Think of the funniest person you know, give her a baby and a month without sleep, multiply by ten and you’ve got the incomparable Samantha Wilde rocking the hilariously appalling realities of motherhood and the modern marriage. This book belongs on the bedside table of everyone who’s ever been a mother, or had one.”
—Karen Karbo, author of The Stuff of Life and How to Hepburn
Have you ever had the sinking feeling that if you died early, your carefully laid plans for your family would die with you? Penelope Cameron in Sheila Curran’s new book EVERYONE SHE LOVED had that fear–only she did something about it. So when she is in fact sent to an early grave, her best friends in the world have agreed to a pact in which they have final say over any new wife (and stepmother to Penelope’s children.) Curran slowly unwinds the strands of their friendships, reaching into the past for secrets that threaten to overwhelm their strong connections.
Summer’s on the way, and just in time, Judi Fennell’s new book IN OVER HER HEAD debuts on June 1. When Erica Peck, one terrified-of-the-ocean marina owner, finds herself at the bottom of the sea conversing with a Mer man named Reel, she thinks she’s died and gone to her own version of Hell. When the Oceanic Council demands she and Reel retrieve a lost cache of diamonds from the resident sea monster in return for their lives, she knows she’s died and gone to Hell.
Judi Fennell has had her nose in a book and her head in some celestial realm all her life, including those early years when her mom would exhort her to “get outside!” instead of watching Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie on television. So she did–right into Dad’s hammock with her Nancy Drew books.
Before the denouement of the mystery, Roxanne Coady, owner of the fabulous RJ Julia Booksellers, hosted “Behind the Mystery” for patrons of the event. Attendees also enjoyed champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries, and complimentary copies of DEADLY ADVICE (thanks to Berkley Prime Crime). Thanks to the Madison Cares committee for an amazing evening!
Today was spent at the Connecticut Library Association Conference in New Haven. I was on a panel talking about secrets we wished we’d know with fellow mystery authors Hallie Ephron, Jane Cleland, Rosemary Harris, and Jan Brogan–always fun to hang out with my pals and a bunch of librarians!
Saturday, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on “keeping a series fresh,” meeting up with old friends Jane Cleland, Katherine Hall Page, and Justin Scott, and meeting new friends Donald Bain and Renee Paley-Bain. They write the “Murder She Wrote” books–33 in all–so believe me, they know something about the topic. 
And it was fun to hear veteran SJ Rozan interview the guest of honor, Linda Fairstein. What funny, talented women!
I find it amazing that I can come away from every conference with great new ideas. Monday, it’s back behind that screen, refreshed and renewed. Thank you Connecticut librarians!
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