Julia’s Chocolates, published in 2007, was the first novel I ever sold. I cannot tell you how thrilled I was when my agent called and said he’d sold it to Kensington Books in NYC.

When I was taking writing classes and desperately trying to publish, I was told that you should “write what you know.” I thought then, and now, that that was terrible advice. What did I know about anything? Not much.

I had been a fourth grade teacher. I was an at – home, exhausted mommy with three kids who freelanced articles for The Oregonian on homes, decor, and people. I did a lot of laundry and tried to keep the house clean and my mind sane. I was a lousy cook and totally undomesticated.

I had a crazy imagination and had tried to write category romance and failed miserably. I slept about five to six hours a night as I regularly wrote from ten p.m. until two in the morning.

So I flipped the “write what you know” advice. I decided to write about what I didn’t know.

What I didn’t know a thing about was what it would be like to have a lousy mother. My mother, Bette Jean, was a kind, compassionate, smart woman. She was an English teacher at my middle school, then my high school.

Bette Jean was the daughter of a Texas southern belle who had lost both parents (one dead, one who ran off) by the time she was four years old, and a poor farmer’s son with an eighth grade education from Arkansas who went west to Los Angeles to build homes.

My mother moved eighteen times by the time she left home at seventeen, as her father was flipping houses. It built within her a life long understanding of what it felt like to be left out, to be the outsider.

She met my father, who had flown jets for the Navy, at UCLA, where he was majoring in engineering, specializing in nuclear engineering. They married when she was twenty one.

Bette Jean was lovely and my very best friend.

The mother in Julia’s Chocolates is exactly opposite from my mother in every single way. After I created the mother, I created Julia, her daughter, and gave her a wild, free thinking, fun Aunt Lydia. Aunt Lydia is the aunt I would have loved to have myself.

Aunt Lydia painted her house pink “like a vagina,” with a black door to “ward off seedy men.” Aunt Lydia had five concrete pigs in her front yard and she hung a sign on each one with the name of a man she couldn’t stand. She had a rainbow bridge on her front lawn and toilets overflowing with flowers.

I had my three main characters, then I added three more ladies, Lara, Katie, and Caroline. Lara was married to a loving, stud – man minister and had squashed herself into being the perfect minister’s wife, because that’s what she thought she should do. She was a closet artist and she was miserable.

Katie was a mother married to a raving alcoholic.

Caroline was psychic. I thought a magical element would be entertaining.

I had my story. I wrote my heart out.

If you read Julia’s Chocolates, I hope you love it, I really do.

 

 

Julia’s Chocolates

Chapter One

I left my wedding dress hanging in a tree somewhere in North Dakota.

I don’t know why that particular tree appealed to me. Perhaps it was because it looked as if it had given up and died years ago and was still standing because it didn’t know what else to do.  It was all by itself, the branches gnarled and rough, like the top of someone’s knuckles I knew.

I didn’t even bother to pull over as there were no other cars on that dusty tw0 – lane road, which was surely an example of what hell looked like: You came from nowhere; you’re going nowhere. And here is your only decoration: a dead tree.

Enjoy your punishment.

The radio died, and the silence rattled through my brain. I flipped up the trunk and was soon covered with the white fluff and lace and flounce of what was my wedding dress. I had hated it from the start, but he had loved it.

Loved it because it was high collared and demure and innocent. Lord, I looked like a stuffed white cake when I put it on.

The sun beat down on my head as I stumbled to the tree and peered through the branches to the blue sky tunneling down at me in triangular rays. The labyrinth of branches formed a maze that had no exit. If you were a bug that couldn’t fly, you’d be stuck.  You’d keep crawling and crawling, desperate to find your way out, but you never would. You’d gasp your last tortured breath in a state of utter confusion and frustration, and that would be that.

Yes, another representation of hell.

The first time I heaved the dress up in the air, it landed right back down on my head. And the second time, and the third, which simply increased my fury. I couldn’t even get rid of my own wedding dress.

My breath caught in my throat, my heart suddenly started to race, and it felt like the air had been sucked right out of the universe, a sensation I had become more and more familiar with in the last six months.

I was under the sneaking suspicion that I had some dreadful disease, but I was too scared to find out what it was, and too busy convincing myself I wasn’t suicidal to address something as pesky as that.

My arms were weakened from my Herculean efforts and the fact that I could hardly breathe.  My freezing cold hands started to shake.

I thought the dress was going to suffocate me, the silk cloying, clinging to my face. I finally gave up and lay face down in the dirt. Someone, years down the road, would stop their car and lift up the pile of white fluff and find my skeleton. That is, if the buzzards didn’t gnaw away at me first. Were there buzzards in North Dakota?

Fear of the buzzards, not of death, made me roll over. I shoved the dress aside and screamed at it, using all the creative swear words I knew.  Yes, I thought, my body shaking, I am losing my mind.

Correction: Mind already gone.

Sweat poured off my body as I slammed my dress repeatedly into the ground, maybe to punish it for not getting caught in one of the branches. Maybe to punish it for even existing. I finally slung the dress around my neck like a noose and started climbing the dead tree, sweat droplets teetering off my eyelashes.

The bark peeled and crumbled, but I managed to get up a few feet, and then I gave the white monstrosity a final toss. It hooked on a tiny branch sticking out like a witch’s finger.

The over sized bodice twisted and turned, the long train, now sporting famous North Dakota dirt, hung toward the parched earth like a snake.

I tried to catch my breath, my heart hammering on high speed as tears scalded my cheeks, no doubt trekking through lines of dirt.

I could still hear the dressmaker, “Why on earth do you want such a high neckline?” she had asked, her voice sharp. “With a chest like that, my dear, you should show it off, not cover up!”

I had looked at my big bosoms in her fancy workroom, mirrors all around. They heaved up and down under the white silk as if they wanted to run. The bosoms were as big as my buttocks, I knew, but at least the skirt would cover those.

Robert Stanfield III had been clear. “Make sure you get a wide skirt. I don’t want you in one of those slinky dresses that’ll show every curve. You don’t have the body for that, Turtle.”

He always called me Turtle. Or Possum. Or Ferret Eyes. If he was mad he called me Cannonball Butt.

Although I can understand the size of my butt – that came from chocolate eating binges – I had never understood my bosoms. They had spouted out, starting in fifth grade and had kept growing and growing. By eighth grade I had begged my mother for breast reduction surgery. She was actually all for it, but that was because all of her boyfriends kept starting at me. Or touching. Or worse.

The doctor, of course, was appalled and said no. And here I was, thirty four years old, with these heaving melons still on me. Note to self: One, get money. Two, get rid of the melons.