What was your early life like and how did it influence your writing?
I grew up a city girl in Chicago. My father died when I was four so my mother went to work as a secretary. That meant I spent a lot of time alone. To keep me out of trouble, I was allowed to go to the movies three times a week. Sometimes, when I didn't have the dime for admission, the manager would let me pick up candy bar wrappers and other scraps outside the theater in lieu of a ticket. Watching those amazing stories on the big screen sparked my imagination--Cary Grant chasing a leopard in "Bringing up Baby," Judy Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and Spencer Tracy struggling to survive an ocean storm in "Captains Courageous." At that time I didn't do any writing but pretended to be the characters I'd seen at home. Those movies stirred emotions that stayed with me and helped me create my own stories as I grew older.
What is the greatest joy of writing for you?
I came to writing through genealogy. I wanted to learn about those who came before me, to try and view their world through their eyes, to show how history shaped the person and the person shaped history. Among those from the past was a whaler out of Nantucket, a soldier suffering through the cold of Valley Forge, a Quaker abolitionist teaching slaves to read, a Civil War soldier dying of dysentery, a Welsh coal miner, and a Swedish dressmaker. Out of all this came my first book Through the Generations. But the ancestor that interested me the most was Sir William Coffin who served in the Court of Henry VIII. I visited his manor house in Devon, England, read letters he had written archived at Oxford, and studied books on the Tudor Period; until I began to feel that he was working through me to tell his story. From that exhilarating and humbling experience came my second book, The King's Man.
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