Jodi Picoult on Sheila Curran's latest novel, Everyone She Loved: “Filled with characters who make you laugh out loud even as they break your heart, this is a funny, warm, inventive, original book.” (Sweet blurb from the undisputed diva of women's fiction. Go, Sheila!) Everyone She Loved is fresh out in the world this week, and the set up is intriguing.
From the flap:
Penelope Cameron, loving mother, devoted wife and generous philanthropist, has convinced her husband and four closest friends to sign an outlandish pact. If Penelope should die before her two daughters are eighteen, her husband will not remarry without the permission of Penelope’s sister and three college roommates. For years, this contract gathers dust until the unthinkable happens. Suddenly, everyone she loved must find their way in a world without Penelope.
Make one wonder...and anticipating that, Sheila shares this backstory on the origins of her latest novel:
Books are born in strange places. This one was conceived in the front seat of a car.
No, not that kind of conception. My friend Julianna was driving. Our daughters were chatting in the back seat. I was talking about an article I’d written for McCall’s about two young girls in Arizona whose parents had died within months of each other. “Did you know that in some states, if there isn’t a will, the kids can be sent to foster care?”
The girls in my story weren’t so unfortunate. Their mother had named her best friends, another pair of sisters, as the children’s guardians.
”Just make sure you chose someone to take over if something happens to you.”
From there we talked about difficult it would be to chose which couple among one’s siblings and friends would best be suited for the job. Where did one couple’s permissiveness slide into overindulgence, another’s consistency into unbearable strictness? The idea of dying was hard enough, but figuring out which couple would most love your kids in your absence? Impossible.
We paused in our conversation just long enough for my brain to settle on yet another catastrophic possibility. “You know what would be worse?” I asked. “What if I died and John (my husband) married someone awful? I’d have no control at all!”
Another pause.
“Unless,” I continued. “I could get him to agree that if he remarried, my sisters and friends would check out the bride. Make sure she wasn’t some kind of wicked stepmother.”
And thus was hatched the idea of EVERYONE SHE LOVED, a novel that explores the faith one woman placed in her dearest friends, the care she took to protect her family, and the many ways in which romantic entanglements will confound and confuse even the most determined of planners.
Click here to read Chapter One.
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