Today is International Women’s Day.
“I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.” Anne Frank
Reading THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK was a profound and moving experience for me. I think I was the same age, or pretty close.
“Let be myself and then I am satisfied.”
For me, this sums up what I have sought my whole life and have hoped that my daughters and daughters-in-law, my granddaughters, all women will find.
To be accepted, to be yourself, seems like such a simple thing.
My late, amazing mentor, Sally Merlin, helped me identify the things in my life that fuel my writing. With her help, when I started to really look at themes (I hated them in school and avoided them when I could lol), in my stories, I realized that identity—finding out who you are—runs through almost every book I’ve written, in ways small and sometimes large.
I doubt very much anything I’ve written will end up as assigned reading in a classroom, but I hope that my readers will find comfort in knowing that their journey to understand and to be understood is a shared one. That is one of the many things I love about books—finding out that you’re not alone.
So happy International Women’s Day!
Perilously yours,
Pauline
P.S. Today seems a good day to mention my “wrinkly romance,” LOUISIANA LAGNIAPPE, featuring the Baker boys dad, Zach. An Amazon reviewer had this to say about it: “Really sweet awesome love story for zack. Loved the mini-mystery and the intertwining story of Nell and Alex’s wedding.”
