Memories of the Lost by Barbara O'Neal

 

LUCY BURDETTE: I adore Barbara O’Neal’s books and gobble them up as soon as they’re released. Her newest, MEMORIES OF THE LOST, is out next week and I’m delighted to host her today. I think you’ll find her blog about the process of writing fascinating. Welcome Barbara!

BARBARA O’NEAL: I am in that strange between place that career novelists know well. I spent the past year writing a new book, which I turned in to my editors a few weeks ago. They’ll have it for a month or so, and I’ll get it back for revisions and fine tuning. After the hard push on the book (that last month is always so very deeply enmeshed in BookLand!) I’m taking July off to spend with my family, visit my mother, hang out with my granddaughters, but in the back of my mind, I’m communing with the next book. At this point, it’s only vaguely a book, a wispy bit of storyline, a situation and characters. It was getting solid enough that I opened a Scrivener file for it the other day, but I can’t look at it too closely, or it will evaporate. 

Finally, my new book, Memories of the Lost is arriving in the world, all shiny and polished like a perfect apple. It is a highly romantic and mysterious book full of secrets, set in both New York City and England. I loved writing about Tillie the artist, and Liam the all-too-famous meditation teacher, about the loft where Tillie lives and paints. I also loved Clare, a Devon woman of middle age who has secrets and traumas of her own, and the farm where she lives with her husband and their collection of animals, a blind dog and a hare who can’t hop and the cats who run through everything in this book. 

The thing is, Memories is fully finished. I worked on it for more than a year, many drafts, and many edits to bring it into a place it could give a reader the experience it gave me in my head. It takes a lot of hours and work to get a book to that point, and it’s exhilarating to get it there. Such an accomplishment! (Whether the world loves the book is beside the point, honestly. An artist of any kind can only do the best work she is capable of producing at any given time.) 

The book I just turned in, titled only with the characters’ names, Mariah and Veronica, is in a different state. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and mental energy to get 100,000 words of a book onto the page, and getting to the end in a relatively readable, whole state is an astonishing thing every single time. I love the book madly when I turn it in the first time; I’ve done it! Written a whole book! 

Of course, it’s quite raw yet, full of plot holes and dropped timelines and inconsistencies and probably different names for secondary characters (editor: “is he Joe or Jim?”). There are always overworked words, different ones for every book; I am known to fall in love with some glittery description and then drop it in over and over. There are the plethora of justs and maybes and shrugs (so many shrugs, so many one-shouldered shrugs, so many raised eyebrows and sideways smiles!). I will wince upon reading all of these things in revision, but most of us just can’t see all of them in a rough draft. It’s all forest in rough draft; revision brings in the individual trees. 

And the new book, the misty idea, is just that. I always think I know what it is about when I start, and I’m always wrong. The girls in the basement lure me in with something that sounds like fun—two women, different ages, thrown together on a long journey!—and ends up being about something else entirely. I can see a luxury stateroom, an exotic destination, a—wait, is he—?

I just have to follow it, and see what happens. 

The day after I turned in Mariah and Veronica, I was sitting in my office/studio, feeling the sense of satisfaction that I’d managed to get it done before my guests arrived. The little girl part of me who said writing books would be the best job ever said quietly, “And I was right, don’t you think?”

She was.

Summer is an in-between time for many of us. What books are you reading to keep yourself company?

ABOUT THE BOOK: An unsuspecting artist uncovers her late mother’s secrets and unravels her own hidden past in a beguiling novel by the USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids.

Months after her mother passes away, artist Tillie Morrisey sees a painting in a gallery that leaves her inexplicably lightheaded and unsteady. When a handsome stranger comes to her aid, their connection is so immediate it seems fated, though Liam is only visiting for a few days.

Working on her own art has always been a refuge, but after discovering a document among her mother’s belongings that suggests Tillie’s life has been a lie, she begins to suffer from a series of fugue states, with memories surfacing that she isn’t even sure are her own. As her confusion and grief mount, and prompted by a lead on the painting that started it all, Tillie heads to a seaside village in England. There, she hopes to discover the source of her uncanny inspirations, sort out her feelings about Liam, and unravel truths that her mother kept hidden for decades.

The fluidity of memory, empowering strength of character, beauty of nature, and love of family braid together in this artful tapestry of a novel.

You can find Barbara on Substack and Facebook.