A Letter from Danielle for June ‘19
Hi Everyone,
Oh YAY!!! It’s summer, or just about, and will be officially summer shortly after you get this newsletter. Spring is always a little sketchy, depending on where one is. I’ve been in snowstorms in New York in late April. And there’s a French saying that says not to take off your winter clothes yet in April. And in most of the East Coast in the States, it doesn’t really become spring-like till May or June. But by sometime in June, summer is ours—hopefully with some vacation and beach time in the coming months. I do love June, I always love strolling home from dinners on warm evenings. It’s such a luxury NOT to be all bundled up and freezing. (The exception being San Francisco, which is really cold in summer, with lots of wind and fog. And Mark Twain’s famous saying “The coldest winter I’ve ever been in, was summer in San Francisco!!”) But ready or not, here comes summer!!! The best part of summer for me is the time I get to spend with my family, in little bits and pieces, and usually for a week in July, and a long weekend in August.
On the book front, some exciting books for you, my book In His Father’s Footsteps is out in paperback. It’s a three-generation family saga, which begins at the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and continues to the present, with three generations of a family, beginning with a couple who immigrated to New York right after the war, and the two generations that come after them, and what they learned from each other, generation by generation. It’s a touching and heart-warming book I hope you’ll love.
And at the end of June, I’ll have a new book in hardcover for you, Lost and Found. It’s about a busy, competent, talented, and very successful photographer in her late 50s. She’s very independent, and perhaps a little eccentric, and lives in an old firehouse—and even has the original firemen’s brass pole. She has a minor accident, a broken ankle, which can happen to anyone. Her adult children lead busy lives and don’t pay much attention to her, she’s busy too—until she breaks her ankle and her oldest daughter treats her as though she is 100, tells her to sell the house she loves, she should no longer live alone, or in a house with a dangerous staircase—and a fire pole!!—and she can see her cherished independence going right down the tubes. While recuperating, she discovers a box of the love letters from the three men she didn’t marry, and begins to wonder if her decisions about them were right at the time, and what has happened to them in the past 20 or 25 years. To escape her children’s reactions to the broken ankle, and revisit her past, she takes off on a driving trip across the United States, to find the 3 men and see them again, in Boston, Chicago ,and Montana (she lives in NY). The book is about what she discovers about them, whether she was wrong or right in her earlier judgement about them, and what she discovers about herself in the process, and the new people she meets along the way. And, as a result of her taking off on her own, she forges new relationships with her adult children. By the end of the book, she is firmly back on both feet, as independent as ever, perhaps even more so, and she has learned a great deal about herself, her adult kids, and the men she didn’t marry. It’s a fun read, and maybe close to home for anyone with adult kids—who may see us as “old” before we are!!! It’s about staying who you are!! I hope you love it as much as I enjoyed writing it!!! It’s a declaration of independence for anyone with grown-up kids!!! Have fun reading it!!!
Have a great week!!!
Much love,
Danielle