A Letter from Danielle for March ’20
Hi Everyone!!!
The holidays seem a lonnnggggg time behind us, don’t they?? And hopefully, with March, a faint promise of spring, depending on where you live. All my cities will still be cold for a while!!!! It’s always a good time to read—whatever the weather—either curled up with a book in winter, or lying on the beach or under a tree in summer.
I have TWO books coming out this month. My new hardcover, The Numbers Game, comes out today! It was an interesting concept to write about and bring to life. At every age, we feel limited by something. We wait anxiously to finish high school and be considered an “adult,” as though the whole world will change when we turn eighteen. And if you go off to college, you think life will REALLY start when you turn twenty-one or graduate.
We look for those landmarks to tell us how grown-up we are—and wait for doors to open magically. But as time goes on, you realize that you have to make your own magic. In our twenties, we’re often confused, and think that we’ll know everything in our thirties. And people still treat you like a kid in your twenties, which is frustrating. In your thirties you feel more confident and sure of yourself, but then suddenly forty is staring you in the face, and for women especially, you start worrying about getting old. Already? You just got to feeling good about life, and now you have to worry that maybe the best part is over? (It isn’t over, that’s the whole point of my book!!). If you’ve made some mistakes in your personal life, they may haunt you in your forties. A lot of marriages break up then—and then you have to start all over. A new life, a new home, maybe a new job or a new city. It’s actually exciting!! And fifty is even scarier than forty. And on and on it goes, we always feel either too young or too old for something.
Can you change careers, marry again, start a new business; are you too old or too young for a particular relationship, or job, or career, or life? At what age do you feel grown up enough to have children? And at what age do people think you’re too old for a job you want? We’re always chasing the numbers, or they’re chasing us. And finally, you realize and decide that maybe those numbers just don’t matter. I know people who are young in their seventies, still vital and working and creative in their eighties, and others who seem lifeless in their thirties or forties. It’s all about the life force we have, the energy, the courage to try new things. This book is really about the fact that age really doesn’t matter. Some people refuse to be daunted by age. My favorite character in the book is a sculptress who has a full life, a busy career, and a youthful outlook on life in her eighties—she lives with a “younger man” in his seventies, and they’re crazy about each other!! We’re never too old for life or love, or being productive, if we want to be. Age is just a number, it’s not who you are!!! I hope you love the book—it’s liberating!!!
And at the end of the month, Lost and Found is out in paperback, about a very successful photographer who finds a box of old love letters in her closet, and begins to wonder if she made the right decision about the three most important men in her life. She hasn’t seen any of them for years and, after some tension with her children, she takes off on a driving trip cross country to see those three men again—and see who they’ve become—and if she was right to leave them. Her driving trip is an adventure, and she learns a great deal, not just about those men but also about herself. I hope you’ll love that book, too.
Have a great month, and I hope you’ll love these two books!!! They’re both very special— and may give you some new insights about life and how you see things.
Love,
Danielle