By Josi
One of my least favorite questions to be asked is “What is
your favorite book?” I have many favorites, but it’s difficult to rank them as
my very favorite, or my fourth favorite, and as I get older, books that were
once lower on the list have risen in the ranks as my understanding of them have
changed. There are a few books, however, that never seem to fall far down the
list. One of those books is
Twelve Sisters by Leslie Beaton Hedley. I checked
it out from the library many years ago and liked it so much that I bought my
own copy, which I somehow lost (probably because I loaned it out) and then I
bought another copy which I don’t plan to loan out ever again since it’s now
out of print. I don’t know how well the book sold when it was in print, I don’t
know how many other people read it, but—not to put too heavy a spin on it—it
changed my life. For a few reasons.
The book is
about twelve women who live in the same LDS ward. They cover the spectrum of
college student to a woman, literally, in her final hours. Each chapter is
dedicated to one of these women and involves a sacrament meeting. In “Her”
chapter, the woman “sees” the other women, but we get to see her in a way that
no one else in that room ever will. We see their struggles, their heartbreaks,
their purpose, their goals. We share in their frustrations, we understand why
do they do the things they do.
In the next chapter, we see another
woman, often passing judgment on someone else we just “met” a chapter or two
earlier. I had never read anything like it—I still haven’t—and when I finished
the book I felt as though my world had opened up a little wider. That woman I’m
critical in my mind for being too perfect, or too sloppy, or too lazy, or too
heavy, has a story that I don’t know and yet I think I DO know. Over and over
again we pass judgment on one another and are somehow confident of that
perspective even though that person we’ve judged is essentially a stranger to
us. It’s so easy to do, it comes naturally for some of us to critique and
measure everyone we meet. Twelve sisters, however, showed just how much truth
is missed when we do this to one another, and how we can compound the hard road
someone is traveling by being so flippant with our determinations.
After
reading that book—about fifteen years ago—I had the seed of an idea form in my
brain—someday I want to write a book like that. In the years that followed, I
would think about it now and then but I couldn’t figure out how to write it
without basically copying what Hedley had done in Twelve Sisters. I didn’t want
to re-write that book, I wanted one of my own, but couldn’t find the right way
to do it different, and yet as good; as powerful. Then, in 2009, Julie Wright
and I went on a book tour. We spent hours and hours and hours talking about
pretty much everything. At some point, I started telling her about my idea but
as I said the words, a light went on in the closet where the idea had been
gathering dust for years. What if the reason I couldn’t figure out how to write
it was because I wasn’t supposed to? As the words tumbled out, Julie helped me
process them and within a short time the idea for Newport Ladies’ Book Club was
born. We wouldn’t write one book, we’d write four books by four authors but
with the same goal I felt Twelve Sisters had achieved—showing how we misinterpret
other people, and just how much of an impact we can have on them.
After
bringing Annette Lyon and Heather Moore up to speed, we all set out to do
something we’d never seen done before—a parallel novel series about four different
women who meet up in a book club. The goal was to show these women’s lives in
detail, while the other members of this book club only saw bits and pieces.
I’ll write
more about the process we went through in a future post, but hope that this
helps the readers understand where the idea came from and why we wrote it the
way we did. Our hope is that reading one book is great, but reading a second,
third, or fourth then enriches the overall experience, helping us to “see” what
we can’t see in just one novel from one Point of View. We hope you love it as
much as we do.
