Nancy Thayer is the bestselling author of over 30 novels, including her most recent, FAMILY REUNION, which released this week. In it, a grandmother-granddaughter duo are eager to spend their summer together on peaceful Nantucket, but the season that unfolds brings about unforgettable surprises. Nancy’s childhood was full of many bookish surprises thanks to her mother, Jane Findly Wright, and she was able to read on her own by the age of four. As she explains in her Mother’s Day blog post, Nancy’s book preferences evolved throughout her preteen and adolescent years, but Jane was a constant influence in her reading life and introduced her to an author whose historical novels she became obsessed with as a teenager.
My mother, Jane Findly Wright, loved books. Every Saturday morning, she took her three children (I was the oldest) around Wichita, Kansas, to the grocery store and the library. She never had to say it in words --- reading books was a necessity of life.
When I was a child, she bought Little Golden Books for me to read. These books were beautiful, with a golden spine and gorgeous illustrations. THE POKY LITTLE PUPPY was my favorite.
I learned to read for myself when I was four, and I quickly realized we couldn’t buy enough books to keep me satisfied. Since then, I have always adored libraries. My grandparents gave me handsome copies of the classics for Christmas, and I’ve passed on LITTLE WOMEN, LITTLE MEN and JO’S BOYS to my daughter and granddaughters. I still can’t relinquish the 1,566-paged volume of GREAT POEMS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, published in 1936. It’s inscribed to my mother from her Aunt Bess on Christmas, 1936, with the personal note: This is a storehouse of many men’s most beautiful thoughts. I hope they will help and cheer you as they have me. My mother gave it to me when I was 12.
When I turned 13, my reading habits changed.
My mother loved novels by a man named Frank Yerby. I casually picked one up, and I was hooked. The book took place during the French Revolution, and its title was THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER, which sounded gorgeously wicked. I was addicted. Frank Yerby wrote 33 novels. His books took place during different historical periods, but I soon realized they had the same plot: a handsome heroic man is in love with three very different women. One is blond, one is brunette and one is redheaded. As much as I read to find out how the revolution ended, I read to find out which one the hero ended up marrying. In THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER, the blond was an aristocrat, the redhead was a woman working in a brothel, and the brunette was a blind little match girl.
Am I getting carried away by Frank Yerby? Well, yes, and here is something I just discovered on Google: Frank Yerby was an African-American with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He left the United States in 1952 in protest against race discrimination and lived in Madrid, Spain, for the rest of his life.
When I was in seventh grade, because my mother had read it and left it lying around, I read PEYTON PLACE by Grace Metalious. I actually told her I was sick and cut school for one day --- and I never cut school --- so that I could read the novel. I remember hiding it under the covers when Mother came into my bedroom to check on my health. Metalious was called “notorious” and “controversial” because of that book, and she did not have a happy life after its publication.
My 2009 novel, SUMMER HOUSE, is about three generations of women --- a granddaughter, a mother and a grandmother whose husband was in WWII. I have my mother’s album of my father’s letters to her from the war in Europe, and they are so beautiful that I used them in SUMMER HOUSE. It was a great joy to give a talk at our local library on Nantucket and to read a few lines from those letters in the book that I had written. My mother, then in her 70s, sat in the front row. She smiled and cried at the same time.
