Eight-year-old Terry McQuinn's life changed one snowy Christmas Eve on the coast of Maine when he glimpsed the "summer people's" world previously unknown to this caretaker's son. Serenity Cottage was a place of beauty and privilege owned by the luminous Halworths -- but in the blink of an eye, tragedy left them in ruins. Determined not to follow in his father's footsteps, Terry grew up to become a high-flying Hollywood film agent -- but he has lost himself along the way. When he is called back to Maine by his father's death, he finds a note that stops him cold: Open Serenity for Christmas. No one has been in the house in thirty years. Although Terry's first instinct is to leave it all behind, he discovers that Katherine Halworth, the girl he remembers from that fateful night, is the new owner. With her arrival imminent, Terry's past comes rushing back and he soon learns that it's never too late to forgive -- and never too late to love.
From the time I was seventeen years old I wanted to write important books and movies that would bring meaning-- DEEP MEANING-- into peoples' lives. I wanted it so badly that from the time I was 21 until I turned 34 I locked myself in a room and lived alone like a monk, reading the classics over and over while I taught myself how to write luminous sentences that revealed the great truths about life and love and friendship. The stuff that is important in this world. I gave 12 years of my life to this education without any guarantee that anything I ever wrote would be good or that I would ever see a word of my writing published. But I dreamed the big dream that my books would be published by the great illustrious publishing houses of New York City-- a million miles away from where I was locked in my room. Random House. Little Brown. Doubleday. Simon & Schuster. And above all the others-- Alfred A. Knopf-- the most respected literary publisher in the world. I wanted this so badly that if someone had come along then and said, Ok, we'll make a bargain with you, Don. You cut off your right arm and we'll grant you your dream. I would have said, No, thanks. But you can cut off my left. And that is the truth. That is how badly I wanted this. I wanted beyond hope and dreaming to become a novelist.
I started writing feature stories for Maine newspapers. I was awful until an editor told me that I was always standing in between the reader and the subject of my story and that I needed to move away so the reader could draw close to the story. I sold stories for the next three years while I worked as a carpenter like both my grandfathers had.
Then it was the winter of 1977 and I had moved to a small tourist town way up the coast of Maine. They had a weekly newspaper there and the old editor had died recently. I begged for the job and got it. I was sitting at the editor's desk my second day on the job. There was a blizzard tearing through the town. Every summer store was boarded up. The little light on my desk was the only light on in town. I looked up from the black Royal typewriter and there was a man walking through the storm, straight to my door. In that moment, I felt my life as a writer begin to turn.
He was a big man, maybe six five, with wide shoulders. He kicked the snow off his boots and asked me if I was the new editor. I said I was. He said he had a story to tell me. He had just sat down when the telephone rang. Someone wanted me to hurry to the dock to take a photograph of the storm tide ripping a restaurant off the pier and carrying it out of the harbor. I asked the man if he could come back and see me the next day. He said he would.
The next morning on his way to see me he dropped dead of a heart attack. Just fell into the snow. And I ended up writing his obituary that week instead of his story.
But I met his widow and she told me he had been a young soldier in the army during the Korean War. They had just had their first baby when he left for the war. Six months after he got there he was captured by the Chinese army. He was a POW for three years, held in a cave for most of that time. He lost over a hundred pounds and was very sick. For a while the POWS were in the hands of a sadistic Chinese commander who would pick one American soldier each night to tie to a pole in the freezing cold. Then he would put a rat in a wooden bowl and strap the bowl to the man's stomach.
All through the night the man would howl with pain while the rat ate its way through him. So this soldier cut a deal with the commander-- he said, 'If I get my men to sign germ warfare confessions will you stop this?' It worked and no other prisoners were executed.
Three years later the soldier comes home to America and it's the McCarthy era. The United States army accused the soldier of being a traitor. They court-martialed him, and they used all the men he kept alive in the cave to testify against him. This was just a little man from Maine with no education. He loved the Army so much that he refused to hire a lawyer to protect him. He said, 'The Army will know that what I did over there in Korea, I did to keep my men alive.' Well, the Army sent him to prison on a life sentence.
They held him for three years then released him. All his life he claimed he was innocent and his wife believed him. Now that he was dead she asked me if I could find the truth. "I need to know the truth," she said to me.
I thought it might take me six months. It ended up taking me six years. I wrote that as my first published book, A SOLDIER'S DISGRACE.
Anyway, here's how I wanted to end that story: If you believe in your dream, keep at it and borrow money if you have to in order to survive. I was about deeply in debt for the six years it took me to write that book. Then one day Paramount Pictures bought the book and I was suddenly swimming in money on the fourth floor of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Hollywood. Champaign in the fridge. Warren Beatty down the hallway. A red convertible for me to drive while I was in LA. The whole deal. Paramount hired the Australian writer, David Williamson to write the script. He had won an Academy Award by then for his script, " The Year Of Living Dangerously" and his script taught me the rudiments of screenwriting.
That first book finally taught me to write well enough to get into the Iowa Writers Workshop where every major writer in the last 70 years has either studied or taught. I was awarded their most prestigious fellowship there which gave me two solid years just to write.
Iowa led to two novels published in New York in the next two years. I had married Colleen by then and we had two babies in three years. Then two more babies. Colleen's dream was to stay home with the kids while they were little and so we had to find cheap places to live in this world. I mean to survive on my novels.
We went to County Wicklow in Ireland. A cottage in the country for $85 a month. I had to hitch hike five miles to do the laundry. It was awesome. A beautiful time I long to have back. We were all so happy. Then we were living up the coast of Maine. Four little children under the age of 7. We didn't even own a bed. Nothing we couldn't fit into our bomb station wagon with no seatbelts that worked. No health insurance. Hand me down clothes for the kids. We were so happy, so close as a family.
Here's something- my daughters were 12, 14,16 when I finally bought them their first nice dresses. I had just learned that one of my screenplays was going to be made into a movie. So I took the girls to Hollywood and we celebrated. But I was 50 years old by then and had never been able to buy them nice dresses. That might happen to you as writers. But the other side is that I had spent every day of their lives with them. At home with them. One summer I played 84 rounds of golf with my fourteen year old son, Jack. That's more than many sons and fathers play together in a lifetime. And as a poor writer I got to spend thirteen summers on the ocean in Maine with my children. Afternoons on the beach. Sailing a small boat every summer day. God watches out for writers who want their books to make the world better in some way and who never contribute to the violence and the ignorance of the culture. I believe this.
Money. Being a writer has a lot to do with learning to live on no money. You already know this. You feel it everyday; I mean, the sacrifices you are already making for your writing.
Things will work out for you. I was just beginning a college teaching career at Colgate University. A wonderful job with wonderful students and I thought we would stay forever. No more worrying about money! But I got fired after a year (the politics at that school were brutal). Suddenly there we were with no money again. I couldn't buy the kids winter coats. I finally found a job working on a construction site on the ocean in Maine. I was 43 by then. We built a mansion that winter. A 12,000 square foot house with 10 bathrooms. 10 hour days working outside all winter. Some mornings it was 26 below zero when we started.
Someone told me I should write about this. I didn't know why, but I did. It became a cover story for Harper's Magazine and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. And I got a book contract from Little Brown and wrote a book about that year. THE CLIFF WALK. A family story. Then Disney bought it for a movie. Disney and the best producer in Hollywood, Kathleen Kennedy who had done "Schindler's list." They signed Curtis Hansen to direct. he had just won his Academy Award for "LA COnfidential." The project died when they could not agree on a script but we were suddenly able to go back to Ireland! Off we went to take the children to the little village outside Sligo where their grandmother had said goodbye to her parents the morning her journey to Elis Island began in 1902.
That book in 1997 led to something amazing. My father and I had been estranged for fifteen years. After he read my book and watched me on The Today Show and Oprah, he sent me something in the mail. A small black and white photograph of him on his wedding day, sitting beside his bride. On the back of the photograph he wrote, "Peggy and Me." He told me that she was my real mother. He'd never said anything to me about her for all these years. It turned out that my mother had died sixteen days after giving birth to me and my twin brother. She was nineteen years old. Nineteen. I was now old enough to be her father. No one ever told us about her because they didn't want us to go through the world knowing we had killed her in childbirth. I mean we lived two hundred yards from her grave and no one ever took us there.
So this became another book, Of Time & Memory. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York. Soon after the book was published, when Oprah Winfrey decided to produce a series of book videos to try to do for books in America what videos had done for music, and the first book she chose for this project was Of Time & Memory.
Mark Pellington, the brilliant young Hollywood director who had made the classic music videos for Bruce Springsteen and the Irish band, U2, was hired to direct and he took a film crew to Hatfield, to document the sad beauty of Peggy's love story and the mystery that shrouded her death. Her marriage bed and all her belongings, including the Singer sewing machine she had used to make her wedding dress and baby clothes, were given away on the sidewalk soon after she died. And when her husband in his desolation began sleeping every night on her grave, he had to be placed under a physician's care.
The people of Hatfield who had watched Peggy grow up spent the next fifty years wondering why she had died, and why her twin sons were never told about their mother. Though the boys grew up with their father and his new wife just a few blocks from the cemetery where Peggy was buried, the family minister, a Lutheran pastor, had instructed their father never to take them there.
One of those sons went on to become a Lutheran minister himself. I became a writer.
I was forty-seven years old when I stood at Peggy's grave for the first time. I had been writing my way there for most of my life, though I didn't know this.
The book I wrote for Knopf, Of Time & Memory, was published to considerable praise. It was widely reviewed and appeared in an extensive cover story in USA Today. I did over a hundred interviews across the country including National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" and "The Diane Rehm Show." The book made the Best Seller list in Boston and in Germany.
Three months after Of Time & Memory was published, I had just finished my appearance on the TODAY Show in New York and was back in my hotel room, a room my editor at Knopf had filled with flowers, when the telephone rang. It was Peggy's doctor from 1950, now an 87-year old man. He said this to me: "I've read your book. You got it wrong. I could have saved your mother's life."
I still remember standing in the hotel room and feeling like the layers of the earth were shifting below me as this doctor told me that it was true that my mother had decided to carry her baby to full term even if it cost her life; but it was not that straight forward.
Dr. Clinton Toewe, was a brilliant young obstetrician just a few years out of medical school when he first met Peggy. He diagnosed her pregnancy in the fifth week, and soon after discovered that the fetus was poisoning her kidneys. He told her that she would die unless he performed an abortion. He placed before her the choice of saving herself or the baby she was carrying.
She told him that she wanted to save her baby.
But in the sixth month of her pregnancy when she was gravely ill, she went to him to save her life. As he prepared to perform a late term abortion, he examined Peggy with his stethoscope and heard two hearts beating, not one, and when he told her that she was carrying twins, she would not let him take her babies. Here the choice became almost impossible for her because she knew that by choosing to give up her life for her babies, she was, in essence, choosing them over the young man who loved her. She was his first and last love, and he was hers. They loved each other depthlessly, and her death would destroy him, she knew this. And because she was afraid he would not be able to be a good father to her babies if he knew they had caused her death, she made the doctor promise to keep all of this secret from him. And so he kept his silence. He delivered the babies just before four o'clock in the morning on August 11, his first set of twins. Sixteen days later Peggy died.
People in the small town of Hatfield, Pennsylvania still remember how Peggy spent the last weeks of her pregnancy sewing her baby clothes and preparing to die. Too uncomfortable to sleep, she often stayed up all night sewing in her bedroom, and the little lamp on the Singer machine was often the only light still on in the town of Hatfield, Pennsylvania. People remembered that and how, soon after her babies were born, the light went out forever.
In the weeks after her death my father slept every night on her grave. His army buddies took turns picking him up each morning, taking him to the coffee shop on Main Street to sit and talk to him.
The whole time I was writing the book I had a strong sense that all the other books I had written in my life were just a preparation to tell my mother and father's love story. But after the doctor's revelation, I had to face the truth: I had written the one book that I was probably put on this earth to write, and I had gotten it wrong.
I became haunted.
It was not just what the doctor had told me. It was more complicated. During my research for the book I had discovered that all my mother's hospital records had been destroyed when a new hospital was built. But one item remained; a single index card that had been taped to the railing of her bed. On this card was the doctor's name. I had that index card in my pocket when I went to see the doctor in the little town of Lansdale, Pennsylvania. The local newspaper had written a story about my search for my mother and the doctor had read the story. As I shook his hand he said, "I delivered a thousand babies in my career and I never lost a single mother. Your mother was never my patient."
I could have exposed his lie simply by showing him the index card. But I didn't. This was more than an error of omission on my part. I was afraid the doctor might tell me what I didn't want to know-- that my mother's death could have been prevented. And so in the book I excused his lie by speculating that the doctor was still standing on his physician-patient confidentiality with my mother, forty seven years after her death.
That explanation was satisfactory for the book, but after I learned the whole truth, I barely slept or left my room for a year.
What is a writer to do in this situation other than try to write his way to some accommodation.
I decided that the only way I could atone for my flawed book was to learn to write screenplays so that someday I could set the record straight in a movie.
I spent ten months reading all the great scripts, three or four scripts a day, and in 2002, when Hallmark Hall Of Fame bought the film rights to my novel, Fallen Angel, I fought for the chance to write the script. I was in Northern Ontario on the set of the movie, telling the star, Gary Sinise, about my mother's story and the screenplay I planned to write about her life. I thought that I might finish it in three months.
It took me six years, a long process of writing 3,763 pages to get the final 120 page draft which I have now under the title, "American Love Story."
At the heart of the screenplay is perhaps one of the greatest stories of redemption and forgiveness ever written. My father barely made it through the years after Peggy died, and because he was far too broken to be a real father to me and my brother, we drifted apart for many years. All my life I believed it was my father who had to be forgiven for never being present in my life; but finally I knew that I had to be forgiven for taking from him the girl he loved best. The true love of his life.
I believe that I have a story which will strike an urgency in the world. Because my mother at age nineteen experienced all the emotions on both sides of what has become the debate over abortion, and because her final decision placed her on the common ground that both sides often seem blind to, namely AntiAbortion, ProChoice, I believe the film I have written has the chance to draw the opposing sides together by making us see abortion as we never have before, just as the film "Kramer Vs. Kramer" once made us see divorce in a new way.
Not long after that book was published I was up early with the radio on, National public radio. News of a bombing in Northern Ireland in the town of Omagh. The IRA had chosen that day to set off the bomb in the center of the town because that was the particular morning when mothers took their children into town to buy their back to school uniform. 39 people slaughtered. Most of them mothers and children. Hundreds wounded. We never think about the wounded. There are now fifteen people in that town who had both feet blown off in the blast. And there are more than twenty people who were so horribly disfigured that they wear masks over their faces. If you were to go to Omagh tomorrow you would see the people in their wax masks.
I heard that radio news and I knew that I had to go there right away. Because I wanted to bear witness to what had happened. Because I had been there with my own little children and we had been so happy.
Twenty hours later I was walking through the wreckage of the town. So much suffering. It was unreal. The children all wear little patches on the school blazers; these patches were scatter all over the streets like leaves.
I ended up attending thirteen funerals, walking in the long processions to the grave yards. Then I stayed in a hotel for a month and began writing a novel about it. NIGHT CROSSING. I fictionalized everything except the name of one woman who was killed in the bombing. She was holding the hand of her three year old daughter, and two weeks from delivering the twin girls in her belly. All of them were killed. I went to her funeral. They buried the four of them together. The only square grave I had ever seen. (Bono sings about this bombing in U-2 Slane Castle concert). Someday I am going to go back to find out how the husband ever survived such a loss. If he survived at all.
After that book I wrote two more novels, one with Simon & Schuster, the other with Doubleday. Neither of these turned out to be as good as I had hoped when I began them. That's part of what makes writing so difficult and at times unbearable. But we can only do our best. And I have come to believe now that if we can say two or three things in a book or movie that matter to us as writers, and that bring meaning to people by reminding them of the things that matter in this life, then we haven't failed.
Our job of course is to write books and stories and poems that go on to remind people that they aren't alone. I mean, years from now, many years, someone you never knew will read something you wrote and see that you felt the same way. The same loneliness. The same confusion. Your work has dignity because you struggled with the important feelings and questions.
I want you to believe that you that you can write your way through the world. If you work hard enough. If you are willing to throw yourself away for your writing. If you can set aside all the desires that we are constantly encouraged to adopt as our own. The desire for a new car, a bigger couch, better hair, etc. We have to turn our backs against that. It's not easy.
You can make it if you persevere. And it doesn't come down to talent. I've seen young writers squander their talent. Hard work can't be squandered because it carries its own rewards. Hard work and defiance are the most important things.
Defiance. When my novel, FALLEN ANGEL, was sold to Hallmark Hall of Fame, my agent in LA told me to forget about asking to write the screenplay adaptation. I'd sold four books to Hollywood and I'd never fought for the chance to write the script myself. This time I wasn't going to be placated. So I got the chance. It was made in 2003 and became the highest rated television movie that year. It ran again the next year, only the second time in many years that Hallmark has run the same movie twice in two years, and it has now become their most requested Christmas movie each year on the Hallmark Channel.
So you can prevail if you find your defiance. And if you work harder than you have even imagined.
And sometimes the hard work brings you some fun! Making the movie was terrific fun. Think of this. I drove to the set in northern Ontario into a small town and when I arrived I found that the whole town had been transformed into the fictional town in my screenplay. It was like walking through a dream. I had written the novel locked away in a room for a year. Then I'd locked myself away for another nine months to write the script. And now it was all alive, right in front of me. And bringing Colleen there was the most fun I've ever had in 28 years of writing. Making movies is fun! You should think about doing it. And selling your screenplays enables you to provide for the people you love.
And sometimes pursuing one dream leads to another. A new dream. My new dream now is to one day caddie for my son on a professional tour. I was sitting home in Maine, missing my son so much after he left for college that I would wear his golf shoes (four sizes too large for me) when I did chores around the house. One day I was sitting in our family room watching the Golf Channel. The Dunhill Tournament was on, live from St. Andrews Scotland. My wife came into the room and saw me there wearing our son's golf shoes. She said to me, "You need to do something different for a while. Maybe go somewhere. Where would you like to go?" I looked at her, then pointed to the TV screen and said, "Right there."
Two weeks later on Valentine's day I flew to Edinburgh. I bought a cheap winter membership at a small golf course outside St. Andrews and started playing two rounds a day,with rocks from the beach in my golf bag to get into shape. I did that for 77 days straight, right through the ten day gale with winds that knocked me to my knees twice. I'd never seen wind like that before. When I was ready I walked to The Old Course and they hired me. And every day out there, taking around golfers from all over the world, I pretend that I am caddying for my son. And I know that day will come.
