Evangeline Starr Raybuck and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends. They tell each other everything. After they graduate, things begin to shift. Vangie gets a job waitressing and moves in with Del; June, unable to get a job anywhere but the local factory, moves in with Ray and his older brother Luke. As they become more involved in their lives with their men, they see each other infrequently, but not so seldom that it doesnt become clear to Vangie that theres something dangerous going on, that June has crossed a line with the men in her life that even Vangie would not.
I've thought of myself as a writer since the 6th grade when I wrote a poem that had the word lemondrops in it and my teacher liked it.
I began writing fiction when I was in college, and parts of what I worked on in my very first fiction writing class eventually became my first novel, SWIMMING SWEET ARROW. If I look at it that way, it took me 20 years to finish the book. I guess I'm getting speedier because THIEF, my second novel due out in April 2010, only took me 9 years to finish.
Sometimes people say my work is plainspoken or blunt. I take that as a compliment. I believe sex is a life force and I try to write about it as straightforwardly as I can. I try to let characters live within their desires and obsessions, because most people are works in progress. I let characters say what they want and need to say.
The natural world is also tremendously important to me, and it makes its way into my work all the time. When I was revising a scene in THIEF, I knew it needed something, but I wasn't quite sure what - and then I decided to put a salamander in it. It was important to have my character Suzanne notice this tiny, moist animal crossing the road at that moment in the book.
My work has been translated into German and Norwegian and will soon be translated into Italian. Bompiani, my Italian publisher, bought THIEF before anyone else did. Va bene!
