Mindy Friddle's Secret Keepers- blog-stop here today!

I don’t read many family stories, even less of Southern fiction, but something about Secret Keepers grabbed my attention, in reality when I think back it was mostly the cover. It is an odd thing about books, you never know what is going to attract you, they all having away of calling out to you, and it is the ones that touch you in a subconscious, which usually turn out to be the best reads. I think this is why I rarely read a “bad” book. Don’t get me wrong, I have from time to time, but most of the time the right books seem to get into my hands.

So when I got the chance to host a blog tour spot for Mindy Friddle for her new book Secret Keepers I jumped on it!

What is a blog tour?

Well a blog tour is similar to an author’s book tour, but it’s hosted online, instead of at, say, a bookstore. The touring author visits a number of blogs (otherwise known as “blog stops”) over a set period–typically, a month. And today it’s me!

“Official” Summary: Rather than give the official Amazon or Barnes & Noble summary, I like the summary that Mindy offers on her own website: I started SECRET KEEPERS with an image of Emma Hanley, gazing at a family portrait, stuck in her hometown. Like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, she yearns to flee. Just when it looks like she might get her wish, her husband heads off to his morning coffee klatch with a gaggle of adoring widow women, and . . . well, Emma’s dream of travel is stymied. Again.

And then she has her hands full juggling the demands of her adult children. Things get really prickly when a motley group of gardeners, the Blooming Idiots, unearth some strange botanicals and the Hanley family’s secrets. Nature, it turns out, is a major character in SECRET KEEPERS. In the course of the novel — through regret, broken hearts, and grief — humor winds like a flowering vine. Publisher’s Weekly says the Hanley clan, “is a genuinely quirky lot with its own unlikely ideas of happiness.” Strange bedfellows, indeed.

About the author: Mindy Friddle is a native of South Carolina, where her family has lived for more than two centuries.
A Master Gardener, she lives in Greenville, South Carolina where she directs the Writing Room, a community-based nonprofit program she founded in 2006 to bring writers to Greenville for paid seminars and readings. Secret Keepers, is her second novel.

Her father was in the service, so she did get to see the world in her formative years. She moved in the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth grades—such a childhood encourages one to observe peer groups from a remove, cultivating the narrator within. As an Army Brat she lived in Germany, Virginia, and Washington D.C. before returning to South Carolina as a teen.

You can find much more about Mindy on her website.

My review: I am by no means a gardener, in fact I have one of those brown thumbs, and I can appreciate the joy that people find in gardening and plants and flowers, it is not my cup of tea. However, that is not required to thoroughly enjoy this book. Flowers and gardening are used as an instrument to tell the story of a family. A family with lots of history, secrets, unsaid conversations. A mixture of Southern themes of gentility, religion, community gently thread the family’s stories together. The presentation of the problems of multiple generations is interesting too, you can see how they all have different focuses, different problems, but they have strong roots (sorry, I couldn’t resist) that tie them together. This was a very pleasurable book to read, it left me wondering what smell I would experience if I got my one whiff of a secret keeper…

My mini-interview with Mindy: After reading the book, there were a few questions I wanted to ask and Danette graciously provided them to me in the following interview:

[MWA] Are any of the characters inspired by people you grew up with? If not, where did you get the inspiration for Emma?

[MF] For me, characters are not based on anyone I know–or knew. They come into their own. I find the adage about characters being revealed by their actions is true. Emma? hmmm….I started with an image, a situation, an older woman gazing at a family portrait with bittersweet feelings. I took it from there. After I got to know Emma—her background, her yearnings—and observed her actions (which sometimes surprised me) it wasn’t hard to get into her head. Also, the omniscient point of view in Secret Keepers allows the reader access to the thoughts of a cast of characters: Emma, but also her adult children, her teenage grandson, a landscaper, and a homeless man. I really loved using the omniscient point of view, with a narrator who occasionally chimes in. I hope the reader does, too. I have more about the story behind SECRET KEEPERS on my website.

[MWA] If you got your one whiff of a secret keeper, what do you think it would be?

[MF] Oh, that’s a good question. For me a whiff of a secret keeper would smell like a mixture of bubblegum lip gloss and whatever that cologne was my seventh grade boyfriend wore. Those heady days of first love!

[MWA] I too was an Army brat and was lucky enough to travel around the world and the States. What is your fondest memory of moving around??

[MF] One of the best things that helped shape me as a writer was the fact that when my family lived on an Army base in Germany in my formative years, there was no television to speak of. Just a big library. And I loved that military families were so comfortable with meeting new people. You welcomed change because every three years you moved…and so did everyone else. There were no “new kids” in class, really. “How short are you?” someone would ask. You’d say, ” eight months,” because the question meant, how long before you move again? When we moved from Germany back to the States– I was fourteen. It was especially challenging to move back to the small town I was born in, where everyone knew each other since kindergarten, where there was no public transportation. I felt like a genie being squeezed back into the bottle.

[MWA] When/how/why did you decide to blog? What is the greatest pleasure you get from your blog?

[MF] I started blogging a couple of years ago. The best part has been posting photographs, a lot from my garden. And then it’s always a pleasure to share a review of a good book or film, and sometimes I talk about the process of writing. I love getting comments and conversations going, too!

[MWA] This was your second novel, how was the experience different from writing your first?

[MF] My first novel, THE GARDEN ANGEL, is about the unlikely friendship between two women: An obituary writer schemes to hold onto her dilapidated, ancestral home and in the process befriends an Emily Dickinson-obsessed agoraphobic stuck in the suburbs. Think “Grey Gardens” meets “Fried Green Tomatoes.” For SECRET KEEPERS, my second novel, I knew I wanted to write in the omniscient point of view, with a narrator, and include multiple perspectives. So there’s a bigger “canvas,” a wider story in SECRET KEEPERS. After completing a first draft of Secret Keepers, I spent several years revising and expanding the scope of the novel to include several members of a family and a cast of characters in the fictitious small town of Palmetto. Both novels have in common a strong sense of place, the love of “ruined finery,” family conflicts, and humor. Readers tell me they love the humor in both books, and I’m so happy to hear that. Humor is a pleasure to share.

[MWA] Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

[MF] I like what Nora Roberts said in an interview in this week’s New Yorker. Her philosophy of writing: Ass in Chair. I try to keep a schedule of writing five times a week for several hours, or 1,000 words per session, depending on what I’m working on. I draft, then revise, then get a reader or two to weigh in, then revise more. It’s not easy or effortless. But I do love when I feel the “portal” is open, and creativity is flowing not from me, but THROUGH me. Some days are productive, some aren’t. I think you learn to accept that, and push beyond the discouragement. For my first novel, I wrote mainly on weekends. Find what works for you, and be good to yourself. Hold off on judging when you are writing your first draft–save that for revision. Also, find a group of fellow writers. You can read each other’s work. Here’s why: You’ll often learn a great deal about your own writing by closely reading and critiquing a fellow writer’s work. It’s amazing how this helps! Of course, be gentle…point out what works. Knowing what works in a piece is so helpful.

If you have a blog or website and would like to host an author, WOW-WomenOnWriting are accepting a few choice blogs to participate in their programs. Come and join the fun! Email Angela & Jodi at blogtourATwow-womenonwritingDOTcom.