Even when I was an employed grown-up member of the actor’s union, I wrote plays, short stories, and even essays; one of which was published in Redbook Magazine and another in Playbill Magazine. But when I finally hit my mid-forties, I was pressured into having “knee surgery,” which is what the industry calls it when an actress of a certain age drops out of sight for six weeks and her publicist announces that she’s having an “old knee injury” repaired. When she reappears, her eyebrows are hiked up on her forehead and all those little lines around her mouth are gone. Since I planned to leave my eyebrows where they sat, I decided to transition back to my first love: Writing.
Eventually, I did succumb to passion over reason, and that passion became my novel, The Three Miss Margarets. And because there’s a goddess who watches out for crazy women who follow their bliss, my first novel received rave reviews which led to several printings. I followed my first success with The Ladies of Garrison Gardens, Family Acts, Serendipity, and Looking for a Love Story.
And now I have a newbie on the way! It’s another idea that I’ve had bouncing around for years—decades even—and I’m hoping people will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Stay tuned!
Louise,
the Author
Writing was my first love when I was a kid. But for a variety of reasons (not all of them logical or even emotionally healthy), I was also attracted to acting. At the age of twelve—feeling that I wasn’t getting any younger and having to make a decision—I informed my startled parents that the theater was my calling and I was going to be an actress. And to everyone’s surprise (including my own), I managed to pull it off.
But I never stopped writing.
I started out as a script writer for soaps, but it was one of the few jobs I’ve had in my life that I really didn’t like. I was working on stories created by others and I realized pretty quickly that I wanted to tell my own. I had an idea that I thought would make a great novel which I tried to work on in my spare time, but there wasn’t much of that (or brain space) when I was turning out forty-eight pages of dialogue a week for my soap job. If I wanted to write my own book, I was going to have to leave my safe gig and gamble on my dream. I’m not cut out to suffer for my art; I’m devoted to luxuries like daily meals and having a roof over my head, so it took me several years to walk away from my paycheck and write my first book.
