Realities

＂The book is by turns humorous, witty, moving, upbeat. Jenny is a warm, sensitive heroine. It’s a pleasure to watch her and a privilege to eavesdrop on her thoughts. Highly recommended...＂LIBRARY JOURNAL

Jenny Weaver is smart and funny and so lonely it hurts.

Jenny and Richard Weaver were going to live happily ever after. Then Richard took his life.

A year after Richard’s death, Jenny impulsively moves from the Northeast to California with their two young children. The children adjust to the move, but she can’t seem to find her way. And the children keep asking, ＂How-and-why did Daddy die?＂ She doesn’t know what to say to them.

In a moment of deep frustration and loneliness, she begins writing to Richard, telling him about her daily life. She holds nothing back, even telling him when she begins a new romance.

Jenny also writes about the past. She vividly recalls their marriage and family life, and begins to see how it went wrong. As she gets closer to the truth and the past becomes threatening, she decides not to write to him anymore. But she finds it impossible to stop.

The answer to their children’s questions is in the past. Can she find a path to healing?

In this intimate, compelling novel, a young widow discovers her own strength and identity after the devastating loss of her husband. Realities was a selection of the Swedish Book-of-the-Month Club.

I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. Reading was my escape from the legendary Buffalo winters and probably contributed to my becoming a writer. I like strong plots and strong characters. A new book is a new adventure! The first sentence in my novel REALITIES--My children are gambling--was the first line of a poem which grew into a book that was published in the US, the UK, and Sweden, where it was a selection of the Swedish Book-of-the-Month Club. THE LAST SEASON, THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE, started with an image of three middle-aged adults sitting at a dinner table, a married couple and an unmarried man. When the husband asked the man what his intentions were, the fellow replied, ＂I intend to marry your wife.＂ The image was a gift, and I had to run with it. The seed for THE WRITERS’ CONFERENCE was an experience I had at a conference. I had never been in an atmosphere that intense. When I came home, I started working on the book. I wanted to capture that intensity. It took over thirty years to write THE WRITERS’ CONFERENCE. I would take it out every five years, work on it, and put it away again. My goal was a fast, entertaining read that pulled the curtain back on a world most readers will never see. You can read more about me and my novels--REALITIES, THE LAST SEASON, THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE, and THE WRITERS’ CONFERENCE-- and the Giffort Street stories at www.mariandschwartz.com