Shelby Hearon – författare

In Her Most Searching and most accomplished novel to date, the author of Owning Jolene and Hug Dancing explores friendship and loss -- and what binds two women together and what separates them. Sarah and Harriet, now in their mid-fifties, have been friends since boarding school. Their lives -- Sarah in the Blue Ridge mountains of South Carolina and Harriet in the piney woods of East Texas -- have run parallel courses: marriage, babies, even opting for separate bedrooms from their husbands at about the same time.Or are their paths really so similar? Now they find themselves, within the same year, widowed -- and deep-rooted differences surface. For Sarah, marriage was a destructive snare; she finds freedom in nature, reward in a wallpaper business she has created (so women can make rooms of their own), and sexual satisfaction with a man in his late sixties who understands her needs. Harriet is lost, no longer employed as a wife; to protect herself she gets a gun; to bolster herself, a young man''s attention.A life-and-death crisis brings the two women together. In the course of their visit the disharmonies they have never before acknowledged are revealed and their friendship is profoundly changed.Telling Sarah and Harriet''s story, Shelby Hearon has given us a witty, disturbing, and moving novel about the way we see -- and fail to see -- our friends and ourselves.From the Hardcover edition.

Shelby Hearon has been widely praised for the insight, wit, and subtlety with which her novels limn the complexities of marriage and family ("What Jane Austen is to courtship, Shelby Hearon is to marriage" --New York Newsday), and the ways in which place can profoundly affect us all. Now, with Ella in Bloom, Hearon gives us her sharpest, funniest, most telling novel yet.It is the story of Ella, who has always lived in the shadow of her "perfect" older sister. A gutsy single parent eking out a living for herself and her intrepid teenage daughter Birdie, Ella invents a genteel life, writing to her mother in drought-baked Texas about her heirloom roses, her linen dresses, and other amenities of a respectable life in Old Metairie, Louisiana. Little does her mother know about the run-down, scruffy house Ella really lives in, or that she makes ends meet by watering rich people''s houseplants when they flee the coastal summer heat.But when Ella''s beautiful sister Terrell, on the way to meet her lover, is suddenly killed in a chartered plane crash, old family patterns are shattered. And Ella, confronting the reality of her life (and of the man she had relegated to the past) comes, finally and fully, into bloom.Wise, wicked, and moving, in Shelby Hearon''s hands this portrait of a woman--a woman we all know--is guaranteed to give extraordinary pleasure.

From the time she was seven, Jolene Temple has been a pawn between her feuding parents, each of whom has become practiced in kidnapping her from the other. She has been left emotionally suspended between two philosophies of life: that of her stolid, conventional father, "always saving for a rainy day," and of her recklessly adventurous mother, "always saying she enjoyed a little shower." Having adopted a different disguise each time her mother stole her away, at 19 Jolene is still unsure of her real identity; she is at ease only in acting a role. When she meets bland L. W. Dawson, she thinks he holds the answers to her quest to be "normal." Meanwhile, however, she has been posing for, and has become the mistress of, middle-aged, twice-divorced artist Henry Wozencrantz, who has much to teach her about facing life without running away. Set in present-day Texas of oil-bust hard times ("the whole state is claiming Chapter Eleven"), the novel delivers wickedly funny, incisive social commentary as well as vivid, quirky characters as outsized as the Lone Star State.

With wit and feeling Shelby Hearon takes us into the life and world of Cile Tait, age thirty-nine, of Waco, Texas. A woman of charm and integrity, she summons up the courage to burn her bridges and defect from her marriage to the Grace Presbyterian Church’s minister, only to be stunned by the complete lack of flame, smoke or hubbub of any kind that follows. Here is an inner-directed, sensuous, self-liberated woman impelled to make a place for herself in a society where church-centered propriety (embodied in her preacher-husband, whose constricting bed and board she leaves) mingles with country-style macho (in the person of Andy, her long-lost high school sweetheart and hug-dancing partner, who resurfaces and reclaims her)… and with the eternal Dallas dash (Andy’s bandbox-stylish wife). It is a new world where superconducting supercolliders, threatening famlands, have brought into the area a global mix of superscientists (including the beautiful Korean who may be moving toward the marriage Cile has vacated), where the rumble of money appears to underlie almost every mysterious action and where Cile’s two daughters, young Amazons with a passion to save the world from exological disaster, are already charting their own independent courses. Yet the more things change, the more they are destined to repeat the past. So it goes in Shelby Hearon’s wickedly observant novel, whose convolutions, through three months from Wind Day to Earth Day, trace the amazing course of true love à la 1990s.

Shelby Hearon''s 14th novel opens at a reception for the loved ones of deceased heart donors where, for the first time, Nan and Douglas Mayhall come face to face with the aging preacher who is the recipient of their twenty-two year old daughter''s heart. Their very different reactions to this disturbing encounter sets them off on separate paths.Something is eroding under the surface of their marriage. Hoping for some peace of mind, Nan goes to Sanibel Island to step back and reassess her life. But it takes another real scare to allow her to slip out of her own footprints for a moment, to see that a world exists outside her pain.From the Hardcover edition.