Mary Kay Andrews, THE NEWCOMER: A Novel
[0:01]Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,
[0:05]Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:35]Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.
[0:37]Mary K. Andrews is the author of The Newcomer, A Novel,
[0:41]and also The Sand to Suit of Coming.
[0:44]Mary K. is the New York Times best-selling author of Sunset Beach,
[0:47]The High Tide Club, The Beach House Cookbook,
[0:49]The Weekenders, Beach Down, Save the Date,
[0:51]Ladies Night, Christmas Bliss, Spring Fever,
[0:54]Summer Rental, The Fixer Upper, I'm still going here, Deep Dish,
[0:57]Blue Christmas, Savannah Breeze, Hissy Fit,
[1:00]Little Bitty Lies, Savannah Breeze, and Hello Summer.
[1:03]A former journalist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution,
[1:06]she lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
[1:08]Welcome, Mary K. Thank you so much for coming on Momstone Have Time
[1:11]to read books to discuss both The Newcomer and The Sand to Suit.
[1:16]Hey, Zibi, it's great to be with you.
[1:17]Great.
[1:18]So Mary K. First of all, The Newcomer came out several months ago,
[1:21]but we're finally getting to this interview,
[1:23]and I'm so sorry about that.
[1:24]And it's so, I've been so backlogged
[1:27]that your next book is coming out
[1:29]before I can even talk to you about this book.
[1:31]So tell us about both books,
[1:33]and we'll just, we'll get into it that way.
[1:35]Yeah, so The Newcomer, which came out in May,
[1:39]is about a young woman, her name is Laddie,
[1:42]and when the book opens, she pulls into the parking lot
[1:46]right at dawn of one of those vintage mom and pop motels
[1:51]on Florida's Gulf Coast.
[1:53]The sun is just coming up.
[1:55]She's terrified and exhausted.
[1:57]She falls asleep immediately.
[1:59]She's got a four-year-old in the back seat of her car,
[2:02]who's also sleeping.
[2:03]And that child is not her daughter.
[2:05]It's her niece, and they are on the run from the law
[2:10]and from a lot of other things.
[2:13]And so Laddie doesn't really know why she's ended up
[2:17]at the murmuring surf.
[2:19]That's the name of the motel.
[2:21]All she knows is that her sister is dead.
[2:24]Her sister is the mother of the four-year-old in the back seat,
[2:28]the little girl's name is Maya.
[2:30]And her sister had been in a very contentious custody battle
[2:36]with her ex.
[2:37]And one of the last things her sister,
[2:41]Tara, tells her is, promise me, if anything happens to me,
[2:46]if anything bad happens, it's Evan.
[2:49]Promise me if something happens, you will take Maya and run.
[2:53]And so that's what Laddie does.
[2:55]And she ends up in, and she is the newcomer,
[2:57]at this quirky mom and pop motel that's
[3:00]a full of senior citizens and snowbirds and regulars
[3:04]and that's sort of where the story starts.
[3:07]So there's some mystery and there's some romance
[3:10]and always in my books.
[3:12]There is a lot of setting.
[3:15]Two.
[3:16]Yes, I felt like I was in this place so clearly
[3:19]that way you described it.
[3:21]And even from the original pulling up and the no vacancy
[3:25]and the getting used to the neighborhood.
[3:28]And it's just, it was so vivid the way
[3:31]you just drew the reader right in to sit.
[3:33]Well, you know, I think for my books,
[3:36]I want to put my reader right in the middle of the story.
[3:40]I want them to see the sun coming up over the Gulf
[3:44]and I want them to hear the surf
[3:46]and I want all of that.
[3:48]I want a big, juicy book.
[3:49]And I want to put them in there right now.
[3:51]Interesting.
[3:52]Did you always start your book?
[3:53]Is that, was that your philosophy from the start?
[3:56]Like, tell me, go back to the beginning for two seconds
[3:58]and then we'll catch back up here
[3:59]of how you even started writing this type of book
[4:01]and how you started writing in general.
[4:03]I mean, you've written so many books.
[4:04]It's amazing and so impressive.
[4:06]And I'm in such awe.
[4:07]So tell me how it all began.
[4:10]Well, I worked as a newspaper reporter for 14 years
[4:14]and at the last 10 at the Atlanta Journal Constitution,
[4:17]I was a feature writer.
[4:18]And like a lot of other working moms, I wanted out.
[4:22]And so I began tunneling out by writing fiction and secret.
[4:25]I wrote one book that didn't sell the second book sold
[4:28]just based on five chapters.
[4:30]So I quit my day job.
[4:31]And, you know, I've always been a big reader.
[4:35]I'd always love mysteries.
[4:36]So I started writing mysteries under my real name,
[4:38]which is Kathy Hogan, Trojack.
[4:41]I wrote a mystery series set in Atlanta
[4:43]and then I wrote a different kind of book.
[4:45]It was set in Savannah where I had lived and worked
[4:47]a couple different times.
[4:49]And that book was Savannah Blues.
[4:50]And my publisher decided we are not going to sell it
[4:53]as a mystery.
[4:54]Even though I wrote it thinking it was a mystery.
[4:57]My editor who was very wise said,
[4:59]nobody cares who done it.
[5:00]They just want to know if we see fully the protagonist,
[5:04]if she gets what she wants.
[5:06]And so that book was Savannah Blues.
[5:08]And we decided not only to market it as just women's fiction,
[5:13]but also I decided I would take on a pseudonym.
[5:17]So Mary K. Andrews is a combination of my children's names.
[5:20]My daughter Katie is Mary Kathleen and my son is Andrew.
[5:24]And the other thing I did,
[5:26]when I picked that pseudonym, was fiction shelved alphabetically.
[5:30]So I decided I would be an A.
[5:33]So my readers don't have to squat
[5:35]when they're looking for my books.
[5:38]So yeah, I always loved Elmore Leonard
[5:42]and Donald West, because they always put you
[5:46]right in the middle of the action of the book.
[5:49]And that's where I want to jump in.
[5:52]And Elmore Leonard's most famous advisor writers is,
[5:56]I leave out the part readers' skip over.
[5:59]So I try to remember that.
[6:00]I love that.
[6:02]I know I have to say you're more focused on your readers
[6:05]than almost anybody I've spoken to
[6:07]that you are keeping them so front and center at every moment.
[6:10]When you sit down and you're at your computer,
[6:12]I'm assuming at a computer and you're typing away
[6:14]and you're thinking about your scenes,
[6:16]are you always thinking about the reader?
[6:18]Or are you letting yourself sort of like fall into the process
[6:21]or tell me what that experience is like for you?
[6:24]Well, it's different different days.
[6:26]Some mornings, you know, I write in bed.
[6:28]That became my COVID habit.
[6:30]When there was nothing to do and nowhere to go,
[6:33]I put my laptop by my bed and every morning started
[6:36]waking up and writing at seven a.m.
[6:38]So I was writing in this little cocoon.
[6:40]So some mornings, I'm so in the scene,
[6:43]nothing else matters.
[6:45]That's, you know, it's like that little black tunnel
[6:47]you're in.
[6:49]And then lots of times I'll go back
[6:51]and when I'm editing and revising,
[6:53]I'll think, does a reader care?
[6:55]Do they need to know that or is that just me
[6:57]doing verbal somersaults?
[6:59]Is that just me being cute?
[7:02]And I want my reader to love the story
[7:08]and if it doesn't serve the story,
[7:10]if it doesn't serve the character,
[7:12]I took a writing workshop was to graft an early in my career.
[7:15]And she, what she said was every paragraph has two jobs.
[7:20]It has to either advance the plot
[7:22]or inform about the character.
[7:24]And so, you know, sometimes you're doing a transition
[7:27]or you're seeing setting,
[7:29]but I do try to keep that in mind.
[7:31]Cause I write commercial fiction.
[7:34]I write commercial fiction and that's what I do.
[7:38]And so I always keep that in mind.
[7:40]Interesting.
[7:41]And then how did you end up starting friends in fiction?
[7:44]And then let's go back to the same as you did after that.
[7:46]But how did you get involved with all the ladies
[7:48]from friends in fiction and end up starting that?
[7:52]Yeah. So what happened was I'm friends with all these authors.
[7:56]So many of us know each other, especially the women.
[7:58]So Patty Callahan, Henry, Mary Alsman-Rho,
[8:01]Christy Woodson-Harvey, Kristen Harmel.
[8:04]We all had spring summer books coming out in 2020.
[8:10]And our tours were all canceled.
[8:12]I had a six week book tour canceled.
[8:14]And so we were spending.
[8:17]And I said, well, you know, I have a pro zoom account,
[8:20]a sort of like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland,
[8:22]my dad's got a barn.
[8:23]Let's put on a show.
[8:24]So I said, I have a zoom account.
[8:27]Let's get on a happy hour, Rose Call.
[8:30]And let's see if we can't figure out something to do.
[8:32]A, so obviously, selfishly, to promote our books,
[8:37]be we were really worried about independent booksellers.
[8:40]How were they going to be impacted by this COVID,
[8:44]by the shutdown of bookstores and everything?
[8:48]And and see to help promote other authors who are in the same boat.
[8:53]And we were really worried about debut authors
[8:56]because when you're starting from nothing,
[8:58]getting out to bookstores and getting out word amount is so important.
[9:03]So we started talking about it.
[9:05]We thought, well, you know,
[9:06]what if we did a Wednesday night FaceTime live show?
[9:10]We started out doing it from my Facebook account
[9:13]because I had a larger, a larger following.
[9:17]And that first show was so comic.
[9:20]I was in my pajamas because I didn't think anyone would watch.
[9:24]My daughter was doing tech.
[9:25]So you can see her crawling out of camera range.
[9:28]I know what you, I know you know what all this is about today.
[9:31]And we were amazed when people started watching.
[9:34]And very quickly, we decided to have on gas
[9:39]because who wanted to hear us talking about our own books?
[9:41]So our first guest, not too shabby, was Kristen Hannah.
[9:44]And we hired a tech company, which was the smartest thing we ever did.
[9:49]We hired our managing director, the amazing Megan Walker of tandem literary.
[9:54]And to our amazement, people started telling us,
[9:58]I'm waiting every Wednesday night.
[9:59]I won't.
[10:00]be there. I want to see it. And so, you know, they don't have to watch it live. They can watch it on
[10:04]YouTube. They can watch it later. But we're up to about almost 50,000 followers on our Facebook page.
[10:09]Well, it took off in a way we never anticipated. We thought we'd do it for six weeks.
[10:14]That's amazing. Do you have any highlights from the show or people that you are super excited to talk to?
[10:19]Oh, I think we're super excited about every guest. Every guest is somebody who we've heard of or
[10:25]who's book we're excited about. We're fans of, you know, Dilia Owens was amazing. Kristen,
[10:31]of course, was wonderful. Everybody loves Karen Slaughter. She's so zany. And you never know what's going to
[10:37]happen with her. We had William Kent Kruger for this tender land, which was great. We just had Vanessa
[10:44]Riley for Eileen Queen, which is an amazing book. And we love talking to authors that maybe our
[10:51]readers, authors who they're not on our readers radar. We want, we want to say, hey, have you read
[10:57]this author? You, you know, let's expand our boundaries a little bit. Let's read something we're not
[11:02]we're not used to reading. So that's really been fun and really rewarding for all of us.
[11:08]Are most of the people who follow you? I know most of you authors are sort of not to geographically
[11:14]constrain you, but from the South. And a lot of your characters are from the South and take place.
[11:19]The story is take place down there. Is that where your audience is? A lot or is it just everywhere?
[11:24]I think it's all honestly, I think it's all over. And we have, we have viewers who are international,
[11:30]all of us live in the South. And that's an accident of geography. We didn't just say, oh, we're
[11:34]only going to have Southern offers so much of this was just, you know, literally, let's, let's
[11:42]throw this thing together. We didn't know what we were doing. So we, we really tried to consciously
[11:47]ask and have guests who were, you know, from outside the South from, you know, the only thing
[11:53]really then the past that's kind of kept us from going more international is the platform
[12:00]that we're operating from. But now it turns out we're going to be able to do some more of that.
[12:04]We have a podcast too. So I interviewed Tana French for the searchers and, you know, we had to
[12:09]overcome, oh my gosh, what time is it where she is in Ireland? So, you know, yeah, we really, we
[12:15]really made a conscious decision to kind of stretch and grow our viewership.
[12:20]Love it. So great. Wait. Okay. Tell me now about the Santa suit comes out very soon.
[12:25]Yes. Santa suit is out September 28th. And it is just a sweet Christmas story. I think after the
[12:32]year we've all been through, I wanted, I wanted something that would take my readers away from
[12:38]themselves away from thinking about masks and vaccines and lockdowns and worry. And so I decided
[12:50]to write a secret book. I handed in the newcomer early for the first time in my life last October
[12:58]and instead of starting work on my book for summer 22 in secret, I thought I'm going to write a
[13:04]Christmas book and I'm going to finish it. So this was October and I said to myself, if I can't
[13:08]finish it by January, it's a non-starter. I didn't tell my agent. I didn't tell my editor.
[13:15]It was the first time I'd written a book on specs since my career started 30 years ago.
[13:20]So it's about Ivy Perkins has just come out of a bad divorce. She's very bruised and sad.
[13:27]And she wants a fresh new start on life. She's been living in Atlanta. She's been running a
[13:31]marketing company with her now ex. She sells her part of the company to him. She packs up her dog
[13:37]pumpkin in her Volvo. And she buys a house. She she's fixated with owning of an old white farmhouse
[13:44]in the out in the country. And she buys this house four roses farm site unseen. She sees a listing
[13:51]online and buys it very unlike Ivy who has had a very normal rigid life. And she drives up to
[13:58]this house. It's the week before Christmas. And what she discovers there and she wants to hide
[14:04]from Christmas. She does she's over it. And what she discovers is that you really you really can't
[14:10]you can't hide from being part of a community. And you can't hide from life. And the first night
[14:18]she's in the house, the family she's bought the house from have left everything. It's been
[14:23]in a state. They've left all the furniture, the clothes and the closet. And she's dumping the clothes
[14:28]out of the closet. And on the top shelf, she finds a box wrapped in Christmas paper. Inside is a
[14:34]beautifully made Santa suit. And she comes discover that the previous owners of the house, they were
[14:40]sort of Christmas central for this mountain community. They decorated the outside of their house
[14:44]with thousands of lights every year. And the husband and wife who've passed away were Mr. and
[14:50]Mrs. Santa Claus. And when she's looking at this suit, she finds a crumpled up note in the pocket
[14:55]from a little girl asking Santa Claus to bring her daddy home. And so that's how the story starts.
[15:01]Oh my gosh, that's amazing. I love it. So how do you keep up your energy? How do you?
[15:08]No, I'm serious. I mean, the idea that at this point you would try to like sneak in an extra book
[15:13]as if it's just like a TV show you're watching before bed. I mean, seriously, how do you do that?
[15:19]Well, it doesn't hurt that I'm an empty nester, but doesn't hurt that I have an incredibly
[15:24]supportive husband who takes over laundry and cooking and my grown daughter and son-in-law grandchildren
[15:32]live around the corner. So they help out. You know, I think my work defines me. And I feel as though
[15:41]if I'm not writing, who am I? And maybe that, maybe I'm shallow. And I tear my hair out and make
[15:48]myself insane right now. I'm really up against deadline for summer 22 because I snuck in that extra
[15:55]book, which I now have to go out and promote. So I tear my hair out and my whale and I nash my teeth
[16:02]and I know, but I know that I'm going to get it done. And I give myself, I give myself work quotas,
[16:07]page quotas. I have not missed a day of writing in three and a half months. Wow. That used to be
[16:13]that I just kind of meander around, son or around. Yeah, I'll get to that. But late in my career,
[16:19]I have discovered that discipline, it's the salvation against insanity.
[16:26]Did you make that effort? Is that an expression? I don't know. I think I just made it up.
[16:29]I love it. All right. I think it belongs on a pillow or something. I wish I were disciplined about
[16:35]fitness, about walking and eating the right foods and doing all those things. And I hope,
[16:42]I'll get back to those things. I wish I were disciplined with those things as well.
[16:46]Yeah, right now it's just me in that tunnel and the laptop and my notebook.
[16:54]I mean, how do you do it all? You've got you've got young kids at home.
[16:58]Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. And you've been through the kind of COVID terrors that
[17:04]the rest of us, you know, we dread. So I mean, I follow you. I know your kids have been on lockdown.
[17:11]They've had COVID. You've had family losses. So I don't know how you pile that on top of
[17:16]what everything else you do. That I think is why I do what I do. This is my escape. You know,
[17:22]I love this. I feel like, yeah, I love it. I love hearing other people's stories, whether I'm
[17:28]reading them or literally talking to them like you and me here today. Like, there's nothing,
[17:33]I can never get sick of hearing people's stories. I find it endlessly fascinating here about
[17:38]people's lives and read about it and put myself into their shoes and I find there's nothing
[17:45]that calms me down as much as doing that. So I just try to do it more, the more stressed out I get.
[17:53]Yeah. I mean, that's what we love about friends and fiction is talking to other writers and
[17:58]hearing from them. It's so inspiring. We always ask them for a writing tip. We ask them what
[18:03]they're reading currently. And you know, I did tour this summer for the newcomers. And I was so
[18:10]amazed by how many fans or friends and fiction came up to me in bookstores. And we weren't hugging.
[18:17]They were wearing masks, but they said, you know, you saved my life. You gave me a place to go
[18:23]on Wednesday nights. And I would turn on my computer or I would watch you on YouTube or Facebook
[18:31]and my husband would know not to bother me because I'm going to spend this next hour
[18:36]talking about books, listening to writers talk about books and they post on our Facebook page and
[18:42]they're sharing. It's really a great community because they're sharing with people they've never met
[18:47]mostly in real life saying, oh, did you like that? I didn't care for it. And then someone will say,
[18:51]keep reading. Don't quit. It's so worth it. So that's been wonderful.
[18:55]That is wonderful. Oh, I love that. That's great. Well, let me ask you your friends and
[19:00]fiction questions now. What is your writing tip and what are you reading? Well, my writing tip has
[19:06]been the same one for a long time. And it's and I need to I have to keep reminding myself of this.
[19:12]You can't fix what you ain't wrote. So get when you're writing, get it down on paper in your laptop
[19:19]document, fight the self loathing, fight the inner terrors. Just write and keep writing. And my
[19:28]philosophy is I try not to back up. Go all the way to the end of your story and then back up,
[19:35]then you can revise, then you can make that you can polish the words until they sparkle like
[19:41]jewels. But if you sit there paralyzed by fear and self doubt, you're just going to erase a
[19:48]hole in that piece of paper. So keep going, no matter what, get to the end. And it helps.
[19:54]If you tell yourself what you want the end to be, now lots of times I change it, but I know where
[19:59]I'm going.
[20:00]I did. I have a roadmap. When I'm reading right now, we're having Emily Henry on friends and fiction Wednesday night.
[20:06]So I'm reading her book, people you meet on vacation. And then I've got, you know, a stack of stuff like you.
[20:13]I've got physical books. I've got advanced readers copies. I've got net galley books. So yeah, I feel like I've got a fortress of books all around me. And I see your fortress.
[20:24]Yeah, that's great being in a fortress of books. There's, there's no place I'd rather be
[20:30]excellent. Well, Mary Kay, thank you so much for coming on mom's time to read books. Thank you for the newcomer and the
[20:37]Santa's suit and all of your work and your dedication to to keeping the reader in mind. I think it's so important and
[20:45]awesome. I loved you hearing you talk about your sense of identity coming from your work because I
[20:51]I think that's the most powerful thing that all of us can do these days is contribute in some way that gets us so excited to get out of bed or your
[21:00]case, stay in it all day to get your work done. So I just put on a, I put on a real close to talk to you. I'm really proud of myself.
[21:07]Thank you so much. You're welcome. I mean, I have on yoga pants. I think everybody has on yoga pants.
[21:12]That's okay. I'm wearing like a shirt dress. I don't even have on pants. So there you go.
[21:16]That was great being with you, Miss Evie. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Bye-bye.
[21:22]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's don't have time to read books. Don't forget to follow me on
[21:27]Instagram at zebi Owens and at mom's don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter
[21:32]at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom every
[21:37]other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan. Heck, texture sound for the sound editing. And thank you to
[21:42]Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.