Her Best Self

New Novel: Her Best Self

I’m thrilled to announce Regal House is publishing my third novel, Her Best Self, as part of their summer front list season in 2024!

What’s it about?

Her Best Self is about a woman in a small southern town whose clandestine friendship with a mysterious outsider pushes her to uncover the ugly mystery surrounding her debilitating accident years before. As Janelle Wolf uncovers the truth about her accident, as her marriage and her family unravels, she discovers “her best self.” It’s a novel of domestic suspense that explores the power dynamics in marriage and female ambition, but there are winks of humor to leaven the ominous backbeat.

What inspired you to write Her Best Self? An old cookbook I inherited. This was a Good Housekeeping cookbook published in 1963. What a time capsule it is! The recipes are clearly targeted to “thrifty housewives.” There are pep talks on what to prepare when a husband’s boss is coming to dinner (pot roast). Also, when to allow “the man of the house” to cook—always outside, over a grill. The cookbook's outdated gender stereotypes are almost funny. Almost.

Stuck in these food-stained cookbook pages were bookmarks—old church bulletins, wedding announcements, and, oddly enough, a newspaper clipping from 1981 about Ronald Reagan appointing Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. (The article talked about O’Connor’s husband, what clothes she wore, how their marriage revolved around their entertaining. Nothing about her intellect or her interest in the law.)  In reading over the news coverage of the time, especially in small town newspapers, I was struck by how women were cautiously inspired by O’Connor, but—at least from today’s perspective—still entrenched in their roles as wives and mothers. I also noted in my research—and discovered as a newspaper reporter myself, after college— women were often identified by their connection to men—their husbands or their fathers. 

Another influence: the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. More than a century after it was published by a feminist journalist, it amazes me how powerfully it captures how a woman’s husband and doctor could label her “hysterical” and insist on a “rest cure,” that nearly destroys her.

A bit more about the novel: Her Best Self is set in fictitious Haven, South Carolina, interweaving Janelle’s first-person narratives with perspectives from a broad cast of characters, and features complicated family dynamics. While it takes place in 2015 and beyond, Her Best Self brings to life a society in the not-so-distant past in which women were defined by their fathers and husbands.

I will post more details about Her Best Self as publishing draws nearer. Stay tuned.

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