The Secrets Sisters Keep (21 page)

Authors: Abby Drake

BOOK: The Secrets Sisters Keep

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On Writing
The Secrets Sisters Keep

I
’ve heard it said that inspiration often comes at the oddest times in the oddest ways. For me, that’s true. I’ve had that clichéd lightbulb go off over my head at a party, in the supermarket, in the middle of the night–even once while driving down the MassPike. Such situations, of course, are not always convenient for making notes.

The idea, however, for
The Secrets Sisters Keep
came from a phone call. Or rather, from the lack of a phone call.

Do you have one of
those
friends who never answers the phone? Someone who is always busy doing something more productive or entertaining? You
know
she’s home, or at least in cell phone range. So what’s she doing that’s more important?

Watching
Dancing with the Stars
?

Updating her Facebook page?

Changing the baby’s diaper? (Well, okay, that one is acceptable.)

Or . . . maybe
you’re
the one who leaves the phone jangling in dead air.

The truth is, I think, many of us don’t pick up today. Caller ID is just so darned handy.

“It’s Betty Ann! Well, I can call her later.”

Or . . . “Oh, it’s Bob. He’ll want to know about Saturday, and I haven’t decided yet.”

Or . . . “It’s Sally. Ugh. Not
her
again.”

But I digress.

I have a friend—let’s call him
Edward
—who is often otherwise occupied when you call. I have no idea what he is doing. (Actually I have a few ideas, but I won’t get into them now.) He lives out west, far from me, and I don’t see him very often.

One day, I returned a call from Edward that I had missed. (I suspect a day will come when no one answers a telephone anymore. Oh, wait. I think they call that e-mailing. Or texting.) Anyway, Edward didn’t pick up. I left a message.

Three days later, he hadn’t called me back. Where the heck was he? Herding cattle across Wyoming? Rappelling in the Rocky Mountains? Perhaps he’d been abducted by alien space beings somewhere outside of Reno.

I called again. He didn’t answer. He did not return the call.

You get the picture. No matter. I was working on my last book,
Perfect Little Ladies
, so I really was too busy to talk to him, anyway.

I went back to my keyboard.

But then, the strangest thing happened. A few words floated into my mind that had nothing to do with Elinor, Alice, Poppy, and CJ (the ladies from the aforementioned
PLL
).

Uncle Edward had wandered off.

The sentence was crystal clear. I tried and tried but couldn’t shake it. Quite simply, it beckoned.

That’s when I knew the next book was knocking on my brain looking for attention.

Uncle Edward had wandered off.

I wrote it on a Post-it. I stuck it to my bookcase. I went back to
PLL
.

A day, a week, who knows how much later, I stared at the Post-it. I guess because
PLL
takes place in the fictitious town of Mount Kasteel, New York, I thought it would be fun to set Edward’s book there, too. After all, I’d been living there in my mind for several months by then and knew the area quite well.

There was a lake.
Lake
Kasteel. As with the town, it had been named by the original Dutch settlers because of the castle someone had built on the south side of the water. In my mind, of course.

Always having been a sucker for Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby,
I suddenly envisioned a Gatsbyish house not on Long Island’s North Shore but on my imagined lake, where music and laughter—party sounds—drifted across the water to curious onlookers who were not unlike Nick Carraway. Like Nick, I’ve often wondered what happens in the grand homes where privileged folks live. Surely those people have delicious lives, fabulous friends, and quirky, yet lovable, families.

Of course, there must be at least one eccentric in the bunch. There must be one Uncle Edward . . . who now has wandered off.

So that’s how
The Secrets Sisters Keep
began: an unanswered phone call. A fantasy lake. And a little Gatsby inspiration.

As for Edward . . . well, he finally called. You would not believe what he’d been doing.

But wait—there goes my cell. Oh. It’s just the dentist’s office. I’ll get back to them later.

Reading Group Questions

1. Which of Edward Dalton’s nieces would you like to have for your sister?

2. Which of the sisters’ lives would you most like to have . . . knowing you could make it better?

3. Why do you think Carleen really stayed away from her sisters for so long? Why did Babe?

4. Have you ever “forgotten” to show a trinket, a bauble—something decadent you purchased—to your husband? If you showed him, were you honest about the price?

5. Like Ellie, have you ever tucked a dream away in a small box in a closet?

6. If you were Edward, would you have wandered off?

7. Name one secret you never told your sister, brother, mother, or father. Surely there is at least
one
!

About the Author

A graduate of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York,
ABBY DRAKE
is a Mayflower descendant (with papers to prove it!). She has one sister, Joan Elizabeth, with whom she loved keeping secrets from the very proper, guarded world in which they grew up. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, but enjoys wandering off from time to time. To learn a few of the secrets she shared with her sister—and for more about Abby Drake—visit her Web site www.abbydrake.com.

By Abby Drake

The Secrets Sisters Keep

Perfect Little Ladies

Good Little Wives

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Credits

Cover photograph © Turbo/Corbis

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE SECRETS SISTERS KEEP.
Copyright © 2010 by Abby Drake. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition October 2010 ISBN: 9780062015471

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