In 2017, I published my first book. It was a book of contemporary literary/psychological fiction short stories titled Gnarled Bones and Other Stories. Lisa Lickel was, in fact, generous enough to review the book, which you can read about here. It was an important book for me and one that allowed me to “test the waters,” as it were, as a self-published author.
But, like many authors with their first book, I wasn’t completely satisfied with it. In 2018, I started to entertain the idea of putting out a second edition. At the end of that year, my writing started to evolve from contemporary fiction to historical fiction. I began the Waxwood Series, and in 2019, I published the first two books of that series, The Specter and False Fathers. I discovered my passion for history and fiction go very deep, and I wanted to transfer that passion to readers as well.
At the end of 2019, I began looking again at the stories of Gnarled Bones. Many readers had commented they felt the stories were too short and ended too abruptly. I entirely agreed with that. So the first order of business was to expand and revise the stories.
But I realized also that, like many beginning authors, I hadn’t gone as deeply into what themes tied the stories together in the collection as I should have. Short story collections are tricky because if there isn’t really something to connect the stories, readers sometimes feel unsatisfied with the reading experience.
About that time, I started to read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I had read a snippet of the book in grad school, but I’d always wanted to read the entire thing. Friedan’s experiences interviewing suburban housewives in the 1950s and her quest to find the “happy housewife” connected with me because I realized she was talking about my mother’s generation. I could see how the feminine mystique and the Problem That Has No Name related to my mother’s life and the lives of her friends. I wanted to write about these women in the post-war generation who struggled with a definition of femininity that they were being pushed to accept and that was simply unsatisfying to them and their journey to self-discovery that would bring on the second-wave feminist movement a decade later.
These were the themes that guided me in revising Gnarled Bones for the second edition. In doing so, the book became almost an entirely new work. I even had to change the title of the book to Lessons From My Mother’s Life because the original short story upon which the first edition was titled could no longer be a part of the collection (I’m saving it for a novella of its own). I explain what changes I made to this second edition, and why I made them, as well as some of the background behind the collection in an Author’s Note I include in the book.
I really hope this second edition will resonate with many women who, like me, have mothers and grandmothers that lived through the post-World War II era and that it will help them to understand these women just as writing the stories helped me to understand my mother better.
It was the 1950s. The war was over and women could go back to being happy housewives. But did they really want to?
Women should have been contented to live a Leave it to Beaver life in the mid-20th century. They should have been fulfilled. Women’s magazines told them so. Advertisers told them so. Doctors and psychologists told them so. Some were. But some weren’t.
In the 1950s, women were sold a bill of goods about who they were and who they should be as women. Some bought it. But some didn’t.
These five stories are about the women who didn’t.
A teenage bride sees her future mirrored in Circe’s twisted face. A woman’s tragic life serves as a warning about the dangers of too much maternal devotion. And the lives of two women intersect during two birthday parties, changing both of them. These and other moving tales of strength, discovery, and hope are about our mothers and grandmothers and the lessons their lives have to teach us.
This book is the second edition of my 2017 short story collection, Gnarled Bones and Other Stories. This edition has been extensively revised, the stories changed and expanded, and the context moved from the present day to the 1950s and 1960s. This edition also includes a Preface and a bonus chapter from The Specter, the first book of my Gilded Age family drama, the Waxwood Series.
You can find out more information, including buy links here.
Tam May grew up in the United States and earned her B.A. and M.A in English. She worked as an English college instructor and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher before she became a full-time writer. She started writing when she was 14, and writing became her voice. She writes historical fiction that examines characters in the social and psychological contexts of their time.
Her first book, a collection of contemporary short stories, was nominated for a 2017 Summer Indie Book Award. A revised and expanded second edition of this book is now available under the title Lessons From My Mother’s Life. She is currently working on a Gilded Age family saga. The first book, The Specter, came out in June of 2019, and the second book, False Fathers, is also now available. Book 3 (The Claustrophobic Heart) and Book 4 (Dandelion Children) will be out in 2020. She is also working on a historical mystery series featuring a turn-of-the-century New Woman sleuth. Both series take place in Northern California.
She lives in Texas but calls San Francisco and the Bay Area “home”. When she’s not writing, she’s reading classic literature and historical fiction, watching classic films, or cooking up awesome vegetarian dishes.
For more information on Tam May and her work, feel free to check out her website at www.tammayauthor.com.
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