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Inside the writing of
Life Without Summer
Dear Readers,
I’ve been a family life expert for more than twenty years, and there’s so much about my work counseling women, teaching parents, and observing children that inspired my first novel. Life Without Summer weaves together the lives of Tessa, a young mother who has lost her four-year-old daughter in a hit and run accident outside her preschool, and Celia, the grief counselor who tries to help her put her life back together. As Celia struggles to keep Tessa from getting caught up in a bleak crusade for answers, she finds that their sessions open the door to emotions she’s spent years ignoring.
Though I’ve never lost a child, I admit to being gripped by the fear it could happen to me. What ifs have been known to have their way with me. I’ve felt the foreboding a mother feels when her daughter sniffles, coughs, trips, or falls. I understand the woman who panics when her son is late coming home from school.
Writing this story gave me the chance to explore the fears that plague mothers. In truth, Life Without Summer started off as a portrait of two women whose lives converge unexpectedly after a tragedy, but it became so much more. It’s about the choices people make when faced with unbelievable pain. It’s about what really holds relationships together when they’re tested. It’s about the choice we all have to forgive.
As a counselor, I’ve always been struck by the healthy and unhealthy ways grief work gets done. As a novelist, I found a way to offer hope to others who may be afraid and to comfort those who know loss intimately. Like the women in my novel, I’ve felt the incredible longing to be whole again after losing a loved one, to be the person I was before grief introduced herself to me. Whether you’ve experienced loss or know someone who has, I invite you to escape into a story that reverberates universal themes about the connections between love and marriage and truth and forgiveness. In Life Without Summer, the strongest message is that there is hope in healing.
Best, Lynne Griffin
