The Bradford sisters are famous in Rockport, Massachusetts: for their beauty, their singing voices, their legendary ancestors, and their elegant mother, Sarah, who has run the historic Folly Cove Inn alone ever since her husband disappeared.
The two youngest sisters, Anne and Elly, fled Folly Cove as soon as they could to pursue their dreams and escape the Bradford name, while Laura stayed and created a seemingly picture perfect life. After a series of bad decisions, Anne has no choice but to come home and face her critical mother and eldest sister, reluctantly followed by Elly, another Bradford woman who’s hiding something.
As the three sisters plan a grand celebration for their mother’s birthday, they struggle to maintain the illusions about their lives that they’ve so carefully crafted. But when painful old wounds reopen and startling family secrets are revealed, they soon discover that even the seemingly unbreakable bonds of sisterhood can be tested. Author Holly Robinson e-chats with Fresh Fiction Columnist Yona Zeldis McDonough about her page-turning new novel.
About Holly Robinson
Novelist, journalist and celebrity ghost writer Holly Robinson is the author of several books, including The Gerbil farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir and the novels Beach Plum Island and Haven Lake. Her articles and essays appear frequently in The Huffington Post, More, Parents, Redbook and dozens of other newspapers and magazines. She and her husband have five children and a stubborn Pekingese. They divide their time between Massachusetts and Prince Edward Island, and are crazy enough to be fixing up old houses one shingle at a time in both places.
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YZM: Tell us about your journey to becoming a writer.
HR: I’m a late bloomer, or maybe a slow learner! I started writing fiction in my twenties, but it took a quarter century to publish my first novel. Fortunately, I successfully published lots of nonfiction, and that kept me going. Once I finally published my first novel with Penguin Random House, it felt like I’d stepped onto a speeding train because the publisher started expecting me to write a book every year. The twists along the way to this point in my career included having a nasty fiction editor tell me I was “too old to be called promising” when I was thirty, weeping into a glass of cognac when my fifth novel was rejected, discovering I could make a good living as a ghost writer, and realizing that the thing that matters most to me, ultimately, is the act of writing.
YZM: This is your fifth novel; does experience make writing a novel get any easier?
HR: Ha! If only! I compare writing to motherhood in this way: just because one of your children is more difficult than the others to raise, that doesn’t necessarily mean that child is better. The only thing that changes is that you learn to trust the process more. For example, I know for a fact that, with every book, I will reach a point about two-thirds through the manuscript where I become absolutely convinced that there is NO WAY I will pull this off and make the book come together. By now, I’ve learned that I can break through this wall of doubt. It’s just a matter of buckling down and being more determined, rather than giving in to fear.
YZM: Water, coastlines and New England are frequent settings in your books; care to comment?
HR: My novels are primarily set in New England because I love the lush and varied geography here, and the fact that history is seeping out of every tumbling stone wall. I live in a house that was built in 1799, and there are other dwellings in my town that date back to the sixteen hundreds. I’m always running into inspiring literary history here, too, like the fact that there is an actual Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, where Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott are all buried on the same ridge. I’m drawn to set my novels along the shore because there is something so primal and cleansing about our connection to the sea. Anyone who has ever walked along a beach can feel that tug of the surf’s rhythm. Listening to the ocean can make us feel sometimes as if we’re breathing at one with the planet. And isn’t that the point of life, in the end? To be at one, and at peace, with our surroundings?
YZM: The subject of sisters, especially estranged sisters, seems to draw you. Can you say more about that?
HR: I have always wanted a sister. I did have one until I was twelve and she was five, but she died of cystic fibrosis. Since then, I have always wondered what it would have been like, had my sister lived to be twenty, thirty, even fifty years old. Would we have stayed close? Would our children have grown up together? Or would we, like many sisters I know, have had a falling out and spent years apart? It seems to me that the bond between some sisters is so close that, when they do become estranged, it must be the most painful thing in the world.
YZM: What are you working on now?
HR: I’m a third of the way through my next manuscript, and it’s a slight departure for me: this book has twin plot lines, one contemporary, one historical, and both are written in the first person. Fingers crossed that it all works out, but even if it doesn’t, I’m having fun and learning as I go.
YZM: Where do you see yourself as a writer in five years? In ten?
HR: With this new book, I’m exploring what it takes to write historical fiction. (Hint: research is hard and takes forever!) I like to think that I will continue exploring different genres, bringing what I’ve learned with me into each new type of book I write. For instance, my husband (a software engineer and science fiction addict) are talking about writing a YA fantasy series together. How much fun would that be? I mean, provided we didn’t get divorced in the process of working together…
FOLLY COVE by Holly Robinson
An emotional and rich new novel about family and secrets from the acclaimed author of Chance Harbor.
The ties of family bind us forever—no matter how far we may go to escape them…
The Bradford sisters are famous in Rockport, Massachusetts: for their beauty, their singing voices, their legendary ancestors, and their elegant mother, Sarah, who has run the historic Folly Cove Inn alone ever since her husband disappeared.
The two youngest sisters, Anne and Elly, fled Folly Cove as soon as they could to pursue their dreams and escape the Bradford name, while Laura stayed and created a seemingly picture perfect life. After a series of bad decisions, Anne has no choice but to come home and face her critical mother and eldest sister, reluctantly followed by Elly, another Bradford woman who’s hiding something.
As the three sisters plan a grand celebration for their mother’s birthday, they struggle to maintain the illusions about their lives that they’ve so carefully crafted. But when painful old wounds reopen and startling family secrets are revealed, they soon discover that even the seemingly unbreakable bonds of sisterhood can be tested…
Women’s Fiction [Berkley, On Sale: October 4, 2016, Trade Size / e-Book, ISBN: 9781101991534 / eISBN: 9781101991541]
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