Take Five: Barbara O’Neal and MEMORIES OF THE LOST

We’re delighted to bring you an interview with longtime WU contributor and prolific author Barbara O’Neal, to highlight her upcoming release MEMORIES OF THE LOST., which releases on Tuesday (July 30). As they so often are, Barbara’s new one looks like the perfect summer read. Just when we thought we couldn’t get any more excited, we saw this:

“Just when I thought Barbara O’Neal couldn’t get any better…she does. Memories of the Lost is a study in pitch-perfect storytelling; an intriguing mystery and a tender love story, meticulously woven around a pair of protagonists who feel so wonderfully real I suspect I’ll miss them for a very long time. I couldn’t read this novel fast enough and yet the story never felt rushed, and ends just as beautifully as her characters—and her readers—deserve.” —Barbara Davis, bestselling author of The Keeper of Happy Endings

Want to know more? Here’s Barbara!

Q1: What’s the premise of your new book?

Barbara O’Neal: An artist visits a friend’s gallery opening and sees a painting that triggers a series of fugue states that upend her life and everything she thinks she knows about herself. Her mother died a few months ago, and all of her friends are worried about her, but Tillie is sure the slips in reality are trying to tell her something. When she finds a newspaper article in her mother’s things that throws her whole life into question, she heads to Devon, England to see what might be going on.

Adding another layer is the charming but blurred-out meditation teacher who appears along with the painting, as if he’s a mythical guide to help her along the way.

Q2: What would you like people to know about the story itself?

BO: Memories of the Lost deals with so many of my favorite things! Memory and secrets, the power of art, and the mysterious fates that link us to the people in our lives. Tillie knows something is amiss, and she has only herself, the messages in her paintings, and Liam to help her.

At one point in my career, I thought I might end up writing fantasy, and adored writers like Terri Windling, whose blog Myth and Moor is one of my favorite spots on the internet. (Tillie is named for her dog.) The fairy tale imagery and spirit in this book stem from that part of myself.

Q3: What do your characters have to overcome in this story? What challenge do you set before them?

BO: Tillie is grieving her mother, an eccentric recluse, and trying to make sense of her fugue states, losses of memory that end up showing her the way. Liam, her partner in the search, is a successful celebrity meditation teacher who desperately wants off the hamster wheel he’s inadvertently created.

Q4: What unique challenges did this book pose for you, if any?

BO: All books are challenging, each in their own maniacal way. In memories, the challenge was holding the different threads and secrets in proper order and in the right revelatory order. It also decided, 3/4 of the way through (with deadline looming) that it had to be told in third person, rather than the alternating first person POV it started in. So much work, but the book, as usual, was right.

Q5: What has been the most rewarding aspect of having written this book?

BO: I loved the magical underpinnings and the pleasure of being an artist for the length of a book. I also really loved the character of Clare, in England, a wise woman who has a menagerie of broken animals in her care–a hare who can’t hop, a blind dog, and so many others.

Congratulations on your new book, Barbara! Thank you for sharing this great sneak peek today.

WU Community, you can learn more about Barbara’s novel on her website, or by following her on FB or IG, or by following the buy-links below. Read on! 

Writer Unboxed

Writer Unboxed began as a collaboration between Kathleen Bolton and Therese Walsh in 2006. Since then, the site has grown to include ~50 regular contributors and a variety of guests on rotation throughout a given year.

In 2016, the Writer Unboxed team published a book with Writer’s Digest / Random House. AUTHOR IN PROGRESS: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What It Really Takes to Get Published is a comprehensive guide focused on helping writers over/around/through hurdles faced at every stage of the novel-writing process. It’s received some ***** reviews; we hope you’ll check it out.

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