Posts by Margaret Dilloway

Therese here. Today’s guest is an author I personally admire, Margaret Dilloway. Margaret’s latest novel, The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns, is a beautifully written character-driven story about the struggles of a woman riddled with kidney disease–and an abrupt personality–and how her life as a rose breeder is disrupted by the arrival of her teen-aged niece. Said thorny Kirkus about the book, “[An] exquisitely written novel about love and redemption.” Library Journal also loved it, submitting this review: “Believable situations with well-drawn characters make this novel as lovely as the roses Gal tends. Dilloway’s second novel is a captivating study of how love and understanding nurture our lives. Engaging, enlightening, thoughtful, this is a winner.”

I’m so glad Margaret’s with us today to talk about the challenging evolution of her book, and how in the end it mimicked much of what she had personally experienced–and what she needed to learn. Enjoy!

The Book of Life

The instant you hit SEND on the final draft of your manuscript, everybody asks one question, “What are you working on next?”

And you want to say, “Can’t I lie on the beach for a month before I answer that question?”

In 2010, I actually did have the option of beach-lying. We were living in Hawaii, and I’d spent the spring and summer after I finished How to Be An American Housewife furiously working away on a new project—not lying on the beach, but locked away in a small room with the blinds drawn and a room-sized air conditioner blowing on the back of my head. The new book was out of my genre a little bit. Different in tone than Housewife. I finished the book, sent it to my editor, and began daydreaming about roses.

My editor was interested in buying it. But then, she left the company to pursue a different line of work. My new editor read the manuscript and thought it wouldn’t be such a good follow-up, business-wise. Instead, she wanted to purchase something that was a mere seed of an idea I’d run by my agent at the time: a book about a rose breeder.

Of course, I took the news cheerfully, shelved my completed novel, and got back to work, drafted up a whole new outline, punched out some research, and turned in a whole new novel in two months.

Ah—no.