Introducing Christine Gunderson
Friends With Secrets Arrives In July from Lake Union Publishing
Like many of us, I attempted my first novel in 4th grade. Millicent's Revenge was a sort of an Edwardian Trixie Belden novel with traces of Anne of Green Gables, the Betsy-Tacy books, and a Narnia-style magic wardrobe thrown into chapter three as a plot device to keep things moving. It was a loving and highly derivative amalgamation of all my favorite books.
Unlike many of us, I wrote this novel on a fourth-generation family farm in rural North Dakota. We lived 50 miles from the nearest Mc Donald’s and three miles from Dahlen, my hometown, population approximately 30, a tiny dot on the prairie where the streets have no names, and no traffic lights, either.
I loved North Dakota with all my heart, but like Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, I felt that "if there's a bright center to the universe," I was "on the planet that it's farthest from."
I found the vehicle for my escape during Christmas break of my senior year, when my high school burned to the ground due to faulty wiring in a popcorn popper.
As an active member of the speech and debate team, I was dispatched to a local television station to tape a public service announcement highlighting our many fundraising activities to rebuild the school. I wrote and edited the script, sat down in front of the teleprompter and fell in love.
Here was a career focused on writing and talking, an occupation where no one cared that I'd almost flunked algebra and couldn't do fractions; a career filled with train derailments, tornados, floods, fires, murders, arson, graft, corruption, armed robbery and prison riots. Who could ask for anything more?
I got a degree in English and broadcast journalism and worked as a reporter and anchor at a small ABC affiliate for five years. Then I took my ability to write and talk and not do math to Washington D.C. and became a press secretary and communications director. For a variety of reasons, most of them logistical, I left all this behind when I had my first child.
Mom, Mom, Mom…A New Career
Over the course of my career, I had some challenging, difficult, and complex assignments, but staying home full time with my children is the hardest thing I've ever done, hands down, full stop. All my friends were still working, my husband was traveling constantly with the State Department, and I felt very alone as I spent my days trying to convince a colicky baby to sleep. Seventeen months later I had my second son, followed by my daughter.
Those early years with small children were incredibly rewarding and incredibly hard. I felt guilty when I didn't feel grateful to be home with my children, and I missed the validation that came from my job, because as every mother knows, there are no gold stars for changing diapers. That transition, from the gratification of an interesting job, to making airplane noises while feeding people pureed peas, is one themes in my debut novel, Friends with Secrets.
I started that book a few weeks after my oldest son was born and I put it away a few months later. I was too close to the subject, and I needed an escape, so I wrote dystopian YA novels instead.
Those YA novels are sitting in a drawer and that baby is now a high school senior. I returned to the novel about motherhood a couple years ago and finished it. It's my seventh complete manuscript, and it's the book that finally sold. Friends with Secrets comes out on July 16th. I like to describe it as Big Little Lies meets Thelma and Louise in a mini van.
There was a lot of rejection in those intervening years, and that's a topic for a future Substack. Until then, I'm incredibly grateful to be here as a member of the Debutant Ball.
Christine Gunderson blogs about writing, parenting, and writing while parenting in her newsletter, Notes on Love and Laundry at www.christinegunderson.com.
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I love this, Christine! Your story is so relatable, and I'm so excited for you!!
Thank you so much! My agent gets credit for the title. I think it's easier to write an entire book than come up with a catchy title.