My office is a converted attic in my New Jersey home. My desk is an L-shaped, rickety el cheapo from Ikea; I use one end for my computer, the other to lay out print-outs and books. While I was writing Pastors’ Wives, my KJV Bible often occupied this surface. I try very hard to keep my desk free of snacks, but somehow the pretzels and nuts just find me. The snacks are usually accompanied by cup after cup of green tea.
I’m looking at this picture and marveling that most things on my desk have zero functionality. I have a collection of pretty bookmarks, but in reality I’m more likely to use one of those magazine subscription cards to hold my place in books. A case that held my late father’s glasses; a calculator that succumbed years ago to an unfortunate run-in with green tea; notebooks completely, totally, every-last-line full.
See that green, patterned hankie propped in the back? It’s wrapped around a flower that grew in my grandmother’s garden. In the month before my mother died of cancer, my Buddhist grandmother told me to wave it around the house to keep Mom alive. My Catholic mother wouldn’t hear of such malarkey. But I kept the weed. I suppose I couldn’t bear to discard a totem that bore such desperate love.
Now that I look around, I see I’ve been hoarding totems that give me comfort and help me keep writing stories . . . and I hadn’t even realized it. Thank you, Tricia, for this wonderful exercise!
About Pastors’ Wives
What’s it like when the man you married is already married to God? asks Pastors’ Wives, an often surprising yet always emotionally true first novel set in a world most of us know only from the outside.
Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s debut novel Pastors’ Wives follows three women whose lives converge and intertwine at a Southern evangelical megachurch. Ruthie follows her Wall Street husband from New York to Magnolia, a fictional suburb of Atlanta, when he hears a calling to serve at a megachurch called Greenleaf. Reeling from the death of her mother, Ruthie suffers a crisis of faith—in God, in her marriage, and in herself. Candace is Greenleaf’s “First Lady,” a force of nature who’ll stop at nothing to protect her church and her superstar husband. Ginger, married to Candace’s son, struggles to play dutiful wife and mother while burying her calamitous past. All their roads collide in one chaotic event that exposes their true selves. Inspired by Cullen’s reporting as a staff writer for Time magazine, Pastors’ Wives is a dramatic portrayal of the private lives of pastors’ wives, caught between the demands of faith, marriage, duty, and love.
Lisa is holding an iPad Mini giveaway and hosting an author chat party on Facebook tomorrow evening! Enter the iPad Mini contest HERE and RSVP to her party HERE. You can also connect with Lisa on her website, Facebook, and Twitter.
Hello Tricia and Lisa!
Lisa, I LOVE your post today! I MUST read your book because going WAY back to when I was a teenager, I used to babysit the Pastor and his wife’s kids! His wife was an RN at a hospital, so she had many 12 hour shifts. It was pretty difficult for them to schedule their days. Their kids were extremely HYPER! WOW! They even attempted to tame the ADHD with foods. Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s there was a question about Gluten possibly being a trigger for ADHD, and she made SURE the kids did not eat gluten, which was VERY difficult back then! At times it was like a circus with three kids! Two boys and one girl.
I often wondered what it would have been like to be the Pastor’s wife. I would be sitting in church, and if she was there whatever Sunday, she would have TONS of women coming up to her at ALL times. I did not know HOW she did it all! There were many things she did not attend because of work, but she also probably had to pick and choose the events very wisely because of the many people who wanted to befriend her because she was the Pastor’s wife. To this day, I do not know how she did it.
Pastor got called to a different church, and this was the tipping point in their marriage. She was not happy. She had to work because our congregation was very small, but she felt as if she was being pulled in a hundred different directions, and they ended up divorcing. This saddened me to no end.
I went to a party at a house one time, and guess who I ran into? My now ‘old’ (not in age, but old in that he used to be my Pastor!) Pastor! WOW!!! I was SO excited to see him!!! The kids were much older, and he had remarried! This woman was able to . . . I don’t want to say ‘handle it’, that’s not the right wording, but maybe she liked the attention more? She seemed VERY happy! I was SO happy for Pastor!
That Pastor made a HUGE difference in my life! I got to go to Catechism camp, and LOVED it! They had a Youth Group there, too! I LOVED THAT CHURCH! Too bad I grew up! LOL! I learned so much about the Bible then, more so than anywhere I have been as an adult.
I have NEVER found another church like that again, and I was not able to raise my kids the way I was raised. (My daughter was and still is quite a handful! LOL!) My kids’ father was not fond of ANY church besides the Catholic church, and I am not Catholic. When they were with me, they went where we chose to go, and it didn’t always fly so well with them as they would be verbal about what their dad had to say about the church/es we attended.
At this one church we attended for a little while, the kids THRIVED there! I wish it had worked out better, but sometimes it doesn’t. Again, I wondered how that wife did it, too. This Pastor’s wife did NOT attend church at all. She stayed away from everything, but there were times when she did need to come into church, but people would flock around her like crazy! I don’t think she liked that too much, but never showed it. I’m only guessing at this because she did not come to church on Sunday’s, and only to very few events.
I guess there are many different types of people, and the demands of being a Pastor’s wife can be very stressful. Some women love it, while others want nothing to do with it. Is there a happy medium, I always wondered???
I can’t wait to read your book!
I like what you wrote about trinkets! That kind of goes along with the theme of Tricia’s new series of books. The Memory Jar and The Promise Box, and five more to come!
We all have special momento’s we treasure. They are SO special to us, we keep them sometimes forever. What your mother-in-law and your mother would have thought does not really matter because those are what make YOU happy! You remember them both in your special way! For those of us who have lost our mothers, we need that! I lost my mother, too. September 2010. It is very difficult still, to let go. I don’t have any trinkets of hers, as my father pitched everything. I was pretty upset by that as over the years I had made her some pretty special things that I would have loved to get back and make my own special corner like you did, but I have a lot of photographs, and I have about half of them made into an album already. That will be my special memory book of her, and her alone.
Good luck with the book! I have seen it in quite a few places on the web and on other blogs!
Thanks for writing today!
Laurie Carlson