Mindy Friddle’s Backstory

There was this dilapidated mansion, next to a Taco Bell that I’d pass on the highway sometimes. It was once a beautiful estate in the upstate of South Carolina that was gradually being swallowed by a strip mall. I wondered what kind of people might have lived there when the local textile town boomed. The house, more than a century old, had been vacant for years and ravaged by trespassers, but the rumor was that two sisters from a once prestigious family had lived -- and died -- there, spinsters.

It was for sale, but there were clearly no takers. One day, I arranged (begged!) for a realtor to take me inside. I was immediately taken with the hidden beauty there: a kitchen garden gone to seed, a dried up fishpond, and oh my Lord, was that a family cemetery there in the back yard? Inside there were stained glass lamps, threadbare rugs and water-stained wallpaper. All that ruined finery!

Later that afternoon, thinking about the place, I began writing furiously on a deposit slip while waiting in line at the bank. I envisioned a woman in a claw foot bathtub in an attic of a ramshackle Victorian house. She was soaking, and patting on a homemade herbal facemask. She was plotting to…what? Thwart buyers? I saw she was a young woman named Cutter who knitted hair doilies and wrote obits and gardened in the family cemetery. Cutter’s voice-- sardonic, determined, nostalgic-- came very quickly.

A few weeks later, while staying at a rented beach house in Edisto Beach, South Carolina, I perused the bookshelves and wedged between the People magazines and Readers Digests, I happened upon a psychological case study of agoraphobia. What struck me, as I read about the torturous daily life of a woman who was confined to her home by her agoraphobia, was the idea of one’s home as both a trap and safety hatch from the world, the pull and poison of that kind of sanctuary. That was Elizabeth, a character stuck in the suburbs, trying to hold onto her husband and her sanity.

And so, going back to Cutter, my character in the bathtub, I began to understand that she was in the warm comfort of her homestead, a kind of elegiac, shabby museum that honored her once prestigious family, a home she was determined to keep. And I wondered what might happen if she befriended the agoraphobic out in the suburbs, one who finds a home a trap, and what the two of them might do together to face the world out there.

It took me years to find out. I wrote the novel mostly on weekends, around day jobs and a family. After about five years, when I had a draft, I queried an agent. I sent the first two chapters. She wanted to see the entire manuscript and that scared me because I was still revising the last chapters. A lot. Nevertheless, I sent it and my agent, who is a close reader and excellent editor. She took me on as a client and gave me some useful feedback. I worked on the novel for another year before my agent sent it out. After "the call" came about the offer from St. Martin’s, I got out my bottle of Jameson’s-- reserved for family tragedies, triumphs and miracles-- and toasted that creepy once grand homestead that was recently bulldozed to make room for a gas station.

THE GARDEN ANGEL is Mindy Friddle’s first novel.

Comments

[Zack]

Great backstory and great blog. I just stumbled on you at random, but I'll be back.
zack