25 Years in the Rearview Mirror: 52 Authors Look Back

Chapters 5 and 6

Chapter Five: Hard Times

We all go through difficult times that ultimately make us stronger, though we wish we didn't have to suffer through them. The following authors have written compelling accounts of such hardships, and even twenty-five years later, they can conjure up every vivid detail.

Finding the Right Direction

By Michele Drier

Written in 2012

Twenty-five years ago, after dinner, I'd put my dog in the car and drive. I'd leave my husband in his recliner watching sports and my daughter in her room, talking on the phone.

I'd drive and I'd cry, wondering how I'd ever made this terrible decision.

I was a single mom, living in Southern California, with a job I loved, friends, my own house and a daughter just going into high school. What I didn't have was a man in my life until a tall, dark stranger showed up at a conference.

He lived in a small town about 400 miles away, so we had a romantic courtship. We'd usually pick a coastal town to meet and time with him was as though I was on vacation. I forgot that vacations aren't real life; when he asked me to marry him, I said yes.

Now I was ruing that decision. We lived in the small town where he'd been born. With no family and no friends for support, with my daughter so unhappy she asked about becoming an emancipated minor, with no job and no money of my own, I was desperate.

I knew that I was the one who had to make a decision. I packed up our things and moved my daughter and me to a condo until she graduated from high school. After that, we'd head back to Southern California.

But life held a different path for us.

My daughter was accepted in a college in California's far north, and I took a temporary job at the local newspaper.

This became a twenty-year stint as a city editor and gave me background and stories to write Edited for Death, the first in the Amy Hobbes series about a newspaper editor who always asks "Why?" and finds the true story behind the headlines.

Michele Drier, born in Santa Cruz, is a fifth generation Californian who has lived all over the state. During her journalism career as an editor at daily newspapers, she won awards for producing investigative series. Her mystery Edited for Death is called "Riveting and much recommended" by the Midwest Book Review. She also writes the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles.

The Scent of Lives Changed Forever

By Beth Kanell

Written in 2010

Summer 1984: I think of it as my last innocent summer, while the pieces of my life looked like ordinary photographs in a family album. Afghans crocheted by my mother covered the beds. Photos hung on the walls. Easy blessings came: The kids and I packed happily for two weeks of vacation in a rustic cottage on a mud-bottomed pond, so secluded that the frogs sang around the clock and crayfish squirmed fearlessly around our feet as we waded between lily pads.

In the evenings, we all read stories: picture books for the toddler, chapter books for the one going into first grade, a stack of novels by my own bed. Supper could be as simple as scrambled eggs, but mostly it was something grilled over a wood fire. And going home at last to our nearby house, ah, that too was languid and lovely and rich with love.