Diane Chamberlain is the bestselling author of 24 novels published in more than 20 languages. Born and raised in New Jersey, she has lived and worked in San Diego, California, and Alexandria, Virginia, but now she considers North Carolina her “true home.”
Chamberlain’s latest book, “Pretending to Dance,” arrives in bookstores on Oct. 6, 2015. A true page-turner, in this novel we follow Molly Arnette, who has spent much of her life keeping secrets.
ONC: Before you became a writer, you had a background in psychotherapy and I wonder how that impacted how you write your characters and how you build your stories.
DC: I have a master’s degree in social work from San Diego State, and I worked in hospitals as a social worker. I eventually had a private practice working with teenagers as a psychotherapist, and I would say that it just gave me a really good understanding of how people tick, of how they interact. Especially the hospital work, it really showed me how resilient people can be, and how under enormous stress, they have the strength they can tap into. So that’s what I always tried to do with my characters. I always put them under enormous stress, because why else write? It has to happen. I want them to triumph. I really want them to have to work at that triumph.
ONC: What moved you to leave the medical world and pursue writing as a full-time job?
DC: When I was in my early 30s, I was working in a maternity unit and an emergency room at a hospital. I had a doctor’s appointment myself, and the doctor was very late. I had a pad and a pen with me, and I had always been interested in writing, but for some reason, I just pulled out the pad and pen and started writing a scene that had been in my mind for years. The doctor was about four hours late; the receptionist kept saying, “Do you want to reschedule?” And I said “No!” Here I am, I just have this time and there was nothing else to do, I was writing by hand and really getting into it, and I got hooked. I viewed it as a hobby in the beginning, and then I took a class in novel writing at an adult school, and the first night the professor came in and said, “I assume you all want to be published,” and it sort of shifted my thinking from hobby to maybe I could do something more with this. The more I wrote the more I wanted to write and it just took off. That ultimately, many years later, became my first novel.
I did both for a long time, for a good 10 years, and then I hit a point, my fourth novel was just about to come out, and I just couldn’t keep up with both the writing to a deadline and working at the same time.
ONC: How do you manage writing with strict deadlines?
DC: Well, almost always it is a year that I have. I usually have a three-book, three-year contract. In the last 10 years, social media has really taken off, and authors are expected to really nurture their social media audience. I actually enjoy that, I enjoy it too much. So it is finding that balance that really does get in the way of the writing and also trying to fit real life in there at the same time. I have to really work hard at finding a balance to get everything done.
ONC: You do seem to really embrace social media. How does it benefit your writing?
DC: You know, writing is a lonely job. We spend our days with people who don’t exist and it is really fun for me. I’m sort of a half-introvert, half-extrovert, and that extroversion part of me gets some needs met through social media where I get to connect with my readers. My readers are such an enthusiastic, fun bunch of people, and I feel as though with some of them I have made personal connections. Hearing back from people means a lot to me.
ONC: North Carolina has become like a character in your books. Why is it such a great setting?
DC: Well, it’s true. Over half of my books are set in North Carolina. I moved from San Diego to Northern Virginia and I lived there for 22 years. When I moved to Virginia I started coming down to the Outer Banks and really got hooked. Growing up in New Jersey with the Jersey shore, I’ve always been very drawn to beach areas. The Outer Banks was so beautiful, and I ended up setting four novels there; three of them are part of a trilogy called “The Keeper of the Light” trilogy. And then I started making my way out of the Outer Banks and exploring more of North Carolina and was just fascinated by the history and by the variety of places that there are geographical. North Carolina really celebrates writers. More than any place I have lived, it really appreciates writers, and I think it attracts writers to it. My step-daughter moved to Raleigh maybe 15 years ago and started having babies, and that really was the final straw. We ended up moving here 10 years ago and so everything is set in North Carolina.
ONC: Why do you enjoy writing at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines?
DC: I went by myself and had wonderful writing time. Then I became part of a group of authors here, seven of us. We are all sort of at the same point in our careers. It has turned out to be a wonderful setting to feed the creative juices. We work very hard when we are down there, we don’t play. Mary Kay Andrews, who is a writer of funny women’s fiction, cracks the whip for all of us. She gets us going. We have to set our goals in the morning every day and we have to check back in with her at 5 p.m. So we work very hard, but we all look forward to that time because we know we’ll get so much done.
ONC: Your books have a tendency to deal with families and secrets. Is there a reason for that theme?
DC: I think the reason that I do keep coming back to that—it isn’t conscious—is from having been a therapist. You become aware of how family secrets are destructive. So it does seem to be something that I am constantly looking at. And also, it is intriguing to most readers to know that there is something yet to be uncovered, to go through that process with a character to try and uncover what it is that has impacted their whole lives. Even if you are not writing a mystery or suspense, there has to be a mystery or suspense in the story to keep those pages turning. I get bored if there is not something left for me to figure out.
ONC: What’s the best part about being a writer?
DC: The reason I keep doing it is that I love to create stories, and I love to reach people with my stories. And I love getting feedback. I’ll tell you what my favorite feedback is, and I hear this often from people, that they’ve gotten away from reading, or they’ve never been a reader, and that they’ve discovered my books and it has started them reading again. To me, that’s worth everything.
ONC: What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
DC: You know, I haven’t had a real hobby in years, but I have a hobby now, and I’m so excited! I picked up the guitar again. I taught myself to play as a teenager and then completely got away from it. Twenty-five years ago, I developed rheumatoid arthritis, and it affected my fingers, so I thought I couldn’t play anymore. About two months ago, I picked up the guitar and went to a meetup group. I discovered that I can still play—not well—but who cares. Now, I’m just so into it and it’s great to have a hobby again.
ONC: Is rheumatoid arthritis in your hands?
DC: It is in my hands, and it is very much in my feet and ankles. I wear a brace, so that really did impact my typing. I’m fine now because I’m on amazing medication, but when it first came on, for about five years before the Biologic drugs were created, there was nothing that was working. I did write a few books using voice recognition software, which is really challenging to use, but it enabled me to keep writing. That was a very rough time and since then I don’t even really think about it with regard to my writing.
ONC: Can you tell us about your latest novel?
DC: “Pretending to Dance” opens in the current day with a 38-year-old woman and her husband living in San Diego. They are trying to adopt a baby and she has told her husband some lies about her past, and she is afraid about the home study, that the lies are not only going to ruin her chance to have this baby, but also ruin her marriage. So she comes to realize that her childhood is getting in the way of her future, and she sets out on a quest to figure out the truth of what her childhood really was. So then we go back to 1990 when she was 14 and she was living in Swannanoa, North Carolina, which is outside of Asheville. And so, there are things that happen during that summer, I hasten to say that there is no abuse, no terrible domestic issues that are going on, it is something totally different. It is sort of a coming of age story. It’s what’s happening in her family that leads her to a crisis and actually leads her to run away from her family for good. And so she has to deal with what happened during that summer in order to deal with her future.
ONC: Do you interact with book clubs to discuss your novels?
DC: I Skype almost every evening. Two nights ago, I Skyped with a 70-person book club at a library in New Jersey, and it was just so amazing. That’s really my favorite kind of event where I reach a lot of people at once and then they get to ask questions about the book. It’s like being there. It’s great, only I don’t get the wine (laughs).
The really cool thing is that I can Skype with book clubs as far as California or Ireland. England and Ireland have been tough because of the time difference, and for California, I’m sometimes in my pajamas, but it’s just been a fun way to interact with readers.
ONC: You’ve lived in several places, but you call North Carolina your “true home.” What makes North Carolina home for you?
DC: I think, it’s interesting, it’s sort of the fact that so many of my books are set here now. It just feels like this is where I belong. It’s kind of like, if you have children in a place, then that’s what connects you to the place. So I think that is probably part of it. I don’t know, I cannot imagine living in any other place. “Pretending to Dance” is the first book that I’ve set in the western part of the state and that has been really fun, getting to explore Asheville and the areas around there. Just looking at a whole different part of North Carolina, I’ve really enjoyed that.