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Mary Campisi
As always, Mary provides terrific insights into her writing and books. Enjoy!
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The idea for A FAMILY AFFAIR came to me several years ago when I read a newspaper article about Charles Kuralt and how he’d kept a secret family for twenty years. That just amazed me! I wondered how a person could actually succeed at this. The idea stayed with me for years before I sat down to
write my own story about a woman who discovers her deceased father had a whole
other life and family she knew nothing about. Creating this plot was different
because the story stayed in my brain for 3 or 4 years, so I guess I was
constantly playing with plot ideas, working and re-working them until I felt I
had a solid grasp of the story and what needed to happen- that’s when I sat
down and wrote A FAMILY AFFAIR. It’s also got many more universal, mainstream
subplots with deep layers – real life, I guess you could say. Do adult children have a right to know ‘truths’ about a parent that could destroy the relationship with that parent? Who makes that decision? Is it self-less or self-serving? Is it ever acceptable to break the vows of marriage? Is ‘the other family’ ever more real than the legitimate one? If a woman is unfortunate enough to fall in love with the son of her father’s mistress, is she betraying the family? I certainly don’t claim to have answers, but the questions are all interwoven in A FAMILY AFFAIR for the reader to decide based on her life experiences and her beliefs. Your readers have anxiously awaited your next historical romance. What do you enjoy about writing history romances? I love writing historical romance for the pure joy of falling into the romance through a ‘fairytale’ setting. The beautiful young women, the wealthy titled men, the gowns, the carriages, the estates, even the villains who are determined to keep the hero and heroine apart, are pure fairytale material reminiscent of Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty. There’s something magical and breathtaking about these romances and I absolutely love writing them and bringing these stories to my readers, perhaps because for a few moments they permit us to suspend our modern day trials and tribulations, (a stopped up garbage disposal, a traffic jam, a child support payment that didn’t arrive . . . ) and just enjoy. What unique qualities does this subgenre provide? Again, it’s the breathtaking quality of the time that’s so intriguing;
the dress, the manner of speech, the societal constraints, especially the
societal constraints, and the absolute certainty of happily ever after that
continues to draw readers and writers back time and again. (After all, fiction
is all make believe but historical romance fiction, now that’s pure fairytale
and we’re allowed to still want that, even as grown women, aren’t we?)
I often wonder why I didn’t write my first historical romance as a series. I think I was so overwhelmed with the actual sale of Innocent Betrayal that I didn’t think about it until readers began writing and asking about Ian’s story, that I thought, darn, I want to write that story. Maybe one day . . . As for the Matchmaker Series, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write a series of related books in which the most unlikely couples are ‘matched’. In the first book of the series, A LOVER AND A HUSBAND, Meriel Linton is a carefree, spirited young woman who only learns the existence of her real father, a powerful earl, when her life is threatened. The earl is delighted to discover he has a daughter and begins a subtle yet determined attempt to match her with the ever proper, stuffy, Anthony Weston, the stable boy he’s raised as his surrogate son. That was great fun to write. In subsequent books, Meriel takes up her father’s commitment to see couples united, whether they want to be or not! And she’s dragging Anthony along by his perfectly knotted cravat!
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What
made creating the plot for A Family Affair different from anything else you have
written?
understood how people can get trapped in situations or circumstances that force
them to act in ways they normally wouldn’t. I also found some of my own
beliefs challenged.