A guest post by Annette Haws introducing her novel Maggie’s Place. Another in our series of introductions of books that are getting serious consideration for the AML Novel Award.
Maggie’s Place is a story about people, still vibrant, entering the third act of their lives. Determined to be happy, Maggie Sullivan, the main character, changes her name, boxes up her previous life, hides her dark memories in the chicken-wire storage unit in the basement, and moves into a one bedroom apartment on the Seventh Floor of the Eagle Gate Apartments in downtown Salt Lake City. Secrets, of course, have an inconvenient way of surfacing when people least expect them to reappear. Three weeks before Christmas, two thieves, one an elegant man in the penthouse and the other a homeless girl, invade Maggie’s carefully circumscribed life. In different ways each is connected to Maggie’s difficult past. The young girl is easy to love, but Maggie’s feelings for the gentleman in the penthouse twist as she struggles to give what he desperately needs, forgiveness. A week before Christmas, a nasty encounter with the homeless girl’s cohorts tosses Maggie’s life into chaos. Her secrets exposed, Maggie experiences a Christmas epiphany–she’s wasted too much of her life wallowing in a past that can’t change.
The inspiration for this novel was actually the entire Seventh Floor of the Eagle Gate Apartments. My favorite aunt lived the last ten years of her life—her happiest years—in Seven B. During frequent visits, I met her delightful collection of neighbors who were docents at the Church History Museum and the Church Office Building. They regularly attended the temple, the symphony, concerts at the tabernacle, and free lectures anywhere they were offered. They played Scrabble, shared late night pizzas, visited back and forth, made shopping expeditions to Harmon’s and the City Creek Mall; most importantly, they cared for each other. Each had a story to share and most had secrets tucked away in the past.
In this novel I’ve celebrated the value of friendship in our lives, regardless of age, but I’ve also tackled difficult problems in our religious community: affinity fraud (Ponzi schemes), gay teenage homelessness, lost boys from Southern Utah, ill-fated gender roles, and abandonment by suicide. The novel crosses genre lines, mystery, romance, and contemporary fiction; but the novel is primarily Maggie’s story. Maggie was one of those pretty women who never learned to be anything else. She built a life around a high-status male, and then experienced not only the devastating shame of her husband’s complicity in a Ponzi scheme, but also his abandonment that splits her lovely life in two. If a woman’s social status, her identity, and even her intrinsic sense of self is dependent on her husband, how can she survive his loss? How do the ladies on the Seventh Floor navigate the death of spouses or the humiliation of divorce? How does Maggie survive? What does she learn? How does she evolve? The heart of this novel is forgiveness, but what is forgiveness? Accepting small acts of kindness? Friendship? An absence of anger? Freeing the past? Maggie isn’t certain, but peace is what she experiences as she allows herself to forgive.
Maggie’s Place is set is Salt Lake City, because this is where I live. I’ve read too many romances set in the Lake Country in Northwest England, coming-of-age stories set in Manhattan, or World War II spy novels located in Paris. Why not a contemporary novel about the terrible cost of affinity fraud set in the financial center of Salt Lake City?
I’m a native of a small college town and also a stealth people watcher from an early age. I’m convinced big cities have nothing on small towns when it comes to colorful characters playing their parts on admittedly smaller stages. I graduated from Utah State University. I did honors graduate work in American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Utah.
After spending fourteen years in the classroom, I retired to pursue writing fiction. Three of my short stories, “Fish Stories”, “The Gift of Tongues”, and “Come to Zion” have been published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. “The Gift of Tongues”, the best of my short stories, was a finalist for an AML Award, and is available on my website, annettehaws.com. My first novel about the travails of a schoolteacher, Waiting for the Light to Change, won Best of State, a Whitney Award for Best General Fiction, and the League of Utah Writers award for best published fiction. My second novel, The Accidental Marriage, is the story of a new marriage that runs amuck.
I’m available for entertaining book club presentations on Skype or in person. I’d love to hear from you at annette_haws@yahoo.com
(Editor’s note: Please see Emily Debenham’s recent glowing review of Maggie’s Place.)