How my novel MY DEAREST FRIEND brought me a dear friend

(The ereader cover)

           In this novel,  Daphne Miller is trying to rebuild her life after she was divorced from her husband when she discovered he was having an affair with. . .her dearest friend.

Now I could get all soggy and serious, but I’ll save that for another blog.

What I want to tell you all today about is how, even before Facebook and the Internet existed, I made a wonderful new friend because of my novel My Dearest Friend.

             One day in the 1990’s, I received a phone call. “I’m Emma Rusch,” a sparkling voice said, “and my son Alan owns Nantucket Office Products. I’d like to take you out for a cup of coffee and tell you how your book introduced me to one of my dearest friends.”

We had a coffee. Emma worked in a bank into her eighties, and one day Charlotte Stewart, another woman in the bank, said to Emma, “You should read this book, My Dearest Friend. Then let me tell you what my dearest friend did to me.” They lunched, they talked, they read, they became good friends.

Eventually, Emma moved from Malverne, N.Y. to Nantucket. She often held tea parties in her apartment, where more scotch than tea was consumed. In 2000, she gave me this lovely needlepoint scene her friend Charlotte Stewart had made for her. I wrote the history of the needlepoint on the back.

Emma lived to 104, surrounded by many dear and true friends.  She was special to me.  And while she flirted outrageously with Charley, she never slept with him.  (I can hear her up in heaven, chuckling, saying, “Are you sure?”)