Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners
Page 32
Eventually, my interest in writing humor led me to the novel. Long-form fiction gave me the freedom to build my characters and the space to spin out their stories. I can still tell stories that make people laugh, but they don’t have to be things that happened to me. And even if some of those ridiculous things did happen to me, I get to blame the people in my book.
What do you hope readers will most take away from Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners?
My parents were big believers in the power of laughter. Several years before he died, my father suffered a traumatic brain injury during a ski accident that nearly killed him. After several days of watching machines keep him alive, my mom, brother and I sat together and began to laugh—at the crazy things he did during the rare moments he spent awake, at what he would say if he could see himself. It was such a release! To finally feel something other than fear and pain and confusion.
Even so, a friend of my father’s who’d come to visit scolded us. “Laughter is hardly appropriate at a time like this!”
I’ve always been proud of my mom for how she reacted. She looked at him and said, “Without laughter, there’s only tears.”
That’s what I want readers to take away from this book—resilience. Really bad things will happen. And when they do, we get to grab on to whatever lifeline gets us through, to prove that even our worst moments can hold more than awfulness and pain.
ISBN-13: 9781488096587
Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners
Copyright © 2018 by Gretchen Anthony
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